MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by josephcsible | 2025-05-14 07:05:53+00:00
> WARNING: Do NOT insert this disc in a non-Preview console. Doing so will disable access to Xbox LIVE

> IMPORTANT NOTE: ONLY USE THE DISC PROVIDED IN A REGISTERED PREVIEW CONSOLE.

> FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH THIS NOTE WILL RESULT IN NON-PREVIEW CONSOLES UNABLE TO CONNECT TO LIVE

There's no technical reason for that to happen incidentally. It seems like it must have been malice on Microsoft's part, as a vigilante effort to "punish" people who shared the disc without their blessing.
by chrismorgan | 2025-05-14 07:06:01+00:00
Five megabytes for the acorn64 rotating box, because it’s a GIF. And a bad GIF that can’t play at its intended speed for most of its rotation, and so has speed jitters (without delving: I presume it’s due to format limitations, as it looks to be using more than 256 colours; see also https://www.biphelps.com/blog/The-Fastest-GIF-Does-Not-Exist). Ugh. `ffmpeg -i acorn64.gif acorn64.mp4` shrinks it to under 350kB, looking about the same except that it now plays smoothly. And will use a lot less power.

(I noticed this because the page was loading unreasonably slowly for unclear reasons. In cases like this, a GIF <img> has a worse failure mode than <video>.)
by brador | 2025-05-14 07:08:03+00:00
This has been tried in some European countries in the early 2000s, website not app.

People stop using it. Forget to cancel, unreliable service, took too long. As users drop wait times become longer, cascading failure.

Solution was real time dynamic rerouting and bus stop buttons to request the bus. But by then it was no longer wanted and canned.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-14 07:08:18+00:00
> it is very unlikely that a smaller company can.

I think it's the reverse: a small company doesn't have the liquidity, buying power or ability to convert more resource into more money like Google.

And of course a lot of small companies will be paying Google with a fat margin to use their cloud.

Getting by with less resources, or even on-premise reduced hardware will be a way bigger win. That's why they'll pay a DBA full time to optimize their database needs to reduce costs 2 to 3x the salary. Or have full team of infra guys mostly dealing with SRE and performance.
by grumpy-de-sre | 2025-05-14 07:08:58+00:00
I'm not really aware of many rich countries that operate minibusses in urban areas. The bulk of the cost of operating public transport is labor so there's a strong incentive to scale.

Now if we get Waymo style self driving minibusses, that'd be great. But if the running costs for full size electric busses aren't too dissimilar it might just make sense to standardize on larger automated busses for increased surge capacity.
by The_SamminAter | 2025-05-14 07:09:10+00:00
I had a glossy screen for a few years, but recently switched to the matte. I’m quite liking it, it certainly lets me work in more environments without blinding glare. It’s nice and sharp, no major complaints. (One minor nitpick though: unlike the glossy, you can’t turn the brightness down until the backlight is off).
by numpad0 | 2025-05-14 07:09:12+00:00
(-1) be vector format that never gets pixelated

(0) that reproduce everywhere on any OS perfectly

(0.5) that supports (everything) any typographical engineers ever wanted past and future

Bitmap formats are out from clause -1, Office file formats disqualify from clause 0, Markdown doesn't satisfy clause 0.5. Otherwise a Word .doc format covers most of clauses 1-4.
by mandmandam | 2025-05-14 07:09:38+00:00
Theoretical scientists made your income possible.

The algorithms behind modern finance, logistics, and computing stem from abstract mathematics.

Quantum mechanics laid the foundation for semiconductors, the internet, your smartphone etc.

Even GPS depends on Einstein’s general relativity, a theory once attacked for being too esoteric and detached from reality.

Do people not understand the concept of a long term investment, even if they can't grasp the importance of understanding for its own sake? What is it?
by david38 | 2025-05-14 07:10:02+00:00
Seriously? A candidate puts in a week of work and he can’t be guaranteed a 30 minute discussion?

Nobody is getting a few hundred or few thousand submissions to evaluate. Nobody. If you are getting 1k applicants, at best 50 are asked to do a take-home and even then, not all at once.

