MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thedanbob | 2025-05-28 11:17:53+00:00
> Why is this so frowned upon?

Maybe because while ad tech these days is no less shady than crypto mining, the concept of ads is something people understand. Most people don't really understand crypto so it gets lumped in with "hackers" and "viruses".

Alternatively, for those who do understand ad tech and crypto, crypto mining still subjectively feels (to me at least) more like you're being stolen from than ads. Same with Anubis, wasting power on PoW "feels" more acceptable to me than mining crypto. One of those quirks of the human psyche I guess.
by mattmanser | 2025-05-28 11:18:11+00:00
The question here is why are you using micro service pattern and k8s with 2 Devs. That pattern is not designed for that small scale operation and adds tons of completely unnecessary complexity.

And does it really matter what you go with when you've got 1.5 engineers?

It's a non-problem at that scale as both engineers are intimately aware of how the entire build process works and can keep it in their head.

At that scale I've done no repo at all, repo stored on Dropbox, repo in VCS, SVN, whatever, and it all still worked fine.

It really hasn't added anything at all to your success.

BTW, it's still common for developers to start entire repos on their own laptops with zero hassles in tons of dev shops that haven't been silly and used k8s with 2 developers.

In fact at the start of my career I worked with 10 or so developers the shitty old MS one where you had to lock files so no-one else can use them. You'd checkout files to allow you to change them (very different to git checkout), otherwise they'd be ready only on your drive.

And the build was a massive VB script we had to run manually with params.

And it still worked.

We got some moaning when we moved to SVN too at how much better the old system was. Which was ridiculous as you used to have to run around and ask people to unlock key files to finish a ticket, which was made worse as we had developer consultants who'd be out of office for days on end.

So then you'd have to go hassle the greybeard who had admin rights to unlock the file for you (although he wasn't actually that old and didn't have a beard).
by stormblooperz | 2025-05-28 11:18:22+00:00
So you have paid attention and read countless examples of people's experiences with Stack Overflow, but have concluded that, in fact, they are all in the wrong?

Frankly, it just doesn't matter at this point. The time to have done something about it was several years ago, it's a lost cause at this point. Whether you reflect and recognise your part in that, and learn and grow from it, is up to you.
by bwb | 2025-05-28 11:18:30+00:00
Eh? Do you mean my website?

Those are all over the website:

Math as a discovery point -> https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/693

Math as a bookshelf -> https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/math?order=most_recommended

Tons of great interviews with authors around math as well:

30 year professor of mathematics -> https://shepherd.com/best-books/books-that-make-maths-intere...

Another that goes deep into mathematical concepts -> https://shepherd.com/best-books/for-mathematical-inspiration

Another examples of math and science and where they mesh -> https://shepherd.com/best-books/narrative-merit-in-mathemati...

And same goes for programming and philosophy, here are those discovery points: https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/876 https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/2568

Plus specific concepts like: - machine learning - https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/2055 - AI (mix nonfiction / fiction) - https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/77 - Agile - https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/5117 - Plato - https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/1087

Hope that helps, where did you go that it was confusing? Let me know and I'll fix it :)
by rf15 | 2025-05-28 11:19:33+00:00
> YYYY-MM-DD as dictated by our excellent government

Same here in germany! ...Which is the reason why everyone ignores it in favour of the traditional format.

I love democracy, and also mountain-shaped temporal unit ordering ^ It's 28.05.2025 13:15.

Text-ordering by date is a nightmare because everything is first grouped by day-of-month, then month, then year! :)
by guidedlight | 2025-05-28 11:19:37+00:00
I have always wondered why Windows never had a unified installation, update, and uninstall framework like MacOS had from the start. It seems like an obvious omission that was never solved.

Even now corporate customers need to individually package software themselves to manage applications in their fleet.

My guess is that Microsoft encouraged applications to share DLLs from the start, and to provide backwards compatibility Microsoft never enforced MSI or a mature software management framework.
by zonkerdonker | 2025-05-28 11:20:49+00:00
>Living this way, he acknowledged, incurred a “20 percent cognitive” overhead.

