MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by leoc | 2025-05-12 03:06:36+00:00
Eric Gilliam's "How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?" https://www.freaktakes.com/p/how-did-places-like-bell-labs-k... came to a similar conclusion. (It did well here just a couple of months ago, too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43295865 , so it is a little disappointing that the discussion seems to be starting from the beginning here again.) Another point which you've both made is that other big US firms had very important industrial research labs, too. (RCA Labs is one that seems to get little love these days, at least outside the pages of We Were Burning https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... Also, to be fair, "Areoform" did mention Xerox PARC once in TFA.) Indeed, overstating the uniqueness of Bell Labs helps to billow up the clouds of mystique, but it's probably harmful to a clear understanding of how it actually worked.

But the ultimate problem with TFA is that it seems to be written to portray venture capitalists(?), or at least this group of VCs who totally get it, as on the side of real innovation along with ... Bell Labs researchers(?) and Bell Labs executives(?) ... against the Permanent Managerial Class which has ruined everything. Such ideas have apparently been popular for a while, but I think we can agree that after the past year or two the joke isn't as funny as it used to be anymore.
by linsomniac | 2025-05-12 03:06:45+00:00
I think whether I'm cured or not only slightly minimizes the story of a physician who discounted something that seemingly impacts 25% of patients... It's also interesting to me that ChatGPT came up with research supporting an answer to my primary question, but the Dr. did not.

The point being that there's a lot that the LLMs can do in concert with physicians, discounting either one is not useful or interesting.
by gotaqmyfriends | 2025-05-12 03:07:35+00:00
How does the woodworking company ensure payment? Does the specialized nature ensure only "real" customers buy? Is there a trusted relationship? A threat of legal action?

I know the other way around is basically the norm: how does one know the company, the seller, will actually provide the product after paying. But the prevailing culture, currently, is that companies in this regard are trustworthy and customers are not. It's a bit debatable but it makes sense.
by timewizard | 2025-05-12 03:07:50+00:00
Our high school did something I'll never forget. They offered trade based two hour "block courses" through the school district. We had Electronics and Circuit Design, IT, Auto Shop and Repair, Welding, Aerospace Engineering, and a whole bunch more that I was never interested in and so don't remember.

It was a great program. It was offered in connection with local state and community colleges. You could get credit for some of your high school work if you continued on in the field. The local employers knew about it so they would stop by often to see what students were learning and to suggest new directions for the entire class.

Never seen anything like it before or since which was the 1990s. It was a way to start paying your dues before you even left high school. You wouldn't command an awesome salary right out of school but you could easily insert yourself into the trades with almost no down time.
by SlightlyLeftPad | 2025-05-12 03:08:09+00:00
Well, it’s a more nuanced answer. Over time, regularly squeezing 1-2% out of search results in an vastly inferior product which flips from primarily serving its users to serving its payers. Eventually, that will mean certain death as others are willing to take on bigger bolder risks. We have pretty good evidence from other long established companies that this constant pressure to extract money from products is a failing strategy.
by KPGv2 | 2025-05-12 03:09:49+00:00
> Much of US banking operates almost entirely on this premise and has done so forever.

I might be mistaken, but isn't banking famous for

(1) the long hours (i.e., processes suck), (2) the drudgery of updating said Excel files (i.e., processes suck) (3) horribly expensive to access (i.e., processes suck)

I have never once in my life as a corporate lawyer thought of banking as a model of operational efficiency.
by ivanbalepin | 2025-05-12 03:12:03+00:00
Enjoyed the article, but the author was correctly questioned in the substack comments how is this any different than a credit card for the borrower and what justifies the "interest-free" myth here, since the BNPL payoff period largely overlaps with the CC grace period. To which the author responds:

> Credit card float only lasts if you pay the full statement balance by the due date

but that is identical to BNPL, it's only interest free if you pay it off, just like a credit card past grace period. So why repeat the "interest free" marketing slogan? yes, initially it is, and so is the CC grace period.

