MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dahart | 2025-05-13 14:34:08+00:00
The dumbest and most obvious of realizations finally dawned on me after trying to build a software startup that was based on quality differentiation. We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even.

What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, are a competitive advantage in a competitive market. Duh. I’m sure I knew and said that in college and for years before my own startup attempt, but this time I really felt it in my bones. It suddenly made me realize exactly why everything in the market is mediocre, and why high quality things always get worse when they get more popular. Pressure to reduce costs grows with the scale of a product. Duh. People want cheap, so if you sell something people want, someone will make it for less by cutting “costs” (quality). Duh. What companies do is pay the minimum they need in order to stay alive & profitable. I don’t mean it never happens, sometimes people get excited and spend for short bursts, young companies often try to make high quality stuff, but eventually there will be an inevitable slide toward minimal spending.

There’s probably another name for this, it’s not quite the Market for Lemons idea. I don’t think this leads to market collapse, I think it just leads to stable mediocrity everywhere, and that’s what we have.
by miloignis | 2025-05-13 14:34:32+00:00
It's not that simple either - normally, if you're doing some loops over a large array of pixels, say, to perform some operation to them, there will only be a couple of bounds checks before the loop starts, checking the starting and ending conditions of the loops, not re-doing the bounds check for every pixel.

So very rarely should it be anything like 3-4x the cost, though some complex indexing could cause it to happen, I suppose. I agree scopes are a decent way to handle it!
by vacuity | 2025-05-13 14:34:55+00:00
TL;DR: I disagree, and I will say upfront that my views on software are extreme. I think quality is a glaring issue in most software.

There is a lot of subpar software out there, and the rest is largely decent-but-not-great. If it's security I want, that's commonly lacking, and hugely so. If it's performance I want, that's commonly lacking[0]. If it's documentation...you get the idea. We should have rigor by default, and if that means software is produced slower, I frankly don't see the problem with that. (Although commercial viability has gone out the window unless big players comply.) Exceptions will be carved out depending on the scope of the program. It's much harder to add in rigor post hoc. The end goal is quality.

The other issue is that a program's scope is indeed broader than controlling lives, and yet there are many bad outcomes. If I just get my passwords stolen or my computer crashes daily or my messaging app takes a bit too long to load every time, what is the harm? Of course those are wildly different outcomes, but I think at least the first and second are obviously quality issues, and I think the third is also important. Why is the third important? When software is such an integral part of users' lives, minor issues cause faults that prompt workarounds or inefficiencies. [1] discusses a similar line of thought. I know I personally avoid doing some actions commonly (e.g. check LinkedIn) because they involve pain points around waiting for my browser to load and whatnot, nothing major but something that's always present. Software ("automation") in theory makes all things that the user implicitly desires to be non-pain points for the user. An interesting blend of issues is system dialog password prompts, which users will generally try to either avoid or address on autopilot, which tends to reduce security. Or take system update restarts, which induce not updating frequently. Or take what is perhaps my favorite invectives: blaming Electron apps. One Electron app can be inconvenient. Multiple Electron apps can be absurd. I feel like I shouldn't have to justify calling out Electron on HN, but I do, but I won't here. And take unintended uses: if I need to set down an injured person across two chairs, I sure hope a chair doesn't break or something. Sure, that's not the intended use case of a chair, but I don't think it's unreasonable that a well-made chair would not fail to live up to my expectations. I wouldn't put an elephant on the chair either way, because intuitively I don't expect that much. Even then, users may expect more out of software than is reasonable, but that should be remedied and not overlooked.

Do not mistake having users for having a quality product.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971464 [1] https://blog.regehr.org/archives/861
by grues-dinner | 2025-05-13 14:35:09+00:00
You don't need trillions of dollars to start making tubes again. And it wouldn't be that one guy doing it for funsies, would it? If the question was "can one hobbyist bootstrap everything on his own" then I would agree. Maybe you completely lose even the insight that a small electric current can be used to switch or modulate a larger one. But if you're also losing mid-high-school physics knowledge, that's a different issue.

As I said, you probably won't ever get to where we are now with the technology, but then again probably 99.999% of computing power is wasted on gimmicks and inefficiency. Probably more these days. You could certainly run a vaguely modern society on only electromechanical and thermionic gear - you have power switching with things like thyrotrons, obviously radios, and there were computers made that way, such as the Harwell Witch in 1952.

Maybe you don't get 4K AI video generation or petabyte-scale advertising analytics but you could have quite a lot.
by ednite | 2025-05-13 14:35:29+00:00
Not cold—more like soft outreach. It happened at a social event through mutual friends. Classic “So, what do you do?” convo. I said software dev. They said, “Ugh, we use this tool—it’s garbage.”