Great article. I wish I had the time, money, and dedication to be able to try some of the techniques, even if only for the principle of it. But like the author says, it really is a Sisyphean effort. There is too much convenience, too much money, too much power in your data.
by arendtio | 2025-05-28 11:21:54+00:00
I think the whole footgun discussion misses the point. Yes, you can shoot yourself in the foot (and probably will), but not evaluating the possibilities is also a risk. Regular people tend to underestimate the footgun potential (probably driven by fear of missing out) and technical people tend to underestimate the risk of not learning the new possibilities.

Even a year ago I let LLMs execute local commands on my laptop. I think it is somewhat risky, but nothing harmful happened. You also have to consider what you are prompting. So when I prompt 'find out where I am and what weather it is going to be', it is possible that it will execute rm -rf / but very unlikely.

However, speaking of letting an LLMs trade stocks without understanding how the LLM will come to a decision... too risky for my taste ;-)
by oleganza | 2025-05-28 11:22:09+00:00
The tradeoff is not that simple (I wish it was :-).

Usually it goes like that: someone made something useful optimised for a specific use-case with certain time (or competence) constraints, within a total lack of decent alternatives. Then people adopt and use it, it becomes the standard. Then people want to do more things with it, and try to build around that thing, or on top of that thing and Frankenstein monsters get born and also become standard.

If you start from scratch you can do a crypto protocol that is both better designed (causes less UX pain and critical bugs) AND performs better on relevant hardware. Also do not forget that performance is easily solved by hardware: Moore's law and then custom hardware extensions are a thing.

Example: Keccak is so much better from the composition perspective, that when used ubiquitously you'd definitely have ubiquitous hardware support. But if everyone continues to use a mishmash of AES and SHA constructions on the pretext of "Keccak" is not as fast, then we'd never move forward. People would continue building over-complicated protocols, bearing subpar performance and keeping the reputation of dark wizardry inaccessible for mere mortals.
by noirscape | 2025-05-28 11:22:14+00:00
It's pretty easy to explain; Apple devices turned the double dash (--) into an em dash by default. (Not sure if they still do.)

You probably won't encounter it in professional(-ish) writing very often (since that's premeditated and usually written on a computer, and most computer users are still on Windows), but in more informal situations (microblogs, text chat) most people don't really care as much to correct the behavior and nobody turns it off, meaning that the frequency of em dashes is unintentionally way higher than it probably should be.
by randomtoast | 2025-05-28 11:22:16+00:00
One solution to the black hole singularity problem is Fuzzballs, a string-theoretic proposal suggesting that what we thought was a singularity is actually a tangled mess of strings and branes, replacing the notion of a smooth event horizon with a quantum "fuzz" that preserves information. If true, this would resolve the information paradox without requiring firewalls or breaking semi-classical gravity near the horizon. Still controversial, but it’s one of the few proposals with a concrete realization in a quantum gravity framework.
by ben_w | 2025-05-28 11:22:35+00:00
https://archive.ph/8EpOF

Honestly, I don't see the urgency here. Yes, quantum algorithms give speed-ups in specific problems, but very few people are doing those kinds of problem: Most businesses that need an efficiency boost are people who accidentally did O(n^2) instead of O(n) (I've seen this IRL), or who should index their database so search is O(log(n)) instead of O(n); very few are doing e.g. a travelling salesman with big-n and need to care about the approximate classical algorithm being only a few percent from optimal.
by thisisit | 2025-05-28 11:24:50+00:00
Strip mined for what exactly?

There are two parts to this. People are feeling frustrated and left behind. Its not only the US. Its nearly everywhere. COVID certainly didn't help. That is what is giving rise to right and far right parties getting elected all over the world. This is not as hard to understand.

But many people learning about US politics seem to confuse right wing incendiary rhetoric with what people want. People want solutions to the income divide. The easy solution presented by right wingers is that money, jobs etc is a limited resource and "outsiders are strip mining". Two entirely different things. What people need and how it is being achieved.

