MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smikhanov | 2025-05-14 09:51:49+00:00
for software, the top end of the market is now non-existent

The issue here isn't absence, but misrecognition: the top end absolutely does exist -- it just doesn't always look like what people wish it looked like.

If by "top end" you mean "built to spec, hardened, and close to bug-free", it's alive and well in heavy manufacturing, telecommunication, automotive, aerospace, military, and medical industries. The technologies used there are not sexy (ask anyone working at Siemens or Nokia), the code wouldn't delight you, the processes are likely glacial, but there you will find software that works because it absolutely has to.

If by "top end" you mean "serves the implied user need in the best way imaginable", then modern LLMs systems are a good example. Despite the absolute mess and slop that those systems are built of, very few people come to ChatGPT and leave unsatisfied with its results.

If by "top end" you mean "beautifully engineered and maintained", think SQLite, LLVM and some OS kernels, like seL4. Those are well-written, foundational pieces of software that are not end-products in themselves, but they're built to last, studied by developers, and trusted everywhere. This is the current forefront in our knowledge of how to write software.

If by "top end" you mean "maximising profit through code", then the software in the top trading firms match this description. All those "hacker-friendly" and "tech-driven" firms run on the same sloppy code as everyone else, but they are ruthlessly optimised to make money. That's performance too.

You can carry on. For each definition of "top end", there is a real-life example of software matching it.

One can moan about the market rewarding mediocrity, but we, as technologists, all have better things to do instead of endless hand-wringing, really.
by drekipus | 2025-05-14 09:52:04+00:00
I am a total noob, ok programmer but not a very good developer.

I'm coming to Phoenix with a Django background and I really enjoy what I've been messing around with so far, but I haven't done anything serious with it.

When I hear people say "ash is like an orm" then that fills me with dread. I actually come to enjoy how elixir/Phoenix/ecto has done things

If I'm trying to build something ie a news aggregator site (like hackernews ) - how would "make it in ash" help me? If it does things for me, does that mean I lose control of those things? Or they are hidden behind some macro magic that I have to pull apart to get to?
by kajkojednojajko | 2025-05-14 09:54:15+00:00
Insane deep-dive! Framing texture sampling as "Ideally, we’d like to integrate over the projection of the screen pixel onto the texture" was enlightening for me. I particularly enjoyed the explanation of anisotropic filtering because it always seemed like magic to me, and in the context of aligning ellipses on textures it just makes sense :D
by lmm | 2025-05-14 09:55:04+00:00
> In what you describe the difference would be that HSBC doesn't get fined and neither HSBC or Revolut does any check. How does that help?

It would mean HSBC and Revolut would compete on a level playing field, and so would their customers, and ordinary businesspeople like OP wouldn't get randomly screwed.

(And sure, maybe a little more "money laundering" would also happen. But at this point the anti-money-laundering-financial-industrial complex has done far more harm to society than money laundering ever did)
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-05-14 09:55:07+00:00
the design looks a bit old fashioned, and then the first few projects look like they might be a bit old fashioned, the design later on after you have scrolled looks more modern and what people are used to, so I worry a recruiter first opening up and scrolling might think you have less skills than you evidently do, and then they don't scroll any farther.
by bArray | 2025-05-14 09:55:41+00:00
Not insanely for a smart watch. Your smart watch battery will be something like 200mAh, so for 20 hours you need to average 10mAh. With zero optimisation, screen refresh rate at 30+fps, I have smart watch chewing 30mAh.

Getting down to 10mAh is not so bad. If you're not actively driving the display, you can under-clock significantly [1], if you're not using WiFi you can turn the modem off [2].

[1] https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32/...

