MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nostrademons | 2025-05-15 14:46:34+00:00
That's what the math is reflecting. Project succeeds if all of 10 people does their job well. Each person has a 95% chance of succeeding. 0.95^10 ~= 60%, and so the chance that all 10 people do their job successfully is ~60%.

Those jobs also include things like management and product design, and so the coordination risk is reflected in the 5% chance that the manager drops the ball on communication. (As a manager, I suspect that chance is significantly more than 5% and that's why overall success rates are even lower.)
by NBJack | 2025-05-15 14:46:35+00:00
Oh wow. Do I have a story about one of their competitors.

I booked a cabin via VRBO for a few nights as a celebration. It was somewhat remote, but the architecture was neat, and it was a decent deal for my budget. There was some weird cotton-like stuff and...snapping?...in one of the walls that was a bit off-putting, but nothing seemed serious.

Then, night came.

I awoke in my bedroom to something moving. Bleary eyed, I turned on the bedside light and saw something flitting almost silently in the darkness. It seemed like a large insect perhaps to my blurred vision. But whether it was the size or the weird sounds, it eventually clicked: it was a bat trapped in the high-ceiling bedroom.

So, after swiftly getting out of the room, doing some hasty research, and calling animal control, I learned two things. First, bat encounters in the area have a standing policy to IMMEDIATELY see the nearest emergency room to receive a rabies vaccination. It turns out bat bites can be super-tiny and difficult to detect, and they are carriers.

Second, I struggled to convince the limited support channels at VRBO that there was a freaking bat in their property. There was no real emergency line for support I could locate at the time, and I really hope that the information I left would somehow be used to prevent someone else using said property from, ya know, potentially contracting rabies.

To this day, I find myself more wary of property encounters. I don't think I ever got a refund for that debacle, but admittedly I may have been a bit more focused on my mortality.
by amanchanda | 2025-05-15 14:46:38+00:00
Maybe I should give more context on what I am building. It is an AI ghostwriter for LinkedIn content (https://socialhq.me).

I was fed up with human ghostwriters and honestly I didn't have enough time myself to write for LinkedIn consistently. So, I ended up designing this. I ran it with a few founders in my network and they loved it. That's when I decided to make this into an MVP. Now we have our initial set of beta users and we are just now starting to commercialize it.

So, my current ICP are individuals who want to build their brands on LinkedIn. So, its predominantly an individual user product ATM.
by johnyeocx | 2025-05-15 14:46:42+00:00
That's true for now -- we definitely don't recommend using the encrypted customer ID as a fully secure method for auth, but implemented it more as a way for users to quick start without friction

1. This is also why we've built plugins for popular auth providers like Clerk, Better Auth and Supabase, which are called on the backend to fetch the user / org ID.

2. The encrypted customer ID is more of an experiment atm, and down the line if we continue working on it we might even build an auth system involving JWTs -- though that'd be reinventing the wheel and not something we're keen on

3. We are actually now working more on a framework agnostic pattern where users register a middleware on their backend which will spin up routes for Autumn, and the frontend provider contains a client which simply calls these routes
by ayushrodrigues | 2025-05-15 14:46:50+00:00
Yes you're right -- payments can definitely be done without webhooks, but it is typically all controlled server-side. Especially things like upgrade and downgrade flows, as they involve automatically charging a user's card.

What we were exploring is whether there's a way to do this securely from the frontend (eg on a pricing page) without needing to open up backend routes.

You're also correct that our niche is trying to control feature permissions, so that we can decouple pricing logic from an application (which makes it easier to handle pricing changes, custom plans etc). We are moving more towards a solution that just uses the JWTs to handle this instead of a customer_id.
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-05-15 14:46:52+00:00
> "I think we would have no choice but to leave Switzerland," said Yen.

Go where? See "Weakening encryption would make European security worse" – the VPN industry reacts to the EU's plan for end-to-end encryption backdoors"

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/weakening...
by joezydeco | 2025-05-15 14:46:54+00:00
I needed to whip up a small embedded hardware widget for a very large machinery project and with an Adafruit Feather + MicroPython I had the thing working in a day and respun the schematic into a working board by the end of the week. An RP2040 plus QSPI flash is a freaking dollar in the BOM, and that's priced in onesies from DigiKey.

