MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjr00 | 2025-05-13 14:47:31+00:00
> You are comparing applications with wildly different features and UI. That's neither an argument for nor against performance as an important quality metric.

I never said performance wasn't an important quality metric, just that it's not the only quality metric. If a slow program has the features I need and a fast program doesn't, the slow program is going to be "higher quality" in my mind.

> How fast you can compile, start and execute some particular code matters. The experience of using a program that performs well if you use it daily matters.

Like any other feature, whether or not performance is important depends on the user and context. Chrome being faster than IE8 at general browsing (rendering pages, opening tabs) was very noticeable. uv/ruff being faster than pip/poetry is important because of how the tools integrate into performance-sensitive development workflows. Does Slack taking 5-10 seconds to load on startup matter? -- to me not really, because I have it come up on boot and forget about it until my next system update forced reboot. Do I use LibreOffice or Word and Excel, even though LibreOffice is faster? -- I use Word/Excel because I've run into annoying compatibility issues enough times with LO to not bother. LibreOffice could reduce their startup and file load times to 10 picoseconds and I would still use MS Office, because I just want my damn documents to keep the same formatting my colleagues using MS Office set on their Windows computers.

Now of course I would love the best of all worlds; programs to be fast and have all the functionality I want! In reality, though, companies can't afford to build every feature, performance included, and need to pick and choose what's important.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-13 14:47:57+00:00
> respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself.

That's the problem of the tiktokification of public discourse. Attention spans of the wide masses are really, really low, everything longer than a tiktok or youtube short just gets dismissed as "too long, didn't read". Trump, for all his faults, is a master of that - each of his speeches is not designed to be appealing to the audience, but to be cut into very short "soundbites" that just convey the core message.
by xnorswap | 2025-05-13 14:48:42+00:00
Your post seems entirely anachronistic.

2007 is the year we did get video streaming services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_iPlayer

Steam was selling games, even third party ones, for years by 2007.

I'm not sure what a "VS-Code style IDE" is, but I absolutely did appreciate Visual Studio ( and VB6! ) prior to 2007.

2007 was in fact the peak of TomTom's profit, although GPS navigation isn't really the same as general purpose mapping application.

Grocery delivery was well established, Tesco were doing that in 1996. And the idea of takeaways not doing delivery is laughable, every establishment had their own delivery people.

Yes, there are some things on that list that didn't exist, but the top half of your list is dominated by things that were well established by 2007.
by Funes- | 2025-05-13 14:48:52+00:00
They're probably bluffing to an extent, but just picture the dystopian scenario we're all heading towards: you're watching anything that's not {MegaCorporation or Government}-Approved Content™ on your TV and all of a sudden the screen goes dark and displays an ominous message, "This device has been permanently disabled due to non-approved usage. It will be retrieved by authorized personnel in the following days. Failing to comply will carry a serious fine. Thank you." Then you say "McDonald's! I'm lovin' it!" out loud so you can unlock your phone and proceed to complain on X before you're swatted by the police for doing so.
by spoonsort | 2025-05-13 14:49:01+00:00
Yes, this is the whole issue with these kinds of systems. The message gets lost in translation to the user. An OG java applet would say "this app is signed, do you want to continue", and the engineer at the bottom is the only one that knows what that even really means, which is that the applet gets to run outside the sandbox if the user runs it. Windows UAC is similar, as are most Linux desktop security mechanisms.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-05-13 14:49:14+00:00
>Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in <1 second, and it still does today. Vim and co are instant.

Do any of those do the indexing that cause the slowness? If not it's comparing apples to oranges.
by dblohm7 | 2025-05-13 14:49:33+00:00
Former Mozilla employee here.

I've been gone for a few years now and have no insight into this decision, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. Having said that, I think that, for better or worse, GitHub is probably the best location simply because it provides the lowest barrier to entry for new contributors.

I know that's spicy enough to trigger dozens of keyboard warriors hitting the reply button, but every little thing that deviates from "the norm" (for better or for worse, GitHub is that) causes a drop-off in people willing to contribute. There are still people out there, for example, who refuse to create an account on bugzilla.mozilla.org (not that this move to GitHub changes that).
by Magmalgebra | 2025-05-13 14:50:50+00:00
> So you are saying it is better if the candidate lies.

This is a toxic framing of an essential test. Constructing polite fictions is an essential skill for collaboration - no less essential than coding. Saying you're leaving in part because "your vision for the product has drfted from leadership's" tells me you probably think they were a pack of moronic baboons and that if you feel that way about some of your future team mates you can keep it under wraps.
Why can't we test observer memory directly using the double-slit experiment?
by kylebenzle | 2025-05-13 14:51:27+00:00
If we use a double-slit experiment with a which-path detector, and have an observer try to remember (or forget) which slit each photon passed through, why can't we use the resulting pattern—interference or not—as a readout of the observer’s memory state?