I listened (an underrated superpower), realized I could actually fix the problem, and suggested a meetup. One Zoom meeting later, we had the foundation of a partnership.

Honestly, it could’ve been any event. Just show up, be sincere, and listen more than you pitch.

I’ve always been an introvert—still am—but I’ve learned to be a functional extrovert when it counts- Good luck and don’t give up!
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-13 14:35:43+00:00
> fawn over every contributor who creates an obviously low-effort one

It's that sense of superiority that pisses me off.

Many maintainers condescendingly reply "contributions welcome" in response to user complaints. People like that had better accept whatever they get. They could have easily done it themselves in all their "high quality" ways. They could have said "I don't have time for this" or even "I don't want to work on this". No, they went and challenged people to contribute instead. Then when they get what they wanted they suddenly decide they don't want it anymore? Bullshit.

You're making the assumption that these are "high quality" projects, that someone poured their very soul into every single line of code in the repository. Chances are it's just someone else's own low effort implementation. Maybe someone else's hobby project. Maybe it's some legacy stuff that's too useful to delete but too complex to fully rewrite. When you dive in, you discover that "doing it properly" very well means putting way too much effort into paying off the technical debts of others. So who's signing up to do that for ungrateful maintainers for free? Who wants to risk doing all that work only to end up ignored and rejected? Lol.

Just slap things together until they work. As long as your problem's fixed, it's fine. It's not your baby you're taking care of. They should be grateful you even sent the patches in. If they don't like it, just keep your commits and rebase, maybe make a custom package that overrides the official one from the Linux distribution. No need to worry about it, after all your version's fixed and theirs isn't. Best part is this tends to get these maintainers to wake up and "properly" implement things on their side... Which is exactly what users wanted in the first place! Wow!
by KronisLV | 2025-05-13 14:35:55+00:00
> …when switching Lumen (UE5's realtime global illumination feature) to the lowest setting, this results in completely flat lighting for the vegetation but is needed to get an acceptable base frame rate (it doesn't solve the random stuttering though).

This also happens to many other UE5 games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 where they try to push the graphics envelope with expensive techniques and most people without expensive hardware have to turn the settings way down (even use things like upscaling and framegen which further makes the experience a bit worse, at least when the starting point is very bad and you have to use them as a crutch), often making these modern games look worse than something a decade old.

Whatever UE5 is doing (or rather, how so many developers choose to use it) is a mistake now and might be less of a mistake in 5-10 years when the hardware advances further and becomes more accessible. Right now it feels like a ploy by the Big GPU to force people to upgrade to overpriced hardware if they want to enjoy any of these games; or rather, sillyness aside, is an attempt by studios to save resources by making the artists spend less time on faking and optimizing effects and detail that can just be brute forced by the engine.

In contrast, most big CryEngine and idTech games run great even on mid range hardware and still look great.
by vessenes | 2025-05-13 14:36:03+00:00
Good read; too long to sway public opinion though.

The most convincing and interesting thing I’ve read about the US’s science standing is just a reminder that it wasn’t always considered a global science leader. A few people saw the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists and built, among other things, Princeton’s IAS.

Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying to return to an era of imperialism for the good of the country. In this area I wonder how resilient and immobile the scientific community is to these stresses. If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers.
by tecleandor | 2025-05-13 14:36:17+00:00
From what I see (and what I've experienced on different sync apps when upgrading Android versions, although I'm not a developer, just a user), access to /Android/data and /Android/obb changed on Android 11:

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[0] On Android 11 (API level 30) and higher, you cannot use the ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE intent action to request access to the following directories: - The root directory of the internal storage volume. - The root directory of each SD card volume that the device manufacturer considers to be reliable, regardless of whether the card is emulated or removable. A reliable volume is one that an app can successfully access most of the time. - The Download directory. Furthermore, on Android 11 (API level 30) and higher, you cannot use the ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE intent action to request that the user select individual files from the following directories: - The Android/data/ directory and all subdirectories. - The Android/obb/ directory and all subdirectories.

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[1] On Android 11 (API level 30) and higher, you cannot use the ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT intent action to request that the user select individual files from the following directories: - The Android/data/ directory and all subdirectories. - The Android/obb/ directory and all subdirectories.

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0: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/documents-files#document-tree-access-restrictions 1: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/documents-files#document-access-restrictions

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edit: fixed readability and a link
by bryanlarsen | 2025-05-13 14:36:29+00:00
That's not quite right: 20% of our energy supply comes from electricity. But over 50% of the energy we consume gets wasted as heat, and fossil fuel energy wastes a lot more of its energy as heat.