[2] https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32/...
by tliltocatl | 2025-05-14 09:56:04+00:00
Afaik, SAS does exactly that (haven't any experience with them personally, just retelling gossips). Also Matlab. Not that they are BAD, it's just that 95% of matlab code could be python or even fortran with less effort. But matlab have really good support (aka telling the people in charge how they are tailored to solve this exact problem).
by vimax | 2025-05-14 09:56:49+00:00
Not OP but I think it is good to balance a healthy respect for disregarding cultural norms with a perceived understanding of your outsider perspective and the given cost. I'm a big fan of Stallman and have worked people of similar dispositions. while they provide very clear insight and intermittent productivity spurts, it comes at a huge social cost that in some cases can make or break a team. In the long-term they could be right, but in the short-term it becomes an all-or-nothing crusade. I've been there myself and I've reassembled the pieces of a team after others did the same. Anti-authoritarianism is noble and justified, but it is no rational excuse for poor hygiene if you want to connect with other people and have a non-imaginary impact on the world.
by ryao | 2025-05-14 09:57:23+00:00
While I do not have data comparing them, I have a few remarks:

1. Scammer Payback and others are documenting on-going attacks that involve social engineering that are not getting the attention that they deserve.

2. You did not provide any actual data on the degree to which bounds checks are “large”. You simply said they were because they are a subset of a large group. There are diseases that only affect less than 100 people in the world that do not get much attention. You could point out that the people affected are humans, which is a group that consists of all people in the world. Thus, you can say that one of these rare diseases affects a large number of people and thus should be a priority. At least, that is what you just did with bounds checks. I doubt that they are as rare as my analogy would suggest, but the point is that the percentage is somewhere between 0 and 70% and without any real data, your claim that it is large is unsubstantiated. That being said, most C software I have touched barely uses arrays for bound checks to be relevant, and when it does use arrays, it is for strings. There are safe string functions available for use like strlcpy() and strlcat() that largely solve the string issues by doing bounds checks. Unfortunately, people keep using the unsafe functions like strcpy() and strcat(). You would have better luck if you suggested people use safe string handling functions rather than suggest compilers insert bounds checks.

3. Your link mentions CHERI, which a hardware solution for this problem. It is a shame that AMD/Intel and ARM do not modify their ISAs to incorporate the extension. I do not mean the Morello processor, which is a proof of concept. I mean the ISA specifications used in all future processors. You might have more luck if you lobby for CHERI adoption by those companies.
by n4kana | 2025-05-14 09:57:41+00:00
You nailed it. I worked in a high-expectation consultancy for 15 years, and the biggest stress didn’t come from junior people being green. It came from leadership avoiding hard decisions.

One team member had a TBI. My manager gave him a custom track so he could succeed. That sounds kind, but it meant the rest of us had to constantly check in, fix problems, and slow down for him.

Another person had lots of field experience but couldn’t handle problems without getting emotional. He built walls around every challenge and pulled people into his frustrations. He had the title of senior consultant, but he couldn’t do the work without a junior staffer helping him every step.

Then there was a junior person who had already underperformed in another team. Instead of addressing it, leadership moved her to my team, where she had even less experience. If I gave her 10 basic tasks, she would typically only complete 7. Not challenging tasks, just needed follow-through. My boss told me to keep setting clear expectations and checking in more. But she just kept pulling time and attention away from the actual work.

She was also split 50/50 between her old team and my team. I kept telling my boss and the other SVP that this made no sense. If someone is underperforming, the worst thing you can do is give them two sets of responsibilities. There’s no way to hold them accountable. Any time she didn’t deliver, we’d say, “Well, maybe it’s because of her other team.”

And here’s what really got me. My boss admitted he wanted these people off the team while enabling them. I ultimately pushed the field guy to deliver actual work until he quit. I kept pushing for the junior staffer to be placed on one team that could pin down her underperformance until the other team took her back. Leadership talked about fixing things, but they wouldn’t act. And it put me in a role that I wasn’t supposed to fill, applying pressure on my teammates rather than support.

This is an organizational deficiency with promoting engineers to manager roles as a matter of course. My boss was a fine engineer, but he was a horrible manager and no one held him accountable for his bullshit. I saw people go around him to complain to his superiors, but it wasn’t well received or productive.