If by some miracle 100 people did this to completion at the same time, there should be a notice to the effect that due to high volume, blah blah blah.
by lan321 | 2025-05-14 07:10:16+00:00
TBH if I suddenly notice a massive change in stop sign or speed enforcement, to me, it'd be more of a signal of revenue gathering than safety. It somewhat undermines my opinion of police since I start seeing them more as a money making tool of the bossman.. I really couldn't care less if someone's speeding a bit or rolling stop signs as long as they are actually paying attention. For all I care you can even run red lights as long as no one is coming..
by BlackFly | 2025-05-14 07:10:25+00:00
That really doesn't explain the model because you have completely left out the distinction between exclusive/shared (or mutable/immutable) borrows. Rust made a large number of choices with respect to how it permits such borrows and those do not follow from this brief outline nor from intuition or common sense. For example, the no aliasing rule is motivated not by intuition or common sense but from a desire to optimize functions.

The most complicated aspect of the borrows comes about from the elision rules which will silently do the wrong thing and will work fantastically until they don't at which point the compiler error is pointing at a function complaining about a lifetime parameter of a parameter with the trait method implying that the parameter has to live too long but the real problem was a lifetime in the underlying struct or a previous broken lifetime bound. Those elision rules are again not-intuitive and don't fall out of your explanation axiomatically. They were decisions that were made to attempt to simplify the life of programmers.
by al_borland | 2025-05-14 07:10:36+00:00
The author wasted a significant amount of his own time, and the hiring manager’s time with all the questions, the proposal, etc.

Even after asking for all this clarity, he failed to do what was originally asked. If asking for all those details, you have to at least do the basics of what was asked.

He failed on multiple fronts here, and even wrote an entire blog post without realizing it. It seems like Kagi did the right thing by not hiring him, if we’re being brutally honest. If he would re-read the original ask with a fresh set of eyes, then look at his final product and all the communication, the feedback should go without saying. When someone misses the mark by that much, it’s takes a lot of effort to try and say it nicely to soften the blow, as a company would want to do. Multiply this by however many people applied, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

Now that he’s written this blog post, I wonder if he’ll have more trouble even getting past the first gate of hiring processes, as other companies won’t want to sign on to have a blog post trying to drag them through the mud over a rejection. That shows more questionable judgement.
by enos_feedler | 2025-05-14 07:11:04+00:00
a bad joke is a little harsh. It's worth trying to do a few new things. Having stayed in many airbnbs, I have wondered why they don't start adding a menu of things I can do once I am there. It feels like a space they could deploy some offerings and have the attention of their customer. There are bad jokes that cost a lot more money. Look at Apple Vision Pro. I think this is relatively cheap vs. their cash flow.
by arkh | 2025-05-14 07:11:08+00:00
> I’d be really curious what this person has spent the majority of their career working on

I feel like early career is a huge factor. As a young person you'll be ok to be a junior when joining a company working on high scale problem. You're also ok with companies working on low scale.

But 10 years later, most high scale companies won't even think about hiring you for anything but junior position if you've never got to work on high scale operations. And that's not the kind of experience you can easily get on your own time.

So if you've accepted to work for small scale companies at the start of your career? You're stuck unless you accept a huge salary cut (and that's if you pass the "too qualified/old for this position" filter).
by throwaway81523 | 2025-05-14 07:11:09+00:00
If you've worked inside of CPython or other programs with manual reference counting, the idea of borrowing shows up there, where you receive a reference from another part of the program and then mess with the object without tweaking the reference count, "borrowing" an existing reference because any copies you've of the address will be short lived. The term shows up throughout CPython.
by notpushkin | 2025-05-14 07:12:08+00:00
I had to do a visa-run in Vietnam a couple weeks ago and my trip to the border was exactly like that. After the bus got to their nominal final stop, they’ve unloaded all passengers except me, then made a couple other stops (they took a computer monitor from one place to another??), then finally told me to wait and take another bus, which I didn’t have to pay for. (Both buses were of the micro-bus / marshrutka kind, of course.)
by dmurray | 2025-05-14 07:12:22+00:00
There will be a rebranding in the next ten years. Airbnb will get a slightly more blocky or rounded version of the same logo and ads everywhere announcing how "Airbnb is now Air".