If no one remembers the which-path info, we expect interference. If someone does remember, the pattern should collapse to two bands. Why hasn't this been tested as a method to probe the interaction between human memory and quantum measurement? Feels related to Wigner’s friend, but focused on the memory-retention threshold.

Is this experimentally viable?
by Ajedi32 | 2025-05-13 14:51:40+00:00
I'm guessing it was back ported to Android 4.4, so it probably hasn't been available quite that long. (Update: Nevermind, looks like it was in the initial 4.4 release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxHVeXbK1P4) But they've definitely been warning about the pending API change since at least 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnJ3amzJM94

The devs in the comments of that video do have some valid complaints about the added complexity of not being able to use the standard Java filesystem APIs anymore with the new permissions model, but still, it has been 6 years.
by rbanffy | 2025-05-13 14:52:43+00:00
> If they had "abandoned" them you'd think it would show.

A left-leaning candidate that has "abandoned" worker's causes is still a better prospect than a candidate that openly opposed to them.

I find it odd that so few people vote in the US - like I said, if all candidates are terrible, one is certainly less terrible and your job, as citizen, is to vote for the lesser evil to prevent the worse one to get power.
by dogleash | 2025-05-13 14:53:05+00:00
>I feel like this is broad enough to make most social interactions lying

They... kinda are tho. We even have a term specifically for that: "white lie."

Sometimes, like in your "how are you?" example, various patterns of white lie ossify into social protocol where both participants are saying things they don't literally mean, but both participants know the game.

You've probably heard of cases where anglosphere people go traveling, ask people how they are (or use any of our other non-literal pleasantries), and are surprised when a real answer is given.
by jppittma | 2025-05-13 14:53:15+00:00
I think your perspective on this matters a lot less than that of the researchers. Their perception is that what’s happening at Harvard and NSF is fascism.

The perception is that we have a gestapo in ICE arresting mayors and judges, an admin talking about suspending habeas corpus, going after scientists who come to conclusions they don’t like, and just gutting funding for research in general.

You can say, “oh this is hyperbole” and “these people are wrong to leave,” but all that really gonna matter is that they were terrified and left.
by lolinder | 2025-05-13 14:53:27+00:00
I have never had a work environment ruined by toxic positivity—the normal healthy human reaction to that kind of environment is gallows humor, which hits the sweet spot between acknowledging the problem and showing a willingness to be there with your team.

I'm sure there are people out there who do have a toxic positivity problem, but my own anecdotal experience leads me to prefer to err on the side of rejecting unnecessarily grumpy people, because they tend to more frequently be a problem.
by breakpointalpha | 2025-05-13 14:53:46+00:00
Poker, specifically Texas No Limit Hold'em, is widely taught on Youtube.

Here are some of the very best in the category, it would be really cool if you partnered with any of these.

https://www.youtube.com/@hungryhorsepoker

https://www.youtube.com/@CarrotCornerPoker

https://www.youtube.com/@PokerCoaching
by miros_love | 2025-05-13 14:53:47+00:00
My wife cold-called about 60% of all businesses in our niche within our city. Meanwhile, I literally walked into CEOs' offices, asked politely for meetings, and pitched face-to-face. Conversion was around 1%, but that gave us our first collision with reality—and our first paying customers. Also half of my clients came from Google search ads. But it was absolutely terrible - 9 out of 10 requests were people trying to talk to chatGPT
by clcaev | 2025-05-13 14:53:50+00:00
I'm not sure this is always the best approach. You should not vent, clearly; and it takes two to tango. However, some concrete and professional differences in opinion do matter. This could be an opportunity to express how you deal with such a challenge. You might explain (without revealing proprietary information) a difference of how the company's (new?) direction diverged from your professional path, how you informed the organization with an open mind, evaluated options and collaboratively decided it was time to move on, with sufficient notice and transition assistance.
by yencabulator | 2025-05-13 14:53:58+00:00
So if I've understood correctly:

Google's S2 is all about performance and prefix-matching.

Uber's H3 makes the math a bit more complex to prioritize less variation in centerpoint-to-centerpoint distances (because they care most about driving times).

This makes the math even more complex to prioritize less variation in area covered by far away tiles (most applicable to e.g. analyzing density of something).
by mdhb | 2025-05-13 14:54:08+00:00
I suspect there is going to be an amalgamation between ChromeOS, Android and Fuchsia.

There is heavy work underway in fuchsia currently to provide Linux kernel comparability via a subsystem they call starnix.

They are already I believe looking at running a version of fuchsia in a vm on Android.

Then there was also a lot of talk about the androidification of ChromeOS.