So the real number is closer to 40%. If we switch ground transport to EV's and heating to heat pumps we can get up to ~75%.
by corytheboyd | 2025-05-13 14:36:43+00:00
The point isn’t about saving yourself from the layoff, it’s about having a network to help you find a new job, because yeah, the layoffs are disconnected, heartless, and clumsy. If you’re always building at least a couple relationships, some of those people inevitably quit on their own, branch out, and after years of this, you end up with a decently sized network to help you out (and you can help them too when the time comes)
by zackmorris | 2025-05-13 14:37:20+00:00
Ya I winced after I wrote that and am considering taking a break from posting for a while. I'm just really tired of suffering the status quo because many people love it if it aligns with their worldview, while people like me who see things a little differently seem condemned to struggle in isolation. I've always admired Tesla, not Edison, but the Edison way of doing business seems to win out and suppress the people on the fringe.

As for GPUs, they are useful for languages like GNU Octave (MATLAB) and Julia. Although there's a code smell with that. The matrix languages that would benefit most from SIMD seem to be the ones that aren't hardware accelerated on GPUs. Something has gone wrong:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8302256

That was over 10 years ago and I doubt the situation is any better today. Misaligned incentives.

I feel that the missing link is direct hardware access to the GPU ALUs. Without being able to transpile CPU code to GPU code and vice versa to provide bare metal multithreading and vector operations, we miss out on a whole branch of computer science. We can't do the interesting experiments that I always rant about, which would make stuff like genetic algorithms borderline trivial. We're stuck with cookie cutter solutions like OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, etc.

Yet we still praise Nvidia, even though like Microsoft/Intel in the 1990s, they're probably most responsibly for stifling innovation in multicore computing.

For what it's worth, you're right about the latency/throughput tradeoff. I don't mind stuff like Intel's integrated graphics or Apple's M line of processors with integrated GPU and NPU cores for raw throughput and efficiency. I just think they're silly because they operate at the wrong layer: 1) CPU 2) multicore 3) GPU. There's no layer 2. Why is that?
by xg15 | 2025-05-13 14:37:30+00:00
Almost all of my nontechnical friends and family members have at some point complained about bloated and overly complicated software that they are required to use.

Also remember that Microsoft at this point has to drag their users kicking and screaming into using the next Windows version. If users were let to decide for themselves, many would have never upgraded past Windows XP. All that despite all the pretty new features in the later versions.

I'm fully with you that businesses and investors want "features" for their own sake, but definitely not users.
by kccqzy | 2025-05-13 14:38:09+00:00
A lot of times that stereotypical helpful person is so helpful that junior people never learn to get rid of their dependence on that person. I know that because I've been that stereotypical helpful person. I realized something was amiss when a junior person who had been on the team for two years still came to me every other day to ask me questions. They spent minimal amount of effort thinking on their own, and then simply decided to ask me. And when I explained the solutions, they only remembered it for a short time and then one week later proceeded to ask me almost the same question again. I suppose this is the kind of proto-vibe-coder before the age of AI.
by haswell | 2025-05-13 14:38:10+00:00
The people who spend hundreds of hours carefully creating content for their viewers care [0].

The referenced video is from a photographer who has some pretty strong and reasonable thoughts on this - specifically the features YouTube itself is experimenting with.

Depending on the nature of the AI product, it has the potential to completely sideline creators.

Not saying that’s what Miyagi is doing and it sounds like they’re actually working with creators on this which is good. But the broader point is that such tools need to be thoughtfully implemented.

- [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ULUSS1-G3do
by MichaelRo | 2025-05-13 14:38:35+00:00
Unfortunately, in 20+ years and some 7 jobs in the meantime, I never ever got a job by means of an inside recommendation nor was I able to get someone I recommended to be hired.

And the reason is, I'm a lowly engineer and that's all. I have zero clout, HR and hiring managers couldn't give a shit of whom I recommend. So if you "prioritize relationships" with an ulterior purpose (get hired eventually by some "relation"), then make sure you relate to the right people :)
by cjrp | 2025-05-13 14:38:54+00:00
> Most of the radio calls today (>95%) are bog standard verbal exchanges about things that should not require any humans in the loop. Anything to with weather is just numbers that can and should be be exchanged digitally. Much faster, less room for error. There should be zero confusion about what the altimeter settings are at a particular airport, what the active runway is, where the wind is coming from, etc.