The reality is rich people have always disdained the poor - "they don't work hard enough and don't deserve help". While people at least had that empathy for fellow underprivileged. But under constant bombardment about being "strip mined" they have slowly let that go. COVID certainly didn't help. And even then that is not unique to US. Nearly every country populace has something against immigrants. US is not unique in that aspect too.

If America was passing a law to provide livable wages to its workers everyone would champion the cause. But I am sure many loud RWs will oppose that as "welfare society" and "not what people want" etc.

But to many outsiders who grew up in the era of American exceptionalism this is a unique situation. The last place anyone expected this to happen is America and everyone will lament that.
by amlib | 2025-05-28 11:24:56+00:00
In terms of geometry density (detail) they have definitely improved by many orders of magnitude but in terms of layout I think most games have actually gone backwards with vastly simple levels to navigate. That (exagerated) meme about level design in 2010 is still fairly relevant [1].

[1] https://imgur.com/a/LfZouTK
by jmclnx | 2025-05-28 11:27:24+00:00
>I often wonder why Microsoft doesn’t go full-apple on its hardware and software.

I think they are tried with secure boot, but pushback from Linux people and maybe fear of anti-trust stopped them (for now).

And maybe if they do this, hardware vendors may fear a market split where they loose Linux people to other vendors. Not that many people but it still is revenue loss. I know I will never ever bye a microsoft only device. Bad enough Smart phones are locked down, at least I can ignore the phone.
by chongli | 2025-05-28 11:27:51+00:00
Mac OS hasn't had that from the start. Sure, many apps are installed simply by drag-and-drop to the Applications folder. However, plenty of apps have installers you need to run which usually request administrator credentials to install support files system-wide. Some of these apps have their own updaters which are set to run at startup. In the past, many apps had extensions and control panels they installed into the System Folder which required a reboot.

Finally, many of these same apps had no uninstaller. You had to hunt throughout the system to remove all the stuff they installed, including preference files and cache files just in case you wanted to reinstall without having problems down the road.
by olalonde | 2025-05-28 11:29:14+00:00
I'm fairly confident it's true. I just asked ChatGPT to generate a 1000 words comment for HN[0] and it used 15 em dashes. Now scroll through HN comments and count how many em dashes you encounter[1]. You can go multiple pages without encountering a single one.

[0] https://chatgpt.com/share/6836f23d-9b58-800b-8cea-0a86a58076...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments?next=44113996
by djoldman | 2025-05-28 11:29:28+00:00
> These new trucks won’t need sleep, they won’t speed, and they won’t get road rage. They won’t ride the brakes or make unnecessary lane changes, wasting fuel. And they won’t need to abide by the 11-hour daily driving maximum imposed on long-haul truckers for safety reasons.

Exactly.

Even if a robot vehicle could "just" match the performance of a human, we would still vastly prefer them because we want people to do higher complexity tasks than operate motor vehicles.
by Apocryphon | 2025-05-28 11:29:30+00:00
Quibbling about this specific subculture / fashion trend aside, the original post with its pearl-clutching highfalutin language is funny for its naïveté.

Every so-called safe, educated, and cooperative society has a love for the renegade. Pirates and the Wild West. Outlaw bikers and gangsta rap. The Godfather frequently ranks as the best (American) film ever directed. In fact, the United States’ central mythos is built on venerating rules-breaking bad boys who bucked the system. You want to talk other cultures? Cossacks, ronin, bandits of the Water Margin, highwaymen, bushrangers.

Yes, there’s a whole spectrum of cultures and archetypes here, but to decry “this symbology”? Good luck, you’ll have to remove whatever deep-seated part of human psychology that is fascinated by the conventions-breaking wild and free.
by xmodem | 2025-05-28 11:30:25+00:00
YC has definitely backed some shady shit in the past, but I suspect these guys might just be straight-up fraudsters.

They claim to be backed by several major investors, but I can't find them in YC's startup directory [1] or Antler's portfolio page [2]. Their website also doesn't have any of the details you would typically expect from a legitimate business, such as an about us page, a description of their corporate history, or an office or mailing address.

