MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-05-13 08:50:53+00:00
There is more to lithography than ASML catering to TSMC, Samsung, Intel.

There could be https://global.canon/en/technology/nil-2023.html &

https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoimprint-lithography

There also is https://www.searchforthenext.com &

https://semefab.com/

claiming to not need that ASML high-end stuff at all, to be competitive.

As reported around 2019 amongst many others like here:

https://eepower.com/new-industry-products/search-for-the-nex...

Maybe it's vaporware, because I'm unaware of anything 'big' produced there. Maybe it's only lack of funding,lack of trust because non-standard and 'unproven', inertia? Who knows?

And finally the forgotten minimal.fab by Yokogawa https://www.yokogawa.com/industries/semiconductor/minimal-fa...

https://www.minimalfab.com/en/ with no outrageous claims about structure size equivalence, but way faster turn-around times for prototyping, and none of the usually necessary investment in all that clean-room tech.

And not to forget the push and incentive China got as 'development help' to be independent :-)

I'm sure they're up to many interesting things in the near future.
by Veen | 2025-05-13 08:51:07+00:00
That’s not bad writing; it's intentional ambiguity. Alephic wants potential clients to understand that they do "AI stuff," so when a company is looking for help with "AI stuff", they can say, "Yes! Of course we do that!" — regardless of the specifics. B2B services companies frame their offering ambiguously to cast the widest possible net. They'll write a custom pitch once they know what a lead actually needs.
by starspangled | 2025-05-13 08:51:16+00:00
Really? You rm -rf your working trees each evening before you finish, and git clone them from github in the morning? :)

I store my code in a completely distributed fashion, often in several places on different local devices (laptop, build server, backup, etc) not to mention on remote systems. I use github and gitlab for backup and distribution purposes, as well as alternative ways people can share code with me (other than sending patch emails), and other people use git to get and collaborate on my work.

distributed version control system doesn't mean distributed storage magically happens. You still need to store your code on storage you trust at some level. The distributed in DVCS means that collaboration and change management is distributed. All version control operations can be performed on your own copy of a tree with no other involvement. Person A can collaborate with person B, then person B can collaborate with person C without person A being in the loop, etc.
by NotGMan | 2025-05-13 08:51:28+00:00
I see a lot of people here saying "be honest" etc... but that simply doesn't work in real life.

I suspect that all of those "be honest" people never actually did this in real life: if they did they would realize that once you get to ~10+ people in a company it simply doesn't work.

There is a reason that politics exists: we humans aren't rational. We are emotional and "exploiting" the biases in the article is not manipulation, since the human who is being "manipulated" isn't rational in the first place.

So who is it to blame? The one doing "manipulation" since that person sees that actual benefit can be had or the "poor manipulated target" who actually can't see past his biases and that his stuborness and blindess is having a negative effect on the company?

If the "just be honest" and "actually being heard" worked there would be no need for politics etc..

From my experience and what I heard from others in real companies at least 50% of people aren't "rational" enough for this to work.

They also have their own reponsibilities and stress and now having to reimplement someones idea (which might be good or totaly shit) is the last thing they want to stress out about: they want to go home to their families.

Even if this "great idea" works will they get a increase in salary and a bigger bonus? In 95% of cases they won't. So why bother?

Humans are incentive based creatures.
by jgraham | 2025-05-13 08:51:42+00:00
Again, I can only comment from the perspective of a user; I haven't worked on the VCS infrastructure.

The obvious generic challenges are availability and security: Firefox has contributors around the globe and if the VCS server goes down then it's hard to get work done (yes, you can work locally, but you can't land patches or ship fixes to users). Firefox is also a pretty high value target, and an attacker with access to the VCS server would be a problem.

To be clear I'm not claiming that there were specific problems related to these things; just that they represent challenges that Mozilla has to deal with when self hosting.

The other obvious problem at scale is performance. With a large repo both read and write performance are concerns. Cloning the repo is the first step that new contributors need to take, and if that's slow then it can be a dealbreaker for many people, especially on less reliable internet. Out hg backend was using replication to help with this [1], but you can see from the link how much complexity that adds.