> consumers have to only forecast the next six weeks of their life

yeah, good luck managing timing on the payments if you have 12+ of these, and it's not uncommon to have that many! Especially if, as author mentioned, you are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

I guess a marginal benefit for consumer is soft-forcing them to pay it off instead of revolving. Another one, correctly, was less hit to the credit score unless and until the bureaus get their hands on all BNPL data at some point in the future. But there is really no magic here for the consumer.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-12 03:13:11+00:00
Yep an early project of mine was building an import of account charges from an FTP file transmission. There was plenty of checking and validation, any records that didn't pass were rejected and the user got notified (I think via email) with the rejected records and the reasons. They could then correct them and resubmit.

Granted the only real security was the FTP username and password, but it was all internal and at the time (1990s) that was good enough.
by rybosome | 2025-05-12 03:14:31+00:00
> Is financing your lunch a sign of societal decay? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s definitely an evolution in Market Completion.

Yeah this is a fucking crazy statement, as if the “but” justifies the former statement because it touches a Proper Noun.

“Is getting beaten to death in broad daylight a sign of societal decay? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s definitely an evolution in Practical Fitness.”
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-05-12 03:15:38+00:00
>> In short, while letting customers send Excel files "and then load+merge their results directly into the same SQL tables" might sound nice, this does not scale and will certainly result in a failure state at some point.

> Much of US banking operates almost entirely on this premise and has done so forever.

This is a disingenuous statement as it relates to at least credit/debit/gift card transactions. Bank-to-bank and select high-volume Merchants communicate in certain circumstances with secure file transfers, especially for daily settlements.

The vast majority of Merchants do not, and instead rely on secure web applications to authorize, capture, and settle their transactions.

Perhaps other banking domains rely on Excel and similar to do business. I cannot speak to those business areas.

> I'd take a look at the Nacha (ACH) operating rules if you have any doubt that sophisticated business workflows can be built on top of flat files and asynchronous transmission.

And I'd recommend you take a look at different integration - online payment processing using Oribtal as described by Oracle.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E69185_01/cwdirect/pdf/180/cwdire...
by rvz | 2025-05-12 03:16:05+00:00
Would you want "vibe coders" submitting patches that they don't understand written by an AI to be accepted by the kernel maintainers?

This is critical software and it is used on billions of computing devices and including cars, airports and even spaceships.

Which this behaviour would make sense, however, this is just unhinged:

> So this patch is utter and absolute garbage, and should be shot in the head and buried very very deep. Please immediately delete it from the whole internet.
by ehnto | 2025-05-12 03:17:10+00:00
This is a perfect example actually, the remediation actions required should have been taken decades ago, it was urgent then. We have just gotten so used to seeing no immediate downside to kicking the can down the road that we have collectively forgotten how urgent it was.

Now it is urgent and critical still, but we have far fewer options for remediation.

Kind of like how changing your cars oil is urgent once you cross the service date. You don't immediately see any downsides, but they are accumulating, you can't roll back the damage, and total failure to change the oil is eventually catastrophic.
by MostlyStable | 2025-05-12 03:17:27+00:00
This strikes me very much as one of the things where the answer is probably very simple but also very difficult.

I would also guess (completely un-informedly) that because the simple (and probably correct) answer is very difficult, a lot of companies are trying to avoid it by doing things that are more complicated but also easier. And because they are more complicated, it is not immediately obvious why they won't work....but they won't. Which is resulting in the repeated failures.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-05-12 03:17:59+00:00
A timer is one of the most underrated ways to stay focused.[1]

We have all been there where you are supposed to work on that boring but critical bug for the project, where a few other team members are waiting, but you end up booking a domain, building a landing page, and launching a waiting list. By dinner, as you are talking to potential alpha users in your community and start spreading the word, you realize you have not touched that bug.