I can't tell who owns air.com, but the website it hosts is a tiny landing page from someone who would obviously sell.

The rebranding will be met by a slew of astonished articles asking "they spent how much?" and almost as many apparently-thoughtful midwit counterpoints saying no, it looks obvious in hindsight, but it took real marketing genius to conceive of this in advance.
by ars | 2025-05-14 07:12:41+00:00
> If only they passed the inverse law requiring gas and coal plants to buy renewable power to reduce their pollution impact.

Why? The goal of this law is a stable grid, it's not an environmental law. And your law makes no sense, they should buy renewable power in order to sell it? Why do I need an extra middleman?

The actual purpose of this law is that if you are putting unable power on the grid it's your job to make it stable.

The grid operator is responsible for the stability of the entire thing, but this law is saying that each individual supplier must be responsible for the stability of their personal part.

I suspect as the proportion of renewables increases more and more grids will require something like this.
by Lio | 2025-05-14 07:13:31+00:00
Pure marketing doesn’t always win. There are counter examples.

Famously Toyota beat many companies that were basing their strategy on marketing rather than quality.

They were able to use quality as part of their marketing.

My father in law worked in a car showroom and talks about when they first installed carpet there.

No one did that previously. The subtle point to customers being that Toyotas didn’t leak oil.
by sunshine-o | 2025-05-14 07:14:01+00:00
After almost two decades my guess is we can start to look back at the whole cryptocurrency thing a bit more clearly.

> but cryptocurrency makes traditional banking obsolete.

Most banks we interact with were obsolete before crypto.

When working there I had a lot of "why" questions until someone explained me "You need to think about banks basically as an extension of the state".

From a tech POV it is exactly what we usually hear: there is a ~50 year old legacy core banking system that nobody really understand but keep working almost miraculously. Everything else beyond that is trash.

Cryptocurrencies pop up in a weird way and obliviously did not delivered since.

In 2025, it is still hard and costly to transact on Bitcoin or Ethereum. If it wasn't govs would have unleashed the fury on crypto.

> Or should have.

Yes our banking system is failing society and preventing progress since at least 2008.

Crypto was our chance to move beyond but it didn't happen. Bitcoin price is probably just reflect the fact that our banking system is at risk of collapsing any time soon and crypto might be (part of) the solution.

> I don't care how many times I am violently buried on this site for mentioning the word

Yes crypto shouldn't be taboo on HN. It is a potential solution for what most people need urgently (more than AI) so it should be discussed.
by thaumaturgy | 2025-05-14 07:15:17+00:00
This is simply a defense of bad policy couched in unnecessarily dehumanizing language.

There is widespread resentment of this and many other common hiring practices in the tech sector, and that is further impacting both the quality of candidates as well as employee motivation and satisfaction. The upside for companies is higher quality candidates whose first experience with the company is a hiring process that makes the candidate want to work there.
by oliwarner | 2025-05-14 07:15:25+00:00
You asked way too many questions.

The instructions seemed clear. They deliberately set an open ended task, and they want to see how well you independently add valuable features (to a well known format).

I agree that this is an obscene amount of unpaid work but if you're going to do it, you can't ask your hiring contact how to do it. It demonstrates a lack of independence, and that's something they told you they wanted for this role.
by pllbnk | 2025-05-14 07:15:45+00:00
In a perfect world, we would agree on a wealth ceiling and would tax everything above it. Want that $200M yacht? Then better sell your mansion or the government will try to sell it. If nobody wants to buy it - it's your problem and a bad investment, try to sell it for much much cheaper than what it cost you to build and maintain it.

The implementation is difficult but not impossible. There's just been no interest in implementing it due to lobbying.
by jimkleiber | 2025-05-14 07:16:09+00:00
It's less out of the quote and more from just the phrase "emotional combat."