I'm never going back my old standby (C on an NXP LPC4). This is the new normal and it's fantastic. I'm really excited to see ROMFS working on this part soon.
by palmotea | 2025-05-15 14:47:15+00:00
The link (https://www.outlookbusiness.com/corporate/good-attrition-mic...) in the passage...

> Microsoft recently announced the layoff of approximately 6,000 employees from its global workforce, describing it as an organisational change to better position the company in a dynamic marketplace.

...was all about firing "underperforming" employees. So maybe his boss thought he was "underperforming"?

I'm reminded something TSMC Founder Morris Chang said in this podcast (https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/tsmc-founder-morris-chang):

> Morris: All right, so that was one problem. Another problem was the immediate one that trigger me to retake the CEO-ship, because the previous CEO had laid off, except he didn’t use the term layoff. He used bad performance review, the worst performance review, and there were about 600 or 700 of them, and he laid them off on the basis of their poor performance review.

> Well, we never did that. The worst we would do was to put them on probation for six months. Quite often at the end of the six months, everybody would go back to his or her old job. Some of them would get transferred because they were in the wrong jobs. So some of them would get transferred, but we almost never really fired people, even after the probation period.

> ...

> I was not a CEO. I was the chairman, but I just knew that anyone, any general manager, any CEO general manager without very much experience, what he or she would do in a situation like that is a knee-jerk reaction. Oh, he says, this is my test. I got to save all the money possible, and I got to lay off people.

> ...

> Now, I was the only one at Texas Instruments in the early 70s that said, no [to a performance-based layoff plan], that would not be a credible way of doing it. People would not respect us if we lay off by performance ratings.

> David: And why is that?

> Morris: Because it’s very subjective. The performance ratings are done by everyone’s own supervisor. Seven hundred worst-performing people in the company. Who gave the 700 people the bad ratings? Seven hundred supervisors. Very subjective.

Perhaps Satya Nadella is a "CEO general manager without very much experience" or wisdom. Which is kinda borne out by how their Microsoft's layoff policy is aping their competitors, embracing layoffs, and treating performance reviews as objective.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-15 14:47:34+00:00
The first time I used Claude, it rewrote >1k LOC without asking for it, but in retrospect, I was "using it wrong". With GPT, even when I told it to not do it, it still did that, but that was some time ago and it was not done via the API, so I dunno. I think I do agree with your list, but I haven't used Gemini that much.

Yeah, they do come across as "overly eager junior devs", good comparison. :D
by archon1410 | 2025-05-15 14:47:50+00:00
The "first MP3", without the background music, and just the voice, sounds a lot better to me than the original I listened to on YouTube. I liked the MP3 more.

Any way for me to find similar stuff? Just a good voice singing stuff, without music? I know acapella, and some of it is good, but I'm thinking of something more specific. Just one person singing without music I guess, something poetic.
by xondono | 2025-05-15 14:47:52+00:00
And here we get into the absurdity of microbenchmarks like these.

Yes, you can get the JVM to crunch some numbers relatively fast, particularly if the operations are repetitive enough that you can pull JIT tricks.

Now try to run something that looks a bit more like an actual application and less like a cherry picked example, and as soon as you start moving memory around the gap jumps to orders of magnitude.
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-15 14:48:29+00:00
And a common blind spot around good software engineers is that software is the hammer for all nails.

Someone recently asked me if Mark Zuckerberg was a good engineer. I think the answer is a very, very qualified "yes." He knew enough to bash together a prototype in PHP of a social network site. But he was a very good problem-solver; he managed to find a tool space people found use in, and iterated on it until it got so good it dominated lives and became the primary communication solution for millions of people. He also knew enough about people to hire the right folks to do the hard (and tedious; the tedium should never be ignored) work to turn his prototype into product, scale it, and maintain it. And that's every bit as much problem-solving as implementing a breadth-first search to populate a "People you might also know" list.