Firefox has enough contributors that write contention also becomes a problem; for example pushing to the "try" repo (to run local patches through CI) often ended up taking tens of minutes waiting for a lock. This was (recently) mostly hidden from end users by pushing patches through a custom "lando" system that asynchronously queues the actual VCS push rather than blocking the user locally, but that's more of a mitigation than a real solution (lando is still required with the GitHub backend because it becomes the places where custom VCS rules which previously lived directly in the hg server, but which don't map onto GitHub features, are enforced).

[1] https://mozilla-version-control-tools.readthedocs.io/en/late...
by eadmund | 2025-05-13 08:51:46+00:00
> Today, almost 90% of Icelandic workers benefit from a reduced working week of 36 hours, compared with 40 hours previously, with no loss of pay.

> Unlike some countries, such as Belgium, where the four-day week means that hours not worked are compensated for by longer working days

40 hours/5 days = 8 hours per day

36 hours/4 days = 9 hours per day

The Icelandic workday increased from 8 to 9 hours, a 12½% increase. That sure looks like hours not worked being compensated for by longer working days.
by VSerge | 2025-05-13 08:51:47+00:00
Looking at the link shared in another comment with the actual study, it seems that only 55% of private sector workers are happy with the new arrangement, and that higher satisfaction rates are in the public sector. I am a bit skeptical about some of the conclusions of the report saying for example that the private sector needs to take more inspiration from the public sector, which seems blissfully unaware that the private sector can't rely on tax revenue to pay salaries, and has a very different set of operating constraints.

referring to this: https://autonomy.work/portfolio/on-firmer-ground-icelands-on...
by lproven | 2025-05-13 08:51:51+00:00
> but what does Tk offer that Qt already doesn't

Small (relatively tiny) code size and simplicity.

Very slow release cycle and long lifetimes. Qt moves pretty quick and this causes problems for downstream projects. E.g. KDE had to keep Qt 5 alive for _years_ until KDE 6 was ready. Rochus Keller has a version of Qt 5 as well. Trinity is still maintaining Qt 3.

Extremely wide cross-platform support, e.g. on the BSDs and some other niche OSes. I think there's even a Haiku version.
by ggm | 2025-05-13 08:52:48+00:00
I can't quite pin it down, but reading this and similar works I am reminded you have to be distinctly non stupid to follow lines of reasoning in these books, at some level. You have to bring inductive reasoning to bear on what is laid out. It's teaching by doing. You have to do the syntax and BNF reasoning for yourself.

It's pedagogy but demands competency. I always struggled with this. Few of my peers, who had competency in bucketloads would agree with me.

I just put into the discard pile the first CS book I bought new for my 1st year pascal course in 1979, it's typeset in as much as a monotype typewriter used as output device is. (The Fortran and algol I did in the mid 70s used badly photocopied handout notes)

Its also by Wirth, who had (if i recall correctly) just finished a residency at York working on the modula/II proposal, and subsequently his Ada proposal(s). He seemed to like the same language, reprising it syntactically time after time. After I learned C I never went back to pascal or it's derivatives.
by dosinga | 2025-05-13 08:53:04+00:00
Thanks for that. This study is much more nuanced and does not really concur with the conclusions from the article at all. The article says:

Today, almost 90% of Icelandic workers benefit from a reduced working week of 36 hours

while the study says:

The offer of shorter hours has been widespread. In the two years prior to being surveyed, more than half (59%) of workers were offered reduced working hours.

Or am I missing something?
by Lightkey | 2025-05-13 08:53:23+00:00
I remember there being legal threads from LucasArts every few years, presumably when new staff at legal got aware of ScummVM. The ScummVM team got used to it but iMUSE was the only part that could actually get them into trouble because it was still patented back in the early days. Nice to see that Nick Porcino is acknowledging the unofficial implementations in the references, including ScummVM and its now-defunct sister project ResidualVM.
by arp242 | 2025-05-13 08:53:41+00:00
> I guess it's the CI/CD infrastructure

Your guess is wrong as Firefox doesn't use GitHub for any of that, and AFAIK there are no plans to either.