I as well take things personally, aka, I feel attacked and pull away, shrinking into my experience and actively not wanting to imagine what someone else is going through.

When I focus on emotional combat, I can start to see how I'm not just experiencing this one specific conflict but am getting hit from multiple angles: financial, physical, social, familial, etc.

And then it almost makes me see that the other person is going through this combat as well, whether I want to see it or not.

So in short it can help me broaden my perspective on the conflicts I'm experiencing, which then can almost trick me into broadening it for the other person, and I can feel myself expand.
by thanatos519 | 2025-05-14 07:16:27+00:00
Yes! Just use an app to say where you want to go, and it tells you which of the 3 nearest bus stops to go to, and you get where you want to go reasonably quickly. No bus routes, just dynamic allocation and routing based on historical and up-to-the-minute demand.

If you tell the system your desire well in advance, you pay less. "I need to be at the office at 9 and home by 6 every weekday". Enough area-to-area trips allocate buses. Smaller, off-peak, or short-notice group demand brings minivans. Short-notice uncommon trips bring cars. For people with disabilities or heavy packages, random curb stops are available.

Then you remove private cars from cities entirely. Park your private car outside the city, or even better, use the bikeshare-style rentals. No taxis or Ubers, only public transit, with unionized, salaried drivers. Every vehicle on the road is moving and full of people and you can get rid of most parking spaces and shrink most parking lots.

It's not rocket science. It's computer science.

Fantasy, because it would allow us to drastically reduce the manufacturing of automobiles.
by anyfoo | 2025-05-14 07:16:56+00:00
I don’t quite understand how that matters here. The researchers found a CPU vulnerability. They demonstrated it on a popular Linux distribution and LTS version, Ubuntu 24.04. They likely picked that to show that the attack is not purely theoretical, but feasible on something that real users currently use for real things. There is a microcode fix available that solves this problem, presumably across all OSes and releases. Whether the kernel is current and how much it diverges is, frankly, irrelevant.
by dizhn | 2025-05-14 07:17:41+00:00
I am currently on vacation in the Mediterranean and find a hybrid model to be the best of both worlds. We strictly use booking.com (we need to find a hotel at 6pm and check in at 7. Same thing the next day.Airbnb would never work.) Booking.com lists apartments too. I would imagine there's a huge overlap with airbnb properties. This way you're using the better company (they helped me out a bunch of times. And the listers are more inclined to behave on booking.com.) but staying in the same apartments with all the positives you listed. It's all self check in now too. I have yet to see any owner or manager.
by llmthrow103 | 2025-05-14 07:18:51+00:00
Every step in the process is a filter. You can ask them not to use AI and trust, you can ask them what tools they used (including AI) and for what part, you can ask the candidate to screen record them programming their solution and forbid using AI, you can ask them about their solution in a followup interview, etc.

It's kind of up to what you're filtering for, and how much you trust the candidate at that part of the process, and how you follow up after hiring.
by mint2 | 2025-05-14 07:19:01+00:00
Efficiency related regulation like the energy star is THE reason why companies started caring.

Same with low flush toilets. I vaguely remember the initial ones had issues, but tbh less than the older use a ton of water toilets my family had before that were also super clog prone. Nowadays I can’t even remember the last time a low flush toilet clogged. Massive water saving that took regulation.

Efficiency regulations may not be directly written in blood, instead they are built on costly mountains of unaddressed waste.
by philberto | 2025-05-14 07:19:07+00:00
So there are virtual stops all over the city. You book a ride let's say city center to your home. The service integrates this route into existing rides or create a new ride. It might stop 5 times on the way to your home and pick up people and drop them. And you as a passenger won't know the route in advance. And it will not be the fastest to your place in most cases.

I guess this is what you call "ride sharing". It is like your parents picking you up from football and realizing the kid from the other part of the town also needs a ride so they make a huge detour
by taneliv | 2025-05-14 07:19:19+00:00
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. If the kids are not toddlers any more, booking a place where you share the apartment/house with the host (or maybe other travelers) can also be a great experience.