Shame on the organization.
by rgoulter | 2025-05-14 09:58:58+00:00
"The SDK is open source" Oh, a BLE MCU with open source code SDK?

AFAICT, the BLE code is provided as a binary blob. https://github.com/OpenSiFli/SiFli-SDK/tree/6c82a9b15db49871...

Which isn't a problem. But, I wish if something is described as "open source", you could read the source code for it.
by noduerme | 2025-05-14 10:01:00+00:00
>> The tragedy is that the indirect benefits are more difficult to quantify, and often get ignored in the face of punchy public hysteria about how much money is "wasted" on public transport...

I think this view is much more prevalent in Europe. As absurd as Elon Musk's little tunnel under Las Vegas was, at the time, the American view was wild enthusiasm that some private company was doing something profitable to improve our lousy transit system. That's how desperate people were at seeing the ballooning costs of never-ending high speed rail projects that never even broke ground.

Private transit was how the United States was built, all for profit, from the transcontinental railway up to and including the takeover and destruction of the city trolley lines by General Motors so they could put their busses on those rights-of-way. That was the point where it all went wrong, again, because a single conglomeration too large to fail managed to get the government to allow them to monopolize the market.

This is where a control economy and a monopolistic market economy meet in a horseshoe. Monopolistic or "late stage" capitalism is increasingly difficult to distinguish from a command economy. That doesn't mean that the center between them isn't a very productive place. Whether crucial services like health and transport and housing are 20% private like France or 80% private like the US, is a matter worth debate. What really matters is that there's valid competition and freedom in both government and markets.

Transport can always find ways to be both profitable and efficient, as long as there is sufficient competition. But under a monopoly (government or private) it winds up only being profitable or efficient.

[Side note] Speaking of externalizing costs, I probably wouldn't be the first to note the amount of human waste on railway tracks throughout Switzerland. Just sayin'.
by executesorder66 | 2025-05-14 10:01:46+00:00
Well that was a whole other topic. And luckily it links to a page that explains the whole topic of what a "celestial sphere" is. Going to the page, I see I was indeed wrong about what it was, but now I see it is an abstract sphere, with a radius that can be whatever size you want, and that is centered on the Earth, or on the observer.

Once again, not so difficult to figure out even if you have no experience in the specific technical field of a Wikipedia article. So I have no idea what /u/casenmgreen's problem is.
by hackyhacky | 2025-05-14 10:01:46+00:00
> If you are going to take in millions in Pell grants, student loans, and research funding, you are going to be beholden to politics. There are many that decline the funding to retain their independence.

What does "beholden" mean? Does it mean the executive branch gets to install "viewpoint diversity" police and cancel whole departments, as they wanted to at Harvard? Do you think that level of government takeover benefits the university or the community?
by justsomehnguy | 2025-05-14 10:03:19+00:00
If I lose my phone I can go to the office of my carrier, present my ID and receive a new SIM with the old number[0]. If Apple/Google decide what I'm not their customer anymore then I have literally zero ways to recover anything from them.

[0] and half a year later the bank would finally found out about and block the SIM 'to prevent fraud' at the most inconvenient time. But again, it's solvable with a visit to the office and an ID.
by dspillett | 2025-05-14 10:03:33+00:00
> aren't traveling with kids

Just as much as many parents think having had kids is one of the proudest decisions (or happiest accidents) they have made, I think not having them is one of my best decisions, travelling is one of my many reasons for that, and I find the assumption from some parents that we should bend around their choice is a little presumptuous.

Furthermore, ignoring various other definitions of better, hotels are sometimes better value (or, at least, just less expensive) then AirBnBs these days, unless you are lucky, and inexpensive/value-for-money seems to be a very important factor for parents that I know.

Having said that I still use AirBnB sometimes, it just certainly isn't my only/preferred option as it was for a time.
by scwoodal | 2025-05-14 10:05:02+00:00
I’d consider Phoenix to be like Flask. Ash fills the gap that brings Phoenix up to feature parity with a batteries included framework like Django.