The blog post linked in the top comment goes in to this in some detail, but in brief: git log, clone, diff, showing files, blame, etc. is CPU expensive. You can see this locally on large repo if you try something like "git log path/to/dir".

Add to this all the standard requirements of running any server that needs to be 1) fast, and 2) highly available.

And why bother when there's a free service available for you?
by Tractor8626 | 2025-05-13 08:54:17+00:00
Classical Nih

"It's easier to do ThingA with Nix because you don't have to do ThingB!" (proceed to explain how to do ThingB but with Nix)

> You don't need to maintain your own forks and patchsets

... but you need to maintain your own nix packages and build scripts which is basically same amount of work
by maxim_charges | 2025-05-13 08:54:20+00:00
Hey HN,

I built a nano MCP server that gives agents access to LinkedIn inbox. Any LLM agent can use it; Cursor integration is one line.

What works today - Read/send messages - Grab profile

Would love feedback on two things: 1. Caching + rate-limit tracking – I’m leaning toward Supabase. Better ideas? 2. Must-have features before v1?

Thanks!
by bayindirh | 2025-05-13 08:54:37+00:00
I think it can be done half/half. Do some, well-defined builds at GitHub and pull in for testing. Another comment tells that some users needed 10+ minutes to get a lock to pass their tests through CI, so maybe some sanity tests can be offloaded to GitHub actions.

I'm not claiming that my comment was 100% accurate, but they plan to move some of the CI to GitHub, at least.
by exidy | 2025-05-13 08:55:05+00:00
There were a great number of inventive aerial navigation systems that predate GPS by many decades. One of my favourite books is Most Secret War[0], a biography by R.V. Jones that details much of the cat and mouse that went into detecting and countering the various systems used by the Axis and the Allies to bomb each other.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1127842.Most_Secret_War
by flohofwoe | 2025-05-13 08:55:23+00:00
This was only for true before svn 1.5 (before it had 'merge tracking'). Also, branching and merging by far wasn't as essential in svn as it is in a decentralized version control system like git. In a centralized version control system it works perfectly well to do all development in the main branch, and only branch off dead-end 'release branches' which are never merged back.

Tbh, I really wonder where the bad reputation of svn is coming from. Git does some things better, especially for 'programmer-centric teams'. But it also does many things worse, especially in projects where the majority of data is large binary files (like in game development) - and it's not like git is any good either when it comes to merging binary data.
by preisschild | 2025-05-13 08:55:48+00:00
It makes a clear difference between 60Hz and 120Hz, but going from 120Hz to 240Hz didn't really make a difference for me tbh. I expect 240Hz to 500Hz would make even less of a difference.

(Experience from using the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 57" 240Hz MiniLED Monitor)
by 2d8a875f-39a2-4 | 2025-05-13 08:55:58+00:00
So to sum up the "methods" listed:

1. Curry favour with stakeholders separately in advance of a big joint decision

2. Lie about estimates

3. Use filters like "falls for reverse psychology" to find subordinates that are easy to manipulate

4. Many engineers hate conflict, so you can just make decisions for them

5. See point #1

edit: clarified my takeaway for #3
by thomasingalls | 2025-05-13 08:56:06+00:00
The current context, in case you forgot, was that the trump admin is making direct threats against private citizens who engage in constitutionally protected activities, like speaking and like gathering in a protest. The context is that "getting detained" is half a step away from "getting disappeared".

I get that you don't think this is a problem. Just remember this when you are looking for someone that you can't find anymore.
by npodbielski | 2025-05-13 08:57:53+00:00
I was not trying to convince you that you cat feeder is not necessary.

If you need it and think it is totally worth it, great!