It sure looks like we are moving towards some kind of cross device OS that is distinctly Google’s without Linux in the future.
by voxl | 2025-05-13 14:54:25+00:00
This heavily trips the crackpot index: 1. Zero understanding about the philosophy of mathematics 2. Asking the public and AI models for peer review instead of the scientific community via publication at a physics conference 3. Association with blockchain NTFs a known "technology" whose only application is grifting 4. The very first comment is yet another appeal to an LLM to attempt to understand the gibberish

The world is doomed, I've not hated people more than I do now. If you use LLMs for anything above a stochastic autocomplete I don't consider you a professional or competent in anyway.
by howmayiannoyyou | 2025-05-13 14:54:47+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg

Sabine highlights the problem with scientific funding in this video and it should be required watching before posting on this thread. Reform is needed. Some good will be tossed with a lot of bad. Its a cycle, a pendulum, and it will eventually tip to excess again sometime in the future. For now... fixing what is broken ought to be the priority.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-05-13 14:56:26+00:00
Parent comment says "the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists" , which is not the same as "Nazi scientists".

Did you see the "Oppenheimer" movie? Check the real physicists depicted working on the Manhattan project. A large number of them were European Jews who left before or during the war. Einstein, Teller, Szilard, Hornig.

Even some others left Europe because of this: Niels Bohr (Jewish Mother) and Enrico Fermi (Jewish Wife).

To be sure there was Wernher von Braun and co as well.

In fact, it would be quicker to list the Manhattan project physicists depicted in that movie who were not Jewish at all:

* Ernest Lawrence

* Luis Walter Alvarez
Show HN: Pg_doctestify Turn Postgres regression tests into Markdown
by michelpp | 2025-05-13 14:56:26+00:00
This is a simple tool I use to turn my Postgres regression tests into Markdown for publishing with mkdocs similar in spirit to Python doctests. I decided to package it up into a tool for others to use in their projects. The repo contains a complete example of using the tool to generate its own docs.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-13 14:56:29+00:00
"This comes after the Feds decided not to renew their long-standing contract with nonprofit research hub MITRE to operate the CVE database." [1]

Doesn't seem like an untrue assumption. Feds decided not to renew the contract, people got upset, and later the feds decided to renew the contract the night it would expire [1].

This is like saying Y2K is a nothingburger because people updated the code to handle more than 2 digit years. It's because of the people getting upset that triggered a preventative measure preventing the problem. It's just the superman movie [2], if the kid just listened to clark kent then superman would've never been necessary.

[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/16/cve_program_funding_s...

[2]: https://youtu.be/-ikd_hRnVR4?t=69
Ask HN: Tranformer Models in Fintech?
by davidajackson | 2025-05-13 14:56:37+00:00
Any more details on uses here? I read a post from Stripe on this. Any other companies or any of you using these successfully?

FYI... has anyone here considered how to represent background information (background context) at the beginning of a transformer sequence? Specialized tokens that refer to user attributes (a token preamble, if you will...).
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-13 14:58:13+00:00
> respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself.

I have very bad news for you re: the last ~70 years of research on voter behavior in democracies.

The story of the field is, if I may paint it a bit poetically, researchers hiding under their desks and rocking back and forth going "it can't be that bad... it can't really work like that..." until they gin up the courage to look again, find it's even worse than they thought, and repeat the cycle.
by Onawa | 2025-05-13 14:58:17+00:00
As a federal contractor within NIH, I can tell you that the damage has already been done to the United States' dominance in science. Even if every action taken by current administration is reversed, the uncertainty for foreign scientists is too much. Many that I have spoken to are looking for their exit from either gov or academic research, or looking to leave the United States completely.

The Trump admins cuts are not likely to be reversed until at minimum 2029 if Democrats are able to take the White House. But the entire scientific pipeline has been disrupted. Science has always had "passion profession" tax, but at this point I would strongly recommend anyone pursuing life sciences or government research to either consider another field, or realize that you will most likely end up in industry.

Things are quite bleak right now...
by bestwillcui | 2025-05-13 14:58:22+00:00
Thanks! Definitely some potential, we actually built a language learning tool for a few days early on (but decided that it was too crowded of a space to start in).

Learning languages seems a bit different in that there's more focus on repetition compared to comprehension questions, but there are certain topics (like grammar concepts) that could work well in our current structure. Also there are some really popular YouTube channels for learning any language, so we definitely see a potential to augment those videos to more accurately & effectively learn.
by enragedcacti | 2025-05-13 14:58:48+00:00
Taking better advantage of a display is nice but imo the really exciting part of desktop mode is the planned integration with Google's Linux Terminal app (i.e. 1st party linux VM support). I have a Samsung DeX device and while you can get a basic dev environment working easily it can be really cumbersome to make it comfortable to use and integrate with your normal tablet workflow. Being able to install full-fat linux apps and run them in a window would be a complete game changer.

source for planned integration: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/392521081?utm_source=...
by ctkhn | 2025-05-13 14:58:59+00:00
There is an amount of this that needs to happen when you onboard to a team, but as new hires become more aware of the stack and where things are documented it should happen only for genuinely complicated things and the occasional brain fart. I have a junior who frequently asks me where things live in the code when you could ctrl-f to find the answer and it's pretty annoying.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-13 14:59:10+00:00
> If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing.