He didn't need to have Knuth's Art of Computer Programming memorized to do what he did.

Software engineering (and the software it creates) are tools. They give us pleasure to use also. But the tools and the pleasure can become disconnected from what gives other people utility and pleasure without some heads-up checks from time to time.
by taurath | 2025-05-15 14:49:04+00:00
Give yourself some credit here, I'm a web developer who works on billing systems and I also have no idea what it is that they mean. My best guess is that they're making a marketing message that they do not have a very particularly annoying workflow of a very particular billing integration (Stripe webhooks maybe?).

My problem is when you know that workflow, and that integration... you actually don't need it, its just nice to have. Its just a way for Stripe to send you updates to an endpoint with the status, like if say a card has declined as the charge is closing. But you can just poll.
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-15 14:49:40+00:00
That's what I mean "only 5%" encapsulating all failure modes (comms/implementation/coordination/etc) is very low.

And that under-estimation compounds to make the top level 60% much higher than it should be.

A 7.5% rate takes top-level success odds below 50% - 46%. A not unrealistic 10% takes the top level down to 35%.

Etc.
by secstate | 2025-05-15 14:49:49+00:00
No one is saying the niche doesn't exist. The embarrassing part is that ever since Jobs' triumphant return to Apple their magic was making what looked niche blow up into an everywhere device. Since Jobs passed, Apple has slowly been losing that magic, and this headset is a beautiful illustration of Apple's inability to find those everywhere devices.

Honestly, at this point, if Jobs were still there we'd probably have no VR headset, but a TV with appleTV built in that also magically provides Atmos surround without any extra hardware and magically "just works" to find any and all content you'd want to watch from any service. The resurrected Apple used to be good at finding what people didn't even know they wanted. Now it's a zombie walking around hoping people see the value in what they make.
by molticrystal | 2025-05-15 14:50:02+00:00
You are right that IP checks are lightweight, though you miss that setting up TCP/IP handshakes is algorithm-heavy, but it’s transparent because hardware and kernel optimizations keep it light on the CPU. TLS encryption, through certificate checks, key exchanges, that whole negotiation, is a CPU-heavy activity, especially on servers. Most of that asymmetric crypto, like verifying certificates, isn’t helped much by hardware accelerators like AES-NI, which mainly help with session encryption. TLS is already tons of work, so HTTP Message Signatures and mTLS are like piling more hay on the stack, it’s extra work, but you’re already doing a lot at that point.

The real complaint should be about having to adopt another standard, and whether they’ll discriminate against applications like legacy RSS readers, since they’re considered a type of bot.
by vessenes | 2025-05-15 14:50:12+00:00
I’m not sure what you mean here. All of my coding is done in a loop; something writes, something compiles, something fixes, once compiling, something tests and writes more, repeat until you need bed.

If you mean “can GitHub copilot author long syntactically, type, and memory-safe- correct rust code in one shot?” Then the answer is “not right now”
by w0m | 2025-05-15 14:50:26+00:00
> I don't find the food tempting

One thing I realized a number of years ago is that my childhood instilled biases in me.

A Few Examples:

Sushi/Raw Fish/ethnic/spicy food == Bad Apple Products == For Suckers Ford == Found On Road Dead (bowtie life) AMD >>> Evil Netburst Intel empire.

When I realized just how irrational I was on soo many subjects (I had never seen sushi or really any ethnic food until I was at my first SDE job as a 20somthing) - it made me re-evaluate.

> pointless to spend time considering it

Since then; Anytime I've ever considered something pointless to consider - it's been a trigger to consider it. Has honestly been kind of life changing revelation; has led to a much more varied and interesting life than I would have led otherwise based off my upbringing/predispositions. I'd even venture as far as to say it's made me inherently happier as a person as I no longer sneer at the apple user/sky diver/snow boarder/ebike rider/mountain climber/etc - now I look into it and possibly plan a trip.