Anyway, I like timers; the only complication in my Watch is a timer.[2] At my desk, I use a physical hourglass regularly. The physical hourglass helps me not be constrained by the Pomodoro-ish restrictions and work past the finish line.

For distractions (that seem important and sometimes are) while I'm on a specific task, I usually have my handy notebook, and I write them down quickly with a pen so I can return to them later. That helps me prevent launching ideas into landing pages.

Once you are good with a process/pattern, whatever tool you build/buy/use, as a timer in this case, helps your focus on your current situation.

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2023/timer/

2. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/watch-tiny-handy-computer/
by docuru | 2025-05-12 03:18:07+00:00
I've learned that people use what they familiar with.

At first, I learned and use plain HTML/CSS/PHP and I thought that was good. At college, they taught .NET framework and for some years, that was my go to techstack. Then I started to learn about more languages and frameworks. At some point, it's hard to switch between them

Now I stick with one thing, unless that platform doesn't support it. This also allow me to be a lot more productive since I know most of the thing needed to be done

Sure I can start with vanilla web, or some new framework but it'll take a lot more of time and just not worth it
by 0_____0 | 2025-05-12 03:20:02+00:00
If you're curious why it takes longer than that, check out this primer on the HW dev cycle.

https://www.hwe.design/product-development-process/developme...

For components that have many components or complex requirements, or are part of more complicated systems, this takes longer. Cars have a design cycle that's many years long - 5-6 years would be a decent ballpark. That's due to the complexity of the product, complexity of the supply chains and tooling, requirements, and scale.
by analog31 | 2025-05-12 03:20:56+00:00
It's interesting that VB5 and 6 were what I call "object based." You could use pre-defined objects, but didn't have to create them yourself. In fact you needed some special "edition" to create objects, which I never did. But was a great way to ease a beginner into OOP -- by using them before creating them.

Now of course I'm not a beginner -- that can only happen once. And maybe it has gotten easier to learn. I remember the series in Byte Magazine about OOP, and it was just utterly baffling, but now I can't imagine why it seemed hard.

Meanwhile, I stepped off the software development bus, and so I don't care as much about "finished" software. Building crude GUI's in Tkinter is satisfactory for my needs these days.
by aaaaaaabbbbbb | 2025-05-12 03:22:07+00:00
Assuming one has access to a credit card and is financially literate, I agree that using BNPL is a hard sell (never having used it myself). But there is a large population--the unbanked--that lacks access to credit cards. For that population, the choice is not between credit card and BNPL, but BNPL and cash.

I found the article's description of how BNPL structurally differs from credit cards interesting, as it is a reasonable explanation for how BNPL can serve the unbanked and still have functioning credit risk models:

> Even with adverse selection for BNPL, the underwriting is for each transaction, not for all monthly spending like that in credit cards; so if a consumer misses a payment, the BNPL provider can stop lending immediately, as opposed to the credit card company which has to underwrite the person’s full ability and willingness to repay their debts. This tech-enabled granularity allows for legibility and hence greater precision and predictability.
by rybosome | 2025-05-12 03:22:11+00:00
Thank you for clearly and concisely articulating why this is dangerous from the securities aspect.

I think the immorality of it for consumers is obvious on the surface, but the backend financial stupidity of it is slightly less obvious. At least to me, I felt that it was risky but couldn’t clearly articulate why until reading this.

The only difference may be how many people buy into these. I don’t imagine BNPL securities to have the reach of 2008 for a few reasons, but perhaps I’m being naive.
by cryptonector | 2025-05-12 03:22:33+00:00
This happened to me a couple of years ago where the car I was driving decided that one of those water-filled tanks ahead of a barrier on a road under construction was in front of the car just because the road was curving hard to the right. It was very scary. It almost caused an accident by itself. I don't remember how the brake assist cleared, but the fact that there's nothing one can do to make the computer not break is very scary.
by zie | 2025-05-12 03:22:33+00:00
Generally in the excel load process, one does sanity checks. However your database can do all the checking if you so wish. CHECK() gets you quite far. If you have PostgreSQL(PG) or some other advanced SQL database, you can even go forth with functions and views and triggers and everything else.