This is 1) untrue, and 2) exactly the kind of cynical "humans-are-untrustworthy" thinking that is one of the reasons why Bell Labs don't exist today.

> After all, why wouldn't they? If they're putting in the innovation the equity is worth way more than a paycheck.

Because not everyone is driven by a need to make tons of money or the promise of a golden pot at the end of the rainbow. If they're well compensated and have enough to live comfortably (and/or care for their family) while being able to use their talents and innovate within their field, that itself is sufficient. This perverted VC-fueled mantra of "I must continually maximize the amount of money I make from my efforts at the expense of all else" is also part of the reason we don't have Bell Labs today.

> it's been nearly impossible to hire anyone who wants that freedom and autonomy (if you disagree ...)

I'm one of those people, but given the thinking that you articulate in your post, I'm not surprised you're unable to hire such people.
by haswell | 2025-05-13 14:59:34+00:00
Do creators have the option to opt out?

I’m still coming up to speed on the full scope of what your product does, but I’m curious what you’d say to someone like pal2tec, who has some fairly strong and what I feel to be reasonable views about the impact of content summarization [0].

Getting direct buy-in and sharing revenue is great. But it’s not clear to me that this is the only thing that creators care about, i.e. are you still summarizing content you’re not monetizing without creator buy-in?

- [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ULUSS1-G3do
by openquery | 2025-05-13 14:59:37+00:00
Close to the end of the paper they casually drop that they solved all the millennium problems including the Riemann Hypothesis and have Lean proofs for all of them.

I don't know enough physics or mathematics to be able to tell whether any of this holds or if it's o3 generated engagement bait.

On further inspection the author seems to have a bored ape as their X profile pic so I'm going with engagement bait. Pretty high quality bait though.
by mamcx | 2025-05-13 14:59:41+00:00
> the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software

In fact, the realization is that the market buy support.

And that includes google and other companies that lack much of human support.

This is the key.

Support is manifested in many ways:

* There is information about it (docs, videos, blogs, ...)

* There is people that help me ('look ma, this is how you use google')

* There is support for the thing I use ('OS, Browser, Formats, ...')

* And for my way of working ('Excel let me do any app there...')

* And finally, actual people (that is the #1 thing that keep alive even the worst ERP on earth). This also includes marketing, sales people, etc. This are signal of having support even if is not exactly the best. If I go to enterprise and only have engineers that will be a bad signal, because well, developers then to be terrible at other stuff and the other stuff is support that matters.

If you have a good product, but there is not support, is dead.

And if you wanna fight a worse product, is smart to reduce the need to support for ('bugs, performance issues, platforms, ...') for YOUR TEAM because you wanna reduce YOUR COSTS but you NEED to add support in other dimensions!

The easiest for a small team, is just add humans (that is the MOST scarce source of support). After that, it need to be creative.

(also, this means you need to communicate your advantages well, because there is people that value some kind of support more than others 'have the code vs propietary' is a good example. A lot prefer the proprietary with support more than the code, I mean)
by alphazard | 2025-05-13 14:59:57+00:00
In software, often the people are the source of stress. Building the software is easy to many in this industry, and the vast majority of the value produced came from someone who thought creating it was easy. Being surrounded by rock stars all doing something they find easy is sublime, and I encourage everyone to seek out those environments. They exist and are fleeting.

The stress comes from people who are bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem. They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them. In their imagination, there is not a clear set of steps that can be burned down over the coming days and weeks to arrive at something of value. In their minds it is all chaos and uncertainty and they are desperate for the assurance of someone who knows what's going on.

The relationships that one develops with each category of person are fundamentally opposite. One is about enticing repeated interactions: You really get it, how do we work together in the future? And the other is about keeping a polite distance to prevent repeated interactions. How do I avoid meetings, projects, shared responsibilities, and future employment opportunities that involve this person?
by JdeBP | 2025-05-13 15:00:09+00:00
It's not separate functionality. The back end (so-called "master" side) of a pseudo-terminal is almost (bar initialization of line speed, hardware flow control, and framing settings) indistinguishable from a "null-modem" call-out serial port or parallel port terminal device. Write a software terminal emulation program for the former, which of course is what screen has, and you already have one for the latter.