MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Syzygies | 2025-05-22 15:09:56+00:00
"Do NOT use any tools till we’ve discussed it through."

I've picked up a lot of speed by relaxing on so many AI guidelines, recognizing they're unenforceable. My comment preferences? Just have AI them out when we're done. My variable naming preferences? I get to pick better short names than AI, once the code works.

"Discuss before act" is nonnegotiable. I get better compliance by not burying this (say, in CLAUDE.md) in a sea of minor wishes we could work out as we go.

This needs to be a single character.
by cratermoon | 2025-05-22 15:10:24+00:00
In the late 1980s/early 1990s my dad prodded me into becoming a programmer rather than what I was really interested in doing after college, becoming a photographer. His view was that it was more of "real" job: stable, pays well, lots of room for growth. I had some programming experience as a hobbyist and took a few CS classes in college as electives, so it wasn't completely out of the question.

Here I am in 2025, having had many jobs, many layoffs, some lean years, and facing age discrimination.

I ask myself, would I have done worse had I followed my real interest?

Cue LLMs eating up all the creative output and upending the market for original, real photography.
by nebula8804 | 2025-05-22 15:10:47+00:00
Well these guys are doing some earlier Apple parts:https://maceffects.com/collections/all

Talked to these guys at VCF East this year. They are total rockstars but man its expensive to do this stuff. We are talking well into 6 figures for just the molds and testing. Probably not even started production at that point. And doing it outside of China? Good luck.
by lubujackson | 2025-05-22 15:10:56+00:00
One underrated world-building element of Dune is the lack of computers and how things were developed to handle it. I don't remember if its addressed directly in the text, but the whole concept of mentats (they guys whose eyes roll back in their heads when they do math) was to compensate for this. Kind of a "post-Terminator world".
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-05-22 15:11:11+00:00
> During the [dot com] boom, many people that couldn’t write a for loop got degrees and somehow got entry level jobs.

This wasn't universally true. In the SE US, late 1990s, I got 2 responses over a year of submitting applications for entry level coding jobs. One response was for a position hundreds of mi away.

Overlapping this time, I was serving as an employment counselor. I learned that this region was super insular and you need some kind of inside referral to get hired - in pretty much every industry. Local tech wasn't immune to that mindset.

It took me a few years to make connections and start working and even then it self-employed, on-site support. Thirty years later I'm still doing that.

On the other side, once I broke into an industry I could go all over. I got a referral into an ARC and within a few months I was serving all of them. They were all years needing someone but went without rather than hire cold.
by nick007 | 2025-05-22 15:11:54+00:00
Very thoughtful analysis. I particularly like the insight around the industry metrics and Goodhart's Law. “DAU” and the like align with social media companies’ interests of increasing attention and time on site, which lead to more ad revenue. But, they are at odds with their users’ interests, or at least don’t consider user costs (ie time). I wonder if a social product could thrive based on the principle of “efficient” usage, a la the platform works on my behalf to keep me efficiently informed on what’s going on in my network and considers the cost tradeoffs of my time and attention. I suspect I could feel very “up to date” on the things I care about most by checking into a social product ~weekly with a thoughtfully curated digest of content.
by jmull | 2025-05-22 15:11:56+00:00
You could use jsdoc, or 'tsc' your .ts files on the way to loading them into the db.

Typescript has a fairly limited utility here though. It's a static type checker. Your types are mostly going to be SQL parameters and the result of running SQL, which, by design/nature are resolved at runtime. You could build a bunch of external controls to help ensure the runtime data is contained to your static types, but you're really swimming upstream. Like you can use a screwdriver as a hammer, but there are better approaches. (I think typescript would be much better used client-side, in your app server code that is above the data layer.)
by AustinDev | 2025-05-22 15:12:44+00:00
>Exactly, and as a consequence of the automatic load shedding, the fission reactors shut down for safety reasons, and had to be cooled using their Diesel generators, which wasn't nice to watch

The shutdown is due to an abundance of caution and is regulatory (in the US). When the grid falls below a certain threshold of stability the reactors are programmatically shutdown. (At least that's how it worked 20 years ago.) They have significant inertia but that only goes so far, as you mentioned until we see the final report we won't know for sure if the shutdown was manual or programmatic.