We execute Python in our PG database and do testing through PGTAP.
by grep_name | 2025-05-12 03:22:41+00:00
Well, that character judgement (if you want to call it that) was based on dillydog's shared thoughts about a long article that itself reflects a very specific way of viewing people. To compare that conclusion to someone who purports to confidently extrapolate someone's self-worth, philosophy regarding how they view themselves and others, the 'narrowness' of their understanding or love for the world (what?), and more just by watching them stand around at a wedding for an afternoon seems strange. It's a much more solid base to draw that conclusion from, in my opinion. The character judgement is that they are "a person who affords everyone a rich and deep inner life," and the judgement comes from the fact that applying their perspective is impossible unless they afford everyone a rich and deep inner life. It's emergent from their stated philosophy in a way that the examples in the article are not.

> My read of the article is that the author ascribes negative traits without judgement and just as easily as positive ones

I don't think this is true at all? The 'negative traits' she assigns to people are things like desperation, self-hatred, 'hating the world (or having a very narrow understanding of it)', 'thinking they are better than everyone'. It's hard to call those categorizations anything but judgemental. She even goes as far as to say she has a 'favorite kind of person' by these categorizations. That she ascribes them as easily positive ones is meaningless. It's the ascribing that is the problem.

My take away is that the article is a small list of things that most people know (i.e. it's easy to tell if someone is actually interested in something or not) paired with a series of ways to judge someone based on some extremely surface-level traits, which slowly veers into a sort of prescriptive take on which combination of those traits makes a person identifiably good. It has a feel-good tone, but I found the article difficult to get through because it put me off so much.

> Heck, as I see it, big part of empathizing with someone is recognizing how all their conditions and traits are natural and operate similarly inside ourselves to one degree or another.

See, to me applying the 'insights' outlined in the article seems like the opposite of empathizing. It's couched in gentle phrasing, but it essentially boils down to "here's how you put someone into a box by looking at them."
by almostgotcaught | 2025-05-12 03:22:43+00:00
> there are levels of problem you will struggle to find 5 people to solve it on avg senior dev salary

You're agreeing with me even though you think you're disagreeing. Yes it is hard for one person (one senior dev salary) to solve large problems most of the time.

> where there is constant arm race in building systems handling millions QPS over petabytes of data and with all recent advanced AI.

Yes I'm saying that at that scale it's very hard to solve the problem by yourself.
by catigula | 2025-05-12 03:23:13+00:00
Car software is so thankless and opaque.

Look at the market landscape: literally nobody knows that Toyota produces the #1 system for automated driver safety aids (ADAS) and it isn't close - their current generation of vision/radar fusion sensors have the only car on the market that passes 2029 federal regulations for AEB (62mph to dead stop if an obstacle is detected being a metric that some other manufacturers called not feasible) on a 2023 Corolla.

Compare that to IIHS data for other brands/makes, even "safe" ones - many of them perform abysmally. The systems are awful. It took me a genuinely decent amount of digging to uncover that most cars, even lauded ones, are equipped with "compliance software" that meets bare minimum requirements, i.e. Honda, Hyundai, etc.

And yet every review and even poster on the internet calls Toyota woefully technically inept because Kia makes fancy screens. Alas.
by nneonneo | 2025-05-12 03:25:10+00:00
EV sales are up, Tesla sales are down, and around the world people are protesting against Tesla because of Elon specifically.

If this was simply a demand problem because Teslas were being compared against “incumbents” (ICE cars?), what explains their strong performance in the past, and the sudden drop in performance now? The standard excuse is the new Model Y changeover, but Electrek offers lots of evidence that demand for the new car is weak too.
by hedora | 2025-05-12 03:25:29+00:00
Maybe people will finally realize that allowing companies to gather private information without permission is a bad idea, and should be banned. Such information is already used against everyone multiple times a day.