What I was trying to say that it is not live essential item. Cost of all of those nice items that western world is buying from China and similar countries, made of the back of low-wage workforce is low just because those people are not having the same lives as you have. Or children mining rare metals in Africa. This is basically modern day slavery with extra steps.

And what I was trying to say, if you cat feeder would be made by your UK fellow citizens from top to bottom, entirely, can you imagine what would be the cost? Would you still be able to afford it? And you would, would be worth it? Or it would be cheaper to pay your neighbor to watch the cat?

And IMHO this is more or less what article is about: 'wow real world takes a lot of hard work to keep it running and it is easier to scroll tik tok instead of work!'. Hardly a new thing, so yes, article was a bit silly.
by jgraham | 2025-05-13 08:58:09+00:00
This is all true, but as the sibling says, not really related to the change discussed here.

Firefox does indeed have a large CI system and ends up running thousands of jobs on each push to main (formerly mozilla-central), covering builds, linting, multiple testsuites, performance testing, etc. all across multiple platforms and configurations. In addition there are "try" pushes for work in progress patches, and various other kinds of non-CI tasks (e.g. fuzzing). That is all run on our taskcluster system and I don't believe there are any plans to change that.
by Tepix | 2025-05-13 08:59:32+00:00
It's all in the software. Avoiding systems that work against you is harder than ever. Even our brains betray us, falling for the dopamine rushes expertly assembled by the exploiters.

An unchecked drive for profit maximisation is often at the source of this evil. Cory Doctorow has expertly described the phenomenon in his essays¹ about enshittification, a term he coined. He has raised a lot of awareness, yet we're still in a timeline where non-profit, decentralised services have small market shares. Perhaps the Leidensdruck, i.e. the degree of suffering, is not yet great enough?

--

¹ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
by lazyasciiart | 2025-05-13 09:00:52+00:00
I think you're missing the context of the article the grandparent was quoting. The article begins:

> Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and long-lasting effects of Reagan crushing the PATCO strike. But that's just my opinion, you know, maybe airplanes got too woke.

So when the grandparent quoted

> maybe airplanes got too woke

and THEN says "I don't think there's any debate that ATC staffing is a major issue right now, and the FAA really did blow up its hiring pipeline to further DEI goals", what does that quote add?

I read an implicit statement that the commenter is siding with this as the cause of the industry problems: "I don't think there's any debate that" [it is, in fact, wokeness that has caused the industry problems]. And I don't think their linked article does make an airtight argument for this.

Perhaps you think the steelman version of the comment simply treats the quoted fragment as an accident, or irrelevant to the rest of it, but I disagree.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-05-13 09:01:02+00:00
The first one, Nemawashi, is not cognitive bias. It is very useful to discuss and to listen to feedback in an informal and safe setting (which fosters trust and honest discussion) to get buy-in in advance of formal presentation. This is change management, and not a sign of a disfunctional organisation but, on the contrary, of good, effective leaders, including on the purely technical side.
by wizardforhire | 2025-05-13 09:01:03+00:00
I’ve since gone back and read the article, haven’t looked for the paper yet.

> Are these sorts of instabilities harder to control in a tokamak as compared to a stellarator, or did you just bring those up as examples of magnetic confinement?

I was just shooting from the hip in the earlier comment alluding to your question and bringing them up as examples of two different approaches to addressing the said issues with instabilities that lead to the complexities of confinement. I think its just a terribly fun thing to think about because of its complexity. Stellarators are attempting to solve the issues passively through design. Tokamaks on the other hand with active control. Theres trade offs to both and neither has reached break even output yet.

I’m personally largely bored with them and think linear is the way to go, even though the laser based inertial confinement reactor at Lawrence is the first to reach breakeven output… experimentally at least.
by Philpax | 2025-05-13 09:01:43+00:00
I can say that I've chosen not to bother when submitting a fix requires me to stray away from GitHub, and doubly so when it doesn't use a PR/MR workflow. There are only so many hours in the day, and I don't have the patience to deal with unconventional workflows when there are other things I could be doing with my time.