Ash Admin (Django admin), Ash Resource & Domain (Django models & ORM), Ash JSON (Django Rest Framework), Ash Auth (Django Allauth), Ash Phoenix (Django Forms), Ash policies (Django permissions)

But you aren’t required to use Phoenix with an Ash project. Ash will happily work as a standalone CLI, terminal app or some other Elixir web framework that comes out tomorrow.
by CLPadvocate | 2025-05-14 10:05:03+00:00
1. The entire legal system in Europe, and in Germany in particular, is based on the concept of "dignity". This is the foundational stone for every other concept in the legal context, also including the "free speech". You have to treat other people with dignity.

2. For every freedom, as it understood in Europe, holds true that "your freedom ends where freedom of other people begins". It means that your free speech is (and was) never allowed to attack other people personally (every kind of insults), professionally (e.g. reputational harm), as a member of specific group (any kind of sexism, racism, defamation, etc.)

Police and courts were not always strictly following this, due to various reasons, but it doesn't change the definition. And it is valid for online speech in exactly the same way as for any other kind of speech.

And actually, also in the US it was defined in the same way - it just wasn't written down, since it was a common understanding at that time - and manners, also covering the art of speaking to each other were actually much stricter back then compared to today.
by RhysU | 2025-05-14 10:05:23+00:00
Sowell's arguing that neglecting to include welfare transfers makes inequality look worse than it is. Especially when there are stark differences in earnings as a consequence of working.

If you earn $5 and the state gives you $45 in assistance, you practically have $50. If I earn $200 and the state taxes me $100, then I practically have $100. The income inequality is 40x but the practical inequality is 2x.

Current common metrics would report 40x, in this contrived example, is the point Gramm and Sowell both make. Their observation that transfers and taxes are neglected when measuring income inequality is self-evidently true and frequently overlooked. Be careful with income inequality conclusions.

The first chapter of Gramm's book calls out that difference between the hours worked in the various income quantiles is large. Sowell makes the point that the age demographics vary considerably across the quantiles with very young and very old people working less and therefore frequently in the lower quantiles. Sowell further points out that different US demographic groups have different mean ages so that one can explain some seemingly-demographic-related inequality by age differences.

Both books are recommended.
by 72deluxe | 2025-05-14 10:05:42+00:00
I had one of these Atrix and laptop docks. It was really good, but sadly way ahead of its time. The desktop was a Debian-based Linux desktop and you could install various ARM packages. Unfortunately, the phone just wasn't powerful enough at the time. The touchpad was also not brilliant compared to Macs (probably better than Windows touchpads of the time). I sold it on ebay to a guy who plugged his Raspberry Pi into it, since the Atrix dock used mini HDMI and microUSB connectors. This has obviously been replaced in the modern age with USB-C.

I am pretty sure that modern phones are more than powerful enough! My wife's iPhone 16 Pro Max would be amazingly useful if not limited by iOS (which always feels like it's hiding true capabilities behind an Etch-A-Sketch interface to me). If you could plug the iPhone in and run a macOS desktop (which hasn't really changed for 15+ years), that'd be great. Thanks in advance.

I have a POCO F7 Ultra which is powerful enough to run LLMs via PocketPal and could easily replace my daily laptop or PC for work if it wasn't scuppered by USB2 on the USB-C port. If I could easily run ollama on the phone via a web interface I would because it's faster than my main PC for LLMs I think!