On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it!

This tradeoff has basically nothing to do with recent advances in AI though.

Also, with the current performance trends in LLMs, we seem very close to being able to run models locally. That’ll blow up a lot of the most abusive business models in this space.

On a related note, if AI decreases the number of mistakes my doctor makes, that seems like a win to me.

If the AI then sold my medical file (or used it in some other revenue generating way), that’d be unethical and wrong.

Current health care systems already do that without permission and it’s legal. Fix that problem instead.
by lerp-io | 2025-05-12 03:26:22+00:00
no no no.....what you people really need is just an ai chatbot that simply generates your crud app/interface/store/whatever on the fly, so you don't even need excel or anything at all and the internet is just one big open vector database big brain. b2b, saas, excel, admin roles?? haha whats that?? and then we just relax outside in the grass hugging trees and smoking pot or whatever like in the 80s.
by bluehex | 2025-05-12 03:26:37+00:00
This is awesome. I've had similar ideas but wasn't able to do any prototyping yet as I only have Pico 2 boards that don't expose the CSn pin in the pinout.

Rather than UART booting every time I thought it might be nice to use UART Boot just as a way to deliver the firmware update to the sub chip - so the UART image you load would just be a program that accepts a larger image (over UART again) and would write to the flash for subsequent boots. I think that would get around the SRAM and boot time downsides the author mentioned. Is there a reason this might not work?
by riku_iki | 2025-05-12 03:28:18+00:00
My point is that in certain domains your regular devs can't solve problem, there are some 10x experts who can solve it.

For some problems, one 10x expert could be enough, for others you need some team (small), and they will be able to achieve results where NNN randomly hired senior devs from the market won't produce useful product.

So, the goal of IC is to become such 10x expert if he wants to grow as engineer and not as manager.
by billy99k | 2025-05-12 03:28:29+00:00
I know many software engineers in their 50s that refused to become managers. One layoff after 50 and most of them had to change careers because many companies don't want to hire 50-something engineers, but will hire a manager.

On top of this, you can take management skills to almost any company and you don't have to continually know all of the details of the latest framework/software fad to get a job.
by jmb99 | 2025-05-12 03:29:50+00:00
Admittedly I don’t know your salary or market, but it is possible to make decent money in embedded. Connections & market timing are both vital though, in my experience, as well as being actually good at your job. I’m in Canada so numbers are way different, but salary-wise I’m in the ~75th percentile software engineers in my area, my title is embedded engineer, and I’m fairly junior (3 years out of university, ~6 years full-time experience). I’m working with some other embedded people who are in the 95th percentile for software engineers in the country. The main problem is there are very few high-paying embedded jobs; conversely though, there seem to be even fewer highly-skilled embedded engineers looking for work. I recently interviewed at a company paying 50th-85th (based on experience) percentile trying to hire pretty much any competent embedded engineer, and their problem isn’t insufficient salary, it’s just a lack of applicants or any skill level. From what I’ve heard, the same seems to be true pretty much everywhere.

Now sure, if you’re looking for 500k+ jobs, embedded isn’t the area to be in, unfortunately. But I prefer low-stress, fun-environment embedded jobs, and don’t mind trading off salary for that. Different strokes.
by felineflock | 2025-05-12 03:30:14+00:00
About a year ago the Ford CEO (who is also Chris Farley's cousin) explained why legacy car manufacturers could not make good software: each of their cars have 150+ modules, each of them from several suppliers, each of them writing their own software.

For every software change on each module, they have to go to a supplier to ask because of IP rights.

That is why Ford is/was trying to build a new generation of modules with in-house software which they never wrote before.

Also pertinent: "Why Ford decided to merge its next-gen architecture with its current platform" https://archive.ph/CR2Pv