I'm not saying "vegan > Meat" - I myself BBQ fairly often; but I'd also advise one to consider the vegan entree you sneered at prior; it may well just surprise you. And if it doesn't; the punishment is a deeper understanding! (.. and maybe paying for second lunch. but that's the risk)
by LexiMax | 2025-05-15 14:50:36+00:00
Tildes has replaced HN and Reddit as the site I default to for news aggregation.

I do feel like it is a bit light on the technology/programming front, otherwise it has a well-rounded mix of interesting topics. I feel like its decisions to not have a downvote button, as well as only allowing sign-ups through limited invites from other existing users, were smart ones.
by johnyeocx | 2025-05-15 14:50:49+00:00
Maybe we didn't phrase it as well as we should've. We meant to say API routes in general are public, and so the server actions could be called by anyone.

Authentication is definitely possible, but we were trying to brainstorm a way where users could have protected routes with as little set up as possible, the ideal being they just pass in customerId into a Provider component

We also did think about things like registering an auth function but felt that being able to just pass in customerId would be a magical experience!

Definitely acknowledge that the current mechanism has flaws though -- it's really more of an experiment at the moment, and if it does indeed become very popular with users we would implement auth mechanisms like JWT and what not -- though that would kinda be reinventing the wheel
Show HN: Wordleish Spinoff for Economics
by hayekstan | 2025-05-15 14:50:58+00:00
Bored at work, built a wordle style economy guessing game. You start with three clues and a new clue is revealed after each guess. You get six guesses in total. The clues are a mix of hard data and interesting facts / unusual trivia about each economy. Each day there's a new economy to guess.

Very creatively I've called it economyguesser.com
by markisus | 2025-05-15 14:52:40+00:00
I had to make a lot of concessions to make this work in real-time. There is no way that I know to replicate the fidelity of "actual" Gaussian splatting training process within the 33ms frame budget.

However, I have not baked in the size or orientation into the system. Those are "chosen" by the neural net based on the input RGBD frames. The view dependent effects are also "chosen" by the neural net, but not through an explicit radiance field. If you run the application and zoom in, you will be able to see the splats of different sizes pointing in different directions. The system as limited ability to re-adjust the positions and sizes due to the compute budget leading to the pixelated effect.
by tomhow | 2025-05-15 14:53:21+00:00
I made the same reply to them as I made to you, and honestly I don't know or care what point your comment was trying to make, you just can't make swipes like that in HN comments.

If you don't want to observe the guidelines, you don't need to participate on HN. If you want to participate here, please make an effort to show that you want to use the site as intended.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-05-15 14:54:29+00:00
I believe the marketing material around serverles functions is at fault. Clearly there is a server, because there is a computer answering requests on a specific ip address mapped to dns. So the wording is maddening. It’s a bit like cgi-bin except it spins up a vm or other sandbox to run the serving code instead of just starting a process.
by evanjrowley | 2025-05-15 14:54:34+00:00
I suppose they might want to stop issuing client auth certificates because it means anyone with a PKI-signed cert could potentially authenticate as a client to a server. With PKI being a series of trust relationships among CAs, there's effectively no control over what gets accepted vs. rejected. I suppose from that perspective only private CAs make sense.

If you want to try using a private CA for x509 certificates to do SSH client authentication, I know of a couple solutions that make it easy to do:

Smallstep: https://smallstep.com/docs/tutorials/ssh-certificate-login/

Infiniscal: https://infisical.com/docs/documentation/platform/ssh/overvi...

You can also do it the hard way. For example, here's how it can be done to SSH into Cisco network gear: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst9...
by sodapopcan | 2025-05-15 14:55:05+00:00
> After getting a result you didn't like with AI, did you try refining your prompt to state that you wanted a single-file structure?

I believe the prompt was: "Please compose a backhanded comment about Elixir I can post in a Hacker News thread about an Elixir blog post. The content of said blog post is irrelevant, I just want people to know I prefer Python."
by uberman | 2025-05-15 14:55:10+00:00
Solid, particularly the advice about context. I find with AI, less is better. Once you have "enough" context, adding more increases the risk of problems. The one I take exception with is the last. "You don't need to understand what the AI wrote". I feel you absolutely do need to understand what the AI wrote and if you don't you should not commit it.
by jghn | 2025-05-15 14:55:43+00:00
> Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?