I mean, it's an adventure, and those can also go poorly, but our experiences have been just excellent. And at those bottom-of-the-barrel prices mentioned earlier.

Definitely not something that hotels offer.
by throw310822 | 2025-05-14 07:19:23+00:00
> So even small things matter

The real point is not how does a candidate get the few thousand votes that determine his/ her victory; it's the many tens of millions of votes that lie underneath and that make the last few thousand count. The result is a coin flip, but one between two candidates that are almost equally liked (or disliked) by 150 million voters.

> Are we moving the goal posts to "convicted to life in prison"?

More like using an official proxy to determine the value of those reports. If there is a credible report of a coup (which must involve a plan to illegally take control of the institutions of a country, especially those that have the "monopoly on violence"- National Guard, army, police, etc.) and which is one of the gravest crimes against the state, then there must have been severe convictions at the highest levels.
by mppm | 2025-05-14 07:19:41+00:00
Everything you suggest is in fact part of standard (and mandatory) procedures. If a pilot makes one serious error, you should look closely at the circumstances. If the pilot makes ten in sequence, he probably is, as GP put it, a moron who shouldn't have been allowed near an airplane, ever.

Circumstances do matter, but they do not constitute a general license to dismiss personal responsibility, especially in occupations known to come with very high responsibility.
by Michelangelo11 | 2025-05-14 07:20:00+00:00
In addition to the ridiculousness of the whole situation, it is unbelievably ridiculous that their customer service is the same incoherent, pro-forma slop that's now the norm for retail customer service everywhere.

If you're offering financial services for business, you really need customer service that lives up to the name and, when a problem occurs, tells the customer the specific steps to take to fix it.
by scrapheap | 2025-05-14 07:20:13+00:00
For me information tends to fall into one of the following categories:

Information that I need right now, but won't need once the task I'm working on is complete (e.g. A standard algorithm that I'm adapting to a specific use case). This information is normally in the form of a web page and will live in a tab in my browser. At the end of the day I close my browser, if I haven't finished the task I'm working on then I can pull that tab out of my browser's history the next day.

Information that my team needs (e.g. "this is how we run our Ansible playbooks"). This written up in a form targeting our environment and goes in our team's documentation (which is just a git repository full of markdown files).

Information that I will need access to regularly (e.g. Configuration options for one of the systems that we look after). This is also usually in the form of a web page and I'll simply add it as a bookmark to my browser (sometimes this also gets added as a link to our team documentation)

Information that I don't currently need but I'm trying to gain an understanding of (e.g. the contents of a book that I'm reading to expand my knowledge on an area). For this sort of information I like to have it in a form that I know will be around so that I can go back to it when needed - I'm usually pretty good at remembering the bigger picture from a book, which is enough for me to know where I need to go to look for the fine details.
by decide1000 | 2025-05-14 07:20:20+00:00
Quite some years ago I sold a Wordpress plugin at a marketplace called Binpress. They paid to my business Paypal account. It had a $3500 balance and I didn't log in to Paypal for a while. After 2 years I tried to recover my account. It was blocked and there was no way for me to get access. I tried every possible way.
by vr46 | 2025-05-14 07:20:34+00:00
I’ve had all kinds of little annoying issues with Wise that cause me to be trapped in circles, but nothing this serious. Support is truly the thing that separates the wheat from the chaff. Everything is hunky-dory when it works, and the moment there’s a problem, you’re suddenly stuck in the Barbican at 3am with no signs, no lights and nobody to talk to.
by mantas | 2025-05-14 07:21:07+00:00
If you're going such lengths to abuse voter ID laws, then no-voter-ID is probably abused too :)

At worst, one abuse is replaced by another abuse. And once voter ID law is in, it's much easier to make tiny changes on prices, offices work hours and so on.

On the other hand. Somehow I don't hear people complaining that driver licenses in US are too expensive and too hard to get, thus fuck it, people can just drive without one...?