Depending on how long the Reactors were shutdown down Xeon poisoning could have also been why they took longer to start back up. Xeon poisoning is one of the attributes of our current fission technology that makes Nuclear less able to cope with instability compared to combustion generation.

>I am quite eager to learn about what really went wrong. We enjoy really cheap consumer prices for electricity (we use it to heat and cool, like in the US)

Air conditioning is a great application of Solar especially in the sunbelt. It just makes so much sense. When it is daylight and the Sun is unobstructed A/C draws a lot of power likewise Solar is at peak efficiency. I've never been to Spain but, if you all believe in A/C I may have to stop by next time I'm sailing the Med.
by r00sty | 2025-05-22 15:13:08+00:00
In a more perfect world where we were just discussing the merits of the tech, I would be more inclined to agree. But I have to impress that the entire point of the tech is to do everything.

AI receives so much funding and support from the wealthy because they believe that they can use it to replace humans and reduce labor costs. I strongly suspect that AI being available to us at all is merely a plot to get us to train and troubleshoot the tech for them so it can more perfectly imitate us. Then, eventually, when the tech is "good enough" it will rapidly become too expensive for normal people to use and thus become inaccessible.

Companies are already mass-firing their staff in favor of AI agents even though those agents don't even do a good job. Imagine how it will be when they do.
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-05-22 15:13:38+00:00
Dang, I thought he had built his own hardware.

I'd still love to get a proper successor to the Sandisk Sansa Fuze, just with USB-C charging instead of its proprietary charging cable.

There's plenty of "luxury" /audiophile MP3 players out there which cost in the hundreds of dollars, but that one was in the sweet spot of bang-for-your-buck music player that I could just use for listening to music on long plane rides etc. without draining my smartphone battery.
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-22 15:14:05+00:00
This is pretty accurate. I know a guy professionally worth probably $100M. His name occasionally turns up in industry rags, and even in more mainstream business news once or twice.

However no photos have ever appeared in the stories. The only photo I can find of him online is his LinkedIn photo.

Within the industry his name can open doors, but out in public no one would recognize him and he can live a normal (extraordinarily wealthy) life.
by rcxdude | 2025-05-22 15:14:07+00:00
Without permission, yeah. But many companies do publish scientific papers. In both worlds, there's usually a game of publishing enough to give people confidence that the results are good, without actually giving away enough details to actually lose any competitive advantage (this is perhaps even more so in academia). In basically every field there will be things that everyone talks about and things that no-one talks about, and the latter is often even more important (but usually more boring know-how type things).
by kukkamario | 2025-05-22 15:14:18+00:00
I think in this case Rust and C code aren't equivalent which maybe caused this slow down. Union trick also affects the alignment. C side struct is 32 bit aligned, but Rust struct only has 16bit alignment because it only contains fields with 16bit alignment. In practice the fields are likely anyway correctly aligned to 32bits, but compiler optimizations may have hard time verifying that.

Have you tried manually defining alignment of Rust struct?
by tpurves | 2025-05-22 15:14:44+00:00
Wonderfully cheeky but also helpfully informative writeup. Also appreciate the hat-tip to all the (as yet) unsolved security issues. Clearly MCP is onto something important, although undoubtedly the standard (or some replacement standard) will mature a fair bit before we're done with it. The flip side to that is, MCPs are probably as 'easier' to experiment with now than they are ever going to be.
by Bender | 2025-05-22 15:15:01+00:00
Many corporate privacy policies per their customer contracts agree with this. Even a single packet regardless of contents is sending the IP address and that is considered by many companies to be PII. Not my opinion, it's in thousands of contracts. Many companies want to know every third party involved in tracking their employees. Deviating from this is a compliance violation and can lead to an audit failure and monetary credits. These policies are strictly followed on servers and less so on workstations but I suspect with time that will change.
Show HN: Whenish – Plan Group Events in iMessages
by devgoth | 2025-05-22 15:15:27+00:00
hey everyone! i built Whenish because it was always so difficult to figure out what date worked best with a bunch of friends in a group chat.