ACARS and CPDLC handle a lot of this. A change of altitude/flight level can be sent from ATC, accepted by a pilot, and updated in the autopilot without anyone speaking over VHF.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-13 14:38:55+00:00
Agree WRT the tradeoff between features and elegance.

Although, I do wonder if there’s an additional tradeoff here. Existing users, can apparently do what they need to do with the software, because they are already doing it. Adding a new feature might… allow them to get rid of some other software, or do something new (but, that something new must not be so earth shattering, because they didn’t seek out other software to do it, and they were getting by without it). Therefore, I speculate that existing users, if they really were introspective, would ask for those performance improvements first. And maybe a couple little enhancements.

Potential new users on the other hand, either haven’t heard of your software yet, or they need it to do something else before they find it useful. They are the ones that reasonably should be looking for new features.

So, in “features vs performance” decision is also a signal about where the developers’ priorities lay: adding new users or keeping old ones happy. So, it is basically unsurprising that:

* techies tend to prefer the latter—we’ve played this game before, and know we want to be the priority for the bulk of the time using the thing, not just while we’re being acquired.

* buggy slow featureful software dominates the field—this is produced by companies that are prioritizing growth first.

* history is littered with beautiful, elegant software that users miss dearly, but which didn’t catch on broadly enough to sustain the company.

However, the tradeoff is real in both directions; most people spend most of their time as users instead of potential users. I think this is probably a big force behind the general perception that software and computers are incredibly shit nowadays.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-05-13 14:39:07+00:00
this feels like another person who sits by himself thinking about things that sound wise to him. he operates on the assumption that he is wise because wise sounding things sound wise to him, and also that those things are wise because they sound wise to him and he is wise. they're great for books, blogs and other one-way forms of communication where their entire job is just satisfying fridge logic so that the audience upvotes and moves along. not so much for dialogue and discussion that will eventually sort every point into buckets labelled "meaningless" or "self-evident". it's the tobacconist's yoga: a contortionate attempt to blow smoke up one's own ass unassisted.
by jon-wood | 2025-05-13 14:39:11+00:00
I think there's a degree to which this is true, I wouldn't walk into an interview and immediately start slagging off my old employer, but if you're interviewing me and get all worked up when I say bad things about them in answer to the question "why are you leaving your current job" that's on you and I won't regret not getting the job.
by yardie | 2025-05-13 14:39:41+00:00
The last known address of the previous owner was the flat I was currently occupying, LOL.

The flat was built and purchased in the 60s, abandoned in the 90s, and sold to us in 2010s. It was near a newly gentrifying, former industrial area. I think we went back and forth with the city for 10 months before they agreed to give me the paperwork that would allow it to be scrapped. I get that no one wants to get it wrong and accidentally throw someone else's property into the bin.
by rich_sasha | 2025-05-13 14:39:53+00:00
I'm not a believer in conspiracy theories, but it's fun to recognize that the reasons you highlight makes such theories very unlikely rather than actually impossible. That means that given enough hypotheses, some will turn out to be true. Imperfect examples that come to mind include Watergate, the Snowden revelations or Big Pharma's role in the opioid crisis.

I think of it whenever I hear a tin-hat theory - it's probably fantasy but from time to time it isn't.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-13 14:39:56+00:00
It's not that they suck at statistics. It's that their statistics and experimental designs are artificially stuck in the dark ages. This is forced on the world by the academic publishing industry - you publish this way, or you perish. The completely unsurprising result is a reproducibility crisis that undermines the entire field. Check out "Bernoulli's Fallacy" for a good overview.

My theory isn't that Psychologists are bad at statistics. It's that the remaining problems involve lots of messy interactions and messy data that all but require statistical techniques. We just don't have the tools to extract obvious causality amidst such complexity.
by Tabular-Iceberg | 2025-05-13 14:39:57+00:00
I once made a DGG without knowing that it was called a DGG so I could look up how to actually do it in the literature.

I ended up making it an icosahedron and recursively subdividing each face into four new ones by inscribing a new triangle. The project went nowhere for different reasons, so I never figured out if it would have worked, and given this isn’t one of the examples I suspect it wouldn’t have.
by Arainach | 2025-05-13 14:40:02+00:00
Constant negativity kills team morale.

Even if the complaints are about things which are individually valid, the pattern is toxic.

Imagine a sports team. After running around for 45 minutes you're all probably tired. Would you rather work with someone who says "I'm tired, it's hot in here" or someone who focuses on encouraging those around them and talking about the team's accomplishments?

Part of the interview is proving you can avoid griping and focus on positives for at least 30-60 minutes, which is an essential skill anywhere.