On Android you can go into Developer settings and force enable the ability to use desktop mode but sadly I can't without proper display support on the USB C.
by ThibWeb | 2025-05-14 10:05:58+00:00
Between this and the relative color syntax, looks like much cleverer theming options are on the way, yay for more control for end users. For anyone discovering APCA, aside from it giving better results, I’ve also found it super interesting to read about the logic behind the algorithm. The Easy Intro mentioned in the article (https://git.apcacontrast.com/documentation/APCAeasyIntro) is well worth the time and it has all the relevant follow-up resources.
by y0ssar1an | 2025-05-14 10:06:06+00:00
this site is filled with hypercaffeinated steve jobs wannabes, so of course they're gonna blame the victim. if you're not a future billionaire like them, then it's your fault for not hustling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U).

don't sweat the cynics, bro. this AI shit is gonna come for them too. they won't be so smug after having their soul repeatedly annihilated by the job market.

i don't have anything to offer except "hang in there" and "don't let the bastards win". you're in a rut, but don't give in to despair. our brains are efficient irrationality machines, so it's gonna feel hopeless. the first battle you have to win is with our human tendency towards irrational doom and gloom. once you conquer that, you'll be unstoppable. i'll be rooting for you, bud!
by logicchains | 2025-05-14 10:06:26+00:00
I think something like Titans explains Gemini's excellent long context performance. That would explain why the Titan team hasn't released the training code or hyperpameters used even though they said in the paper that they would, and why soon after that it came out that DeepMind would be holding off publishing new results for 6 months to avoid giving away competitive advantages.
by harshreality | 2025-05-14 10:07:32+00:00
What's immutable, without tools to decompress and possibly perform further de-obfuscation of text streams, is the typical way publishing software encodes text into streams inside PDFs.

It remains possible to have a pdf with text that is easily mutable with any text editor.

Even if text inside a pdf is annoyingly encoded, you can always just replace the appropriate object/text streams... if you can identify the right one(s). You can extract and edit and re-insert, or simply replace, embedded images as well.

I don't think "this format promotes, as the norm, so much obfuscation of basic text objects that it becomes impractical to edit them in situ without wholesale replacement" is the win you think it is.

"Looks good on paper" has to do with the rendering engine (largely high-DPI and good font handling/spacing/kerning), not PDF as a content layout/presentation format. A high-quality software rasterizer (for postscript or PDF, often embedded in the printer)—not the PDF file format—has been the magic sauce.

Today, some large portion of end-user interaction with PDFs is via rendering into a web browser DOM via javascript. Text in PDFs is rendered as text in the browser. Perhaps nothing else demonstrates more clearly that the "PDF is superior" argument is invalid.
by watwut | 2025-05-14 10:07:50+00:00
>and worrying for days afterwards about the effects of smoke, mold, dust etc on their health.

I mean, that one is on you. It is possible to go on vacation even camping with kids without having anxiety attack over everything.

Also, while some kids are difficult and kids are slow and certainly limit you, hours of tantrumps every holiday and impossibility to eat are not normal.
by rajnathani | 2025-05-14 10:08:15+00:00
Social relationships are an underrated thing in general. Reading a HN comment many years ago about how scientifically the strongest correlation with happiness is the level of social relationships, really helped changed my perspective (along with observational studies on socializing/loneliness levels).

Humans are inherently social beings (there's also a positive correlation of intelligence in animal species with the level of socializing (eg: birds, dolphins, dogs, etc.)).

It's also good to see the term "Social Health" starting to being used these days.

I reckon (tried on myself) that to be able to still prioritize one's personal and work growth, that one could remove self-indulgences like watching TV, browsing public reels (any social media outside of your family and friends), listening to music alone, etc. and instead spend some of that extra time with others. To an extent, these relationships help with personal and work growth as well, for example getting better at a sport or traveling and learning about other industries respectively.
by dzaima | 2025-05-14 10:08:57+00:00
Software developers will be the vast majority of users though, at the very least for the CLI.

Git certainly isn't anywhere close to the prettiest thing for ease-of-learning (and indeed used to be even worse), but Mercurial didn't seem particularly good either. Really for the common uses the difference is just needing to do a "git add ." before every commit, vs a "hg add ." before some.

All of my git usage has been on projects with ≤2 devs (including me; technically excluding a few largely-one-off OSS contributions of course), but I still use a good amount of local temp branches / stashes / rebasing to organize things quite often (but also have some projects where all I've ever done is "git add .; git commit -m whatever").