Whenish is an iMessage app that allows individuals to select multiple dates that work for them for an event attempting to be planned for.

i have more ideas for new features but wanted to get something out there that was usable. so far ive had good reception in my friend group chats of Whenish.

download it, give it a go, let me know what you think! this is my first app i felt ~good~ about releasing.
by derf_ | 2025-05-22 15:15:38+00:00
> But still you might need to decode between 1 and N frames to get the frame you want, and you don't know how much memory it will consume...

All of these things are bounded for actual codecs. AV1 allows storing at most 8 reference frames. The sequence header will specify a maximum allowable resolution for any frame. The number of motion vectors is fixed once you know the resolution. Film grain requires only a single additional buffer. There are "levels" specified which ensure interoperability at common operating points (e.g., 4k) without even relying on the sequence header (you just reject sequences that fall outside the limits). Those are mostly intended for hardware, but there is no reason a software decoder could not take advantage of them. As long as codecs are designed to be implemented in hardware, this will be possible.
by codingdave | 2025-05-22 15:15:53+00:00
This is turning into a boring refrain. "Person who has a vested interest in AI taking over says that AI is taking over."

Using YC companies as vibe-coding examples is hardly a good example. You absolutely can vibe code a demo to get to your next funding round. That doesn't mean you can use that same code to keep customers happy with a stable product.
by fred_terzi | 2025-05-22 15:15:59+00:00
Have you looked into tradeshows? My company (large industrial equipment) still heavily does them. My company is not sold on AI, so stick to a quick demo of it's utility and stay away from 'buzz words' when talking to them. When I bring up 'Agent Mode' people roll their eyes and what we do is mostly software these days! Target the young people in those companies who are frustrated but haven't bailed yet. If it works and people can see it they'll buy in if it saves them time. Especially in the world of 'we can cut 10% of a workforce and still ship products'. Best of luck! Open invitation to reply with a link or repo!
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-22 15:16:11+00:00
The speed of light is a significant limitation at these kinds of scales.

It's not just a massive pile of wiring and magnets etc, it's a massive pile of wiring and magnets which kicks particles around a race track the size of a small town, with absolutely insane timing precision before dumping them into targets the size of buildings, all generating unimaginably huge volumes of data which have to recorded in nanoseconds.
by MegaDeKay | 2025-05-22 15:16:53+00:00
> I don't see a practical reason why dB's normal use can't have been covered by normal prefixes

Because you can easily add dB values that are on greatly different scales in your head, especially when the values aren't exactly powers of ten. If I have 86 dBW of Effective Isotropic Radiated Power and -162 dB of free space loss to some distance, the power flux density at that distance is -76 dBW/m^2.
by dj3l4l | 2025-05-22 15:16:55+00:00
The useage of dB in the case of probability is exactly as the 1 Bel -> 10x meaning, but that is the technical meaning, without further context of the unit in the logarithm. There is no need to conceptualise this further as involving power or amplitude (which does not apply in probability).

I think that the unit having been popularised in the telecommunications industry just meant that every other instance of a log_10 ratio in physics lead to a realisation that it was a Bel. For Bayesian odds, this was probably because even the development of Bayesian probability was largely advanced by physicists (E.T. Jaynes being a famous example), who also were trained, and often worked, in signal processing of some kind or another. But I doubt they would have thought about this "power-ratios-only" adherence that is more the conception of telecommunications engineers, as opposed to physicists.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-22 15:17:21+00:00
Loved Bugzilla back in the '00s. Used it just as the author described: everything was a bug. New features, enhancements, actual bugs/problems. Worked very well.