For projects that I'd be interested in being a long-term contributor to, this is obviously different, but you don't become a long-term contributor without first dealing with the short-term, and if you make that experience a pain, I'm unlikely to stick around.

A big part of this is the friction in signing up; I hope federated forges become more of a thing, and I can carry my identity around and start using alternate forges without having to store yet another password in my password manager.
by coreyh14444 | 2025-05-13 09:02:00+00:00
I don't know about Iceland's work culture, but I can say as an American working in Denmark I've noticed that while Danes work FAR fewer hours than I'm used to, especially in startup culture, they tend to be extremely focused while at work. Nobody does their online shopping or reads news (cough cough what I'm doing now) while at work. In my old coworking space, a woman did CAD work and I never once saw anything other CAD open on her computer.
by anal_reactor | 2025-05-13 09:02:37+00:00
It's pretty much inevitable that every organization at some point pivots away from its core mission towards politics. As soon as the first actor who doesn't care about the mission but cares about their position enters the organization, the game is on, and others will either play the game, or be outsmarted. Same shit happens in literally every field, and made me feel extremely cynic about putting actual effort into anything that doesn't benefit me.
by pledg | 2025-05-13 09:03:45+00:00
I’ve lived in 4 different flats in the Barbican and they all had a dishwasher. I think only the studios you’d have a problem finding space for one. Of course in the others it is a preference whether you want to lose space for other things or not. It is not a lot of extra plumbing. It is usually when they want to preserve the original kitchen (or a cheap landlord as you suggest - although all the ones I had there were great)
by dgunay | 2025-05-13 09:05:10+00:00
I don't delete things by default but generally everything I might care about automatically gets backed up off device. I have seen lots of stress and turmoil from people needing to get data off of their old devices and being unable to do so. At any given moment, I would be comfortable throwing my phone off a cliff, in that I wouldn't worry about losing data. Anything of sentimental or practical value is backed up.

Similarly with Git, I rarely use stashes. If I have to switch contexts, anything I care about gets committed to a branch (and ideally pushed to a remote) or I blow it away.
by radicality | 2025-05-13 09:05:13+00:00
Is that kind of refresh rate even supported by current hdmi/displayport standards and graphics cards? Can I realistically expect to - for example - make a 4k hdr video at 500 fps, and play it back on that screen, connected to something like a newest macbook pro or a desktop with nvidia gpu, and actually get the correct output (verifiable by a high fps camera for example) ?
by ajb | 2025-05-13 09:05:24+00:00
It's easy to assume that a cultural issue is due to nationality or ethnicity, but actually culture varies hugely between companies and even teams. At a previous place, which did a lot of acquisitions, we had one Israeli team join us who were impossible to deal with, and we started to assume that that's what Israelis were like, and then we had another Israeli team join who were lovely to work with.

Of course there are some things which a particular nation do on average, but within nation variation is usually greater. Also one always gets a biased sample, so what appears to be American behaviour can actually be the culture of big tech in California founded within a generation by VC funded entrepreneurs.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-05-13 09:05:24+00:00
You're being downvoted for calling the Barbican a rotting piece of shit that's slowly falling apart.

I think it's a cool building for sure, but like many buildings in the UK (including people's houses) it isn't well taken care of and you can see how grotty the surfaces are on the facade, how things need to be repaired & fixed.

I'm looking to buy a house here and walking down streets of so many areas it's just crazy how people don't take pride in water blasting their driveway or the facade of their house, even things like fixing broken/cracked windows.

And then stupid fucking trends like extending your house with an open conservatory and treating it like another normal room...a single layer of brick in a country that gets cold & wet in Winter! What the hell!
by amrocha | 2025-05-13 09:06:15+00:00
Sounds like a dysfunctional country where states seem like they have a lot of power but they really don’t because they don’t control their borders. And a few holdouts can ruin everything for the large majority.

If your states were like real countries, they could just ban guns, set up border controls, and turn away anyone bringing guns in. But they can’t, so they’re not countries.