1: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies 2: https://www.antler.co/portfolio
Show HN: DappInsight – Ranking DApps by Audits, TVL, and GitHub Activity
by dappinsight | 2025-05-28 11:30:44+00:00
I built [DappInsight] to help cut through the noise in Web3. Most dApp explorers prioritize hype or pay-to-rank listings. DappInsight does the opposite — ranking dApps by:

Audit status

TVL (and 7-day changes)

Multi-chain support

GitHub activity

Community trust scores

The idea is to surface real, reliable projects instead of meme coins with 3 wallets holding 90% of supply.

You can try it at: dappinsight dot xyz (replace dot with .)
by motohagiography | 2025-05-28 11:31:00+00:00
jeffery pfeffer talks about the triad of performance, credentials, and relationships in one of his books[1] and it extends the metaphor, where a lot of independent consultants are super high performers, but may lack an advanced credential that opens the door for most management roles, or don't have the relationships in their business to close deals so they become subcontractors to people with those relationship management skills.

every industry, company, or field weights these differently. most institutions rank actual individual performance very low relative to credentials and relationships, where something like sales would be all performance and relationships and they don't care what your other bona fides are. if you didn't go to an ivy school, a master's is usually needed to get hired as an exec, but not to be a trouble shooter, etc..

know what your career path values and adapt and invest in the triad accordingly. people who gripe about certifications and book-larnin' are usually indexed on the performance and relationship fields where they can leverage their outlier skills there, whereas being still pretty average with a higher credential score creates opportunity and career momentum. may the odds ever be in your favour.

[1] Pfeffer's "Power" https://www.amazon.com/Power-Some-People-Have-Others/dp/0061...
by KaiserPro | 2025-05-28 11:31:02+00:00
One of the things not covered here is how to deal with versioning.

By default a monorepo will give you $current and nothing else.

A monorepo is not a bad idea, but you should think about either preventing breaking changes in some dependency killing the build globally, or have some sort of artefact store that allows versioned libraries (both have problems, you'll need to work out which is better for you. )
by immibis | 2025-05-28 11:31:11+00:00
Realistically, the bot owner could notice you're running MoneroAnubis and then would specifically check for MoneroAnubis, for example with a file hash, or a comment saying /* MoneroAnubis 1.0 copyright blah blah GPL license blah */. The bot wouldn't be expected to somehow determine this by itself automatically.

Also, the ideal Monero miner is a power-efficient CPU (so probably in-order). There are no Monero ASICs by design.
by trollbridge | 2025-05-28 11:31:14+00:00
There also won't be a truck driver to under pay or not pay at all to load and unload the truck nor be a sham owner-operator who is being leased the truck by the trucking company and can barely eke out a living.

Same challenge Uber at al face with autonomous vehicles - when you can underpay a driver 50 cents a mile to drive their own car, it doesn't make much sense to have an autonomous vehicle that costs you closer to 70 cents a mile to operate.
by MathMonkeyMan | 2025-05-28 11:31:36+00:00
Looks like it. There's [ar][1] and that's all I can find about it. [pax][2] is linked at the bottom, but is not required to understand the ar format.

[1]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xcu/ar.html

[2]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xcu/pax.html
by names_are_hard | 2025-05-28 11:32:08+00:00
What if you're storing a calendar date, such as a birthday? A timestamp is inappropriate, and it's meaningless to discuss timezones in this context.

(Example - you want to know if a person is old enough to buy cigarettes, and you need to store a birthday that you can compare against the current day to see if they're legally 18 - if you store an epoch at UTC, do you store the time of day they were born? That's not the way the law works. Do you store midnight UTC? If they're currently in NY, can they but cigarettes at 7pm the day before their birthday because they're currently 18 in London?)

Sometimes you need a logical calendar date, not a point in time in the history of the universe.
by mihaaly | 2025-05-28 11:32:58+00:00
The Çulture of Unfinished Software gets more and more mainstream, with OS level infrastructure and inflated buzzwords' department.

Meanwhile, any chance finishing OneDrive file renaming to work without issues finally? Is there an 'update' pending about that? Just a random thing I come accross daily, among the dozens others slowing my work and distracts me on proudly presented OS level.