I would differ from the author on the need for tight coupling to source control. There could be any number of folks who want to see what's going on with an item but have no interest in or even understanding of the actual related code. It's easy enough to include a bug number in commit messages to tie the two together.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-22 15:17:54+00:00
This might not help you but to the very best of my knowledge localstack can operate over the network just fine and I am pretty sure it has a reset endpoint for zeroing its state (I think it's this https://github.com/localstack/localstack/blob/v4.4.0/localst... )

The other alternative is that I've seen folks mention systemd-nsspawn as a form of isolation if that's what your using docker for (but I've never tried it myself)
by staunton | 2025-05-22 15:18:13+00:00
"QKD is already used by banks and governments to transmit keys over fibre optics."

I wonder what specific uses they mean. It's kind of hard to believe those are "serious" use-cases, going beyond demonstrations done for marketing reasons... Then again, as soon as you have a serious use-case, you don't tell anyone about it, so it's really hard to evaluate how much (if at all) this stuff is really used in practice.
by Duanemclemore | 2025-05-22 15:18:17+00:00
This is rad. The game is especially cool. Congrats, OP!

This is the same math as this old program called Jenn3d[0] which I played around with almost twenty years ago. (Amazingly the site is still online!) The crazies who built it also built it to play Go in 3d projective space. I was never able to play Go with it, but I've been in to projective geometries since.

OP - if you want to try something else cool with 4d to 3d projective geometries, here's an idea I ran across working with 3d to 2d.

I make a tool for generating continuous groupings of repetitive objects in architectural computation. [1] When faced with trying to view the inside of lattices containing sets of solids which tile space continuously, I tried a few different methods (one unsuccessful but cool looking one here [2])

So when I created the sphere upon which to project the objects in the lattice, rather than just project the edges I made concentric spherical section planes and projected the intersection of those with the objects. [3] By using objects parallel to the projection plane to cut sections I was able to generate spacings between the final generated section lines that mapped how oblique the surface being cut was from the ray projecting from the centerpoint of the sphere to its surface.

Sorry OP, that's a long description. TL;DR - instead of projecting 3d mesh edges to a 4d sphere then back down to 3d space, what if you tried describing the meshes as the intersection of their 3d geometry with 4d hyperspheres parallel to the projection hypersphere? It would look more abstract, but I bet it would look cool as heck, especially navigating in 3d projective space!

[0] https://jenn3d.org/ [1] https://www.food4rhino.com/en/app/horta [2] https://vimeo.com/698774461 [3] https://vimeo.com/698774461

p.s. Also, if any actual geometers are reading this - I'd love to co-author a math paper that more rigorously considers what I explored / demonstrated with the drawings above. I have a whole set of them methodically stepping through the process, and could generate more at will. I also have a paper about it I can send on request (or if you can hunt down the Design Communication Association Conference Proceedings 2022).
by Bender | 2025-05-22 15:18:45+00:00
Firefox only updates on its own if installed outside of the package manager. This applies to Debian and its forks. If I click on Help -> About it says, "Updates disabled by your organization". I personally would like to see distributions suggest installing Betterfox [1] or Arkenfox [2] to tighten up Firefox a bit.

[1] - https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox

[2] - https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-22 15:18:48+00:00
There's many algorithms with a space vs time tradeoff. But what works best, depends a lot on the time/energy cost of re-computing something, vs the storage/bandwidth cost of caching results.

Expensive calculation, cheap storage → caching results helps.

Limited bandwidth / 'expensive' storage, simple calculation (see: today's hyper-fast CPU+L1 cache combo's) → better to re-compute some things on the fly as needed.

I suspect there's a lot of existing software (components) out there designed along the "save CPU cycles, burn storage" path, where in modern reality a "save storage, CPU cycles are cheap" would be more effective. CPU speeds have grown way way faster than main memory bandwidth (or even size?) over the last decades.

For a datacenter, supercomputer, embedded system, PC or some end-user's phone, the metrics will be different. But same principle applies.
by sillystu04 | 2025-05-22 15:19:33+00:00
There are performance benefits to using DB functions in situations where you'd otherwise have to pull lots of data out of the DB.