As someone who tries to be prompt to a fault, I can see that yes there are people who get annoyed at promptness. It's not that you're a bad person for being prompt. Rather you're a bad person if you start without them or otherwise push back on their lateness.
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-15 14:56:15+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14541220

DonHopkins on June 12, 2017 | next [–]

The old expression "all our wood behind one arrow" was actually "one of President and CEO Scott McNealy's favorite quotes", which Sun used as a marketing campaign slogan and in presskits around 1990.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080515194354/http://www.sun.co...

Sun even produced a TV commercial in which an arrow that presumably had all of Sun's wood behind it whooshed through the air and hit the bull's eye of a target. (Nobody at Sun ever knew what the target was, but by golly they all knew which arrow to put their wood behind.)

Photo of Scott McNealy in his office at Sun with a huge Cupid's Span style wooden arrow through his window, and a small Steve Martin style wooden arrow through his head:

https://findery.com/johnfox/notes/all-the-wood-behind-one-ar... [sorry, link broken, not on archive.org]

>Sun's Workstations Still Shine, But Rivals Cloud The Outlook

>Daily Gazette - Nov 10, 1991

>Associated Press (Google News Archive)

>Sun touts an "all the wood behind one arrow" slogan, meant to describe a company focused on one goal - workstations. As an April Fool's joke in 1990, Sun employees built a 60-foot-long arrow in McNealy's office with the point going out the window.

Phrase: more wood behind, all the wood behind one arrow

https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2011-Septe...
by arghwhat | 2025-05-15 14:57:04+00:00
> Things like lens flares, motion blur, film grain, and shallow depth of field are mimicking cameras and not what being there is like

Ignoring film grain, our vision has all these effects all the same.

Look in front of you and only a single plane will be in focus (and only your fovea produces any sort of legibility). Look towards a bright light and you might get flaring from just your eyes. Stare out the side of a car or train when driving at speed and you'll see motion blur, interrupted only by brief clarity if you intentionally try to follow the motion with your eyes.

Without depth of field simulation, the whole scene is just a flat plane with completely unrealistic clarity, and because it's comparatively small, too much of it is smack center on your fovea. The problem is that these are simulations that do not track your eyes, and make the (mostly valid!) assumption that you're looking, nearby or in front of whatever you're controlling.

Maybe motion blur becomes unneccessary given a high enough resolution and refresh rate, but depth of field either requires actual depth or foveal tracking (which only works for one person). Tasteful application of current techniques is probably better.

> High FPS television can feel cheap while 24fps can feel premium and "filmic."

Ugh. I will never understand the obsession this effect. There is no such thing as a "soap opera effect" as people liek to call it, only a slideshow effect.

The history behind this is purely a series of cost-cutting measures entirely unrelated to the user experience or artistic qualities. 24 fps came to be because audio was slapped onto the film, and was the slowest speed where the audio track was acceptable intelligible, saving costly film paper - the sole priority of the time. Before that, we used to record content at variable frame rates but play it back at 30-40 fps.

We're clinging on to a cost-cutting measure that was a significant compromise from the time of hand cranked film recording.

</fist-shaking rant>
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-05-15 14:58:14+00:00
JWT is a standard that is supported by a lot of frameworks and auth libraries. It’s also reasonably straightforward to implement yourself. It’s very easy to make big security mistakes when you roll your own security, though, so it’s best to at least stick with proven paradigms even if you implement it yourself for a new framework. Also read up on the mistakes people have made in implementing it and avoid repeating those mistakes.
by Propelloni | 2025-05-15 14:58:45+00:00
Malicious compliance is one of the great tips from the Simple Sabotage Field Guide. And it is one of the few effective ways to escalate pain in an organization. If you don't get shit done because of rules, and a boss asks you to simply break the rules for efficiency's sake, you can return the favor and just ask to simply abolish the rules for efficiency's sake. It may surprise you how fast stupid rules can be abolished, even in large orgs.