... or perhaps when I say 'Update and shut down', then actually shutting down in the end instead of restarting and spinning the fans the whole night (me believing the poor thing was shut down as prom... suggested)?
by creatonez | 2025-05-28 11:33:52+00:00
I love this... but I've grown disappointed by these technically impressive demos, now that older Minecraft running in WASM is no longer novel ever since Eaglercraft came out. As per the readme:

> The latest version of Minecraft. Newer releases of Minecraft use a newer version of Java and OpenGL which we currently do not support. [...] This demo demonstrate these capabilities by running an older version (1.2.5) of Minecraft and LWJGL entirely in the browser.

Sadly, no one seems to be able to get past Minecraft 1.5, which was released in 2013 :(

Edit: Hmm... not sure when this happened, but Eaglercraft supports 1.12 (2017) now. Neat! Might be hard to go further than that, since modern Minecraft uses Java 21 / OpenGL 3.2, and LWJGL itself has evolved significantly in its platform APIs.
by dmurray | 2025-05-28 11:34:06+00:00
I never understood why the joke is on the drunk guy in this metaphor.

If you dropped your keys and they're either under the lamppost or fallen down the drain, you should start by looking under the lamppost even if you think it's more likely they're in the drain.

If you're debugging something and the problem is either in the nice easy documented, logged, instrumented system or in a more intractable one, you should look in the easy one first. If you're right, you'll solve it quicker, if you're wrong, less time wasted.
by dgb23 | 2025-05-28 11:35:06+00:00
My worldview is materialist and deterministic in principle. But day to day I'm an existentialist with a touch of spiritualism.

To me, a fairly pragmatic way of characterizing these tools day to day is to anthropomorphize them. One benefit of this heuristic: they simulate conversation and it's much easier to use them with a conversational flow. Another one is to create an approximation of a character, which makes it easier to build a useful intuition for what they can and cannot do.

Obviously these kinds of heuristics do break down. But it's obvious enough when they do so one can switch into a more precise and analytical mode of thinking.
by diggan | 2025-05-28 11:35:30+00:00
> I often wonder why Microsoft doesn’t go full-apple on its hardware and software.

To be honest, I kind of understand they don't want to do that. I bought a Surface Pro 8 some years ago and is probably the worst computing hardware I've experienced in a long time. Even basic things like thermal management is horribly broken when using Windows on it. Running Linux on it gave a slightly better experience, but seems so backwards that they cannot even make their own hardware work well, I thought the combination of hardware+OS by same company would lead to a better experience but nope.
by eadmund | 2025-05-28 11:35:53+00:00
> a small team of ~1.5 full-time engineers

Yes, with one and a half FTEs you should only have a single repo.

My experience with Bazel has been extremely bad, but I don’t think that it should necessarily be avoided completely. It may actually have some value on extremely large multi-team projects. But for less than two FTEs it seems like massive overkill.

I believe that you could do what you need with Kind (and maybe Tilt?), without Bazel.

> We have made this tool layer which means if I run `go` or `kubectl` while in our repo, it's built and provided by Bazel itself. This means that all of us are always on the same version of tools, and we never have to maintain local installations.

Go kind of does that for you already, with go.mod. Since kubectl is a Go program, you could achieve that goal the same way.

> it has been crucial to have an ex Google SRE on the team

I wonder how many additional team members y’all could afford in return for an ex-Googler’s salary expectations.

I sincerely hope that y’all find the maintenance expense of Bazel to be worth it going forward. Hopefully you will!
by dcminter | 2025-05-28 11:36:07+00:00
Huh, I never knew there was a Wang Unix before. Presumably this was on the VS8000 systems? I found this brochure mentioning it:

https://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/wang/vs8000.pdf

"Wang also offers a UNIX System V.2-compatible operating system, IN/ix for the VS8000 series" and a footnote mentions that it's due in 1990

My Dad did some work with Wang 2200 systems, but by 1990 it had become clear that the IBM PC compatible was inevitable and he'd switched to Niakwa Basic instead of Wang systems for his customers (mostly running a bespoke small business payroll system).