For example, if you wanted to find which of your sessions where created with iPV6 addresses you could select them all out and perform the logic in your application code, potentially at the cost of pulling millions of records out of your DB. But doing it in a DB function allows you to skip this as your app code never needs to do the calculations.

This kind of optimisation is generally more important when the DB is running on a separate machine to the application code because of the overhead of big network requests in getting large amounts of data out, but even on a local SQLite DB there is likely some non zero benefit to minimising the amount of data retrieved.

I suppose DB functions could of course be implemented in SQL or similar, but that can be quite unfriendly for complex logic. So in a sense there is an advantage ergonomic as well.
by latexr | 2025-05-22 15:20:29+00:00
> What would you call a leader that puts the objective ahead of everything else, including employees and themselves?

That definition is too broad to be useful. Is the “objective” to make money at all costs, and the leader is willing to suck employees and themselves dry, even over protests? Or is the objective to build a free hospital in a poor country and everyone is so committed to the cause they are willing to make personal sacrifices?

> I think that more closely aligns with people that have been very successful.

Also aligns with scammers and other grifters who are now in jail. “Successful” is also too broad a term to be useful. One person may think that “being very successful” means being rich, while to another interpersonal relationships and a happy life are what matter.
by deng | 2025-05-22 15:20:40+00:00
Yeah, isn't that a shame? Wouldn't it be nice if instead of catastrophizing that telemetry data is always only ever there to spy on us, that we might assume that there are actually trustworthy projects out there? Especially for FOSS projects, which can usually not afford extensive in-house user testing, telemetry provides extremely valuable data to see how their software is used and where it can be improved, especially in the UX department, where many FOSS is severely lacking. This thread here is a perfect example of this kind of black/white thinking that telemetry must be ripped out of software no matter what, usually based on some fundamental viewpoint that anonymity is impossible anyway, so why bother even trying. This is not helping. I usually turn on telemetry for FOSS that offers it, because I hope they will use this to actually improve it.
by SmellTheGlove | 2025-05-22 15:20:41+00:00
I’m mid 40s, had mainframe on my resume from probably 15 years in financial services (not the exciting, high paying kind either). I moved into tech in my mid 30s and am now in a fairly senior leadership role. But that person that gave me a shot in tech, at a YC company that pretty much everyone here has heard of, was in their 20s! I tell you this to encourage you to do interesting things, whatever you think those are. You wouldn’t want to work with a founder or manager who dismisses you because your keywords don’t overlap theirs. You want to work with the founder or manager who asks questions and wants to understand what you learned and how that experience helps you now.

Mainframes may not be what you’d work on at a startup today, but they’re complicated pieces of engineering, and writing software for them requires you to understand a lot about how they work. Updating or rewriting their software further requires you to understand how the people before you _thought_ they worked. That’s how I tell that story.
by formerly_proven | 2025-05-22 15:20:53+00:00
Though that's still incomplete, because (more of the context stuff that you just have to know already) the "SPL" here refers to the reference level in air (20 µPa) and not water or oil (1 µPa).

It should probably be given as: dB(A) SPL (1=20 µPa).

Though that's still incomplete, because (more of the context stuff that you just have to know already) the 20 µPa only applies at the standard temperature and pressure.

It should probably be given as: dB(A) SPL (1=20 µPa, T=293 K, P=101.3 kPa, in standard air).

Though that's still incomplete, because (more of the context stuff that you just have to know already) the (A) here is actually the A-weighting curve specified in IEC 61672:2003.

It should probably be given as: dB A-weighted (IEC 61672:2003) SPL (1=20 µPa, T=293 K, P=101.3 kPa, in standard air).

Though that's still incomplete, because (more of the context stuff that you just have to know already) ...

...

The point of communication is to transport information, not pointless pedantry (except for a small subset of the population). Nobody is confused as to what 85 dBA refers to.