MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryao | 2025-05-13 07:43:02+00:00
I cannot answer this for him, but I can speculate on the answer to your first question. The transformations he described his minifier applying do not change the code from the perspective of the compiler in any meaningful way, so the end result should have no performance difference. The only possible exception is the inlining, but the compiler likely would have done that anyway, so the end result should still have no difference.

To state that more precisely, everything is going to be translated into a SSA syntax in a compiler pass at some point. At that point, much of what he described should be either something the toolchain would have done (such as comment removal by the preprocessor) or effectively undone (such as the variable name reuse since by definition SSA makes each variable name be used exactly once). The rest should converge to the same result after subsequent optimization passes (such as an inlining pass). If you find a performance difference from using his tool, file a bug report with your compiler’s authors.
by vasco | 2025-05-13 07:43:06+00:00
The only method that works long term is being honest about what you want from people and honest about the diff between your expectations and their output.

In a previous company many times new managers asked me how to approach a subject with their reports and usually they wouldn't consider just saying it exactly as they described it to me. Just say what you mean, it'll help all your relationships, not even just work ones.

It's hard enough trying to convey what you mean clearly, adding shenanigans that you'll also be bad at on top is not going to help.
by Hilift | 2025-05-13 07:43:27+00:00
> If you call your granny via whatsapp

Remember flight MH370? The industry doesn't want obviously good solutions if it costs more than $1 per passenger. There is room to automate part of this, and have ATC and pilot human oversight with manual contingencies. But no one is going to pay for it, not through normal or usual and customary processes. Most of the major US stakeholders (airlines) are poor.
by nextaccountic | 2025-05-13 07:43:56+00:00
Unfortunately the project is not just code. It also has issues, PRs and other stuff. Github has two kinds of lock in, a) your stuff is there and if you move elsewhere you probably will wipe your issues etc (huge loss of institutional knowledge), and b) there is a network effect because everyone has a github account and people are used to just hop on a repository and file an issue (rather than being greeted by a log in page), cross-reference issues between repositories (hard to make work if repos aren't in the same site, unless both sites use some interop thing like activitypub which github will never use), etc

> Everything surrounding code: issues, CICD, etc, is obviously another story. But it's not a story that is answered by distributed git either. (though I would love a good issue tracking system that is done entirely inside git)

There is https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug - would love if people started o use it, even in a read only way: use github issues normally, but also have a bot that saves all coments to git-bug, so that i can read issues without an internet connection. Then, at a later date, make it so that people that make issues on git-bug also gets the issue posted on github, making a two way bridge.

Then, optionally, at a later stage when almost everyone migrated to git-bug, make the github issues a read only mirror of the git-bug issues. Probably not worth it: you lose drive-by comments from newcomers (that already have a github account but probably never heard of git-bug), raising the friction to report bugs
by jemmyw | 2025-05-13 07:44:01+00:00
I don't understand why any of these except hiring is persuasion. Engineering managers don't pitch projects. They shouldn't be persuading leadership to give them resources, they just lay out timelines for what is possible with now, with more. Maybe even with less.

As an engineer and engineering leader in my career I've never had to persuade or be persuaded to do the tasks I'm assigned. They're the job. Sometimes they're boring. I think about that during planning and make sure people get some variety and ask them what they like working on.

Why would you need to persuade a cross team lead to help you? Are they not doing their job? I've never asked and been told "you have to persuade me" and if I was told that I'd ask leadership for clarification on priorities.

This sounds like organizational dysfunction and fiefdom building.
by kaichanvong | 2025-05-13 07:44:04+00:00
while --it-is possible seeing how fossil confuses, for the Github conversation, it's not really in the same category, conversation, some clever happenings happening within fossil-scm, however, it's not really the same as the problem design-led github solves given people saying downtimes; sure, git, github; however how people using github, different–similar, git, however, github.

However, were you to say liken-able (slang keywords: comparative something else--) of, "fossil with git-github", then again: no.

Good call were the conversation (comments, almost interchangeable at-times haha!) being, everyone use git for Firefox, something kinda wild-topic!
by colechristensen | 2025-05-13 07:44:21+00:00
It shouldn't.

Christianity wasnt the official state religion of Rome until 380 CE at which point it only had legal status for 67 years. Christianity wasn't done covering europe until iceland in 1000 CE.

What might count as prechristian wasn't at all clear and depended on where you were and how official you want things to be, it also was absolutely not like flipping a switch or even gradual, it was rocky and complicated.
by Spivak | 2025-05-13 07:44:34+00:00
It feels like we're living two separate lives when it comes to remote work. If my office was a 5-10 minute walk then in-office could be fine. I used to longboard to the office and I didn't have too many complaints. But after getting 2+ hours of my day back every day, an extra hour of sleep, gas money, not having to meal prep or get take-out, and work among my at-home comforts not under wight fluorescent light and an oppressive HVAC it's really hard to imagine an in-office job getting preference over basically any remote job.

I did the hour commute thing, I hated it even when it was the norm.
by laserbeam | 2025-05-13 07:46:58+00:00
> You could, but generally people can’t. They learn a set of narrow workflows and never explore beyond.

The point is you CAN. Joe can in theory do it, and Steve can make an alternative piece of software to do it for Joe. In most other centralized places (like social media), you CANNOT. Joe cannot take his data off of Facebook and interact with it outside of the platform or move it to another platform.
by nerdsniper | 2025-05-13 07:47:30+00:00
Benzonatate is a commonly prescribed somewhat stronger cough medicine which requires a prescription. I've known a number of people who've had to take it for a persistent or stubborn cough.

Wikipedia says "Overdose of only a small number of capsules can be fatal" but the study they quote shows that you'd need to take 10x-20x the usual dose for the smallest amount that's been shown to kill anyone -- which is admittedly more narrow of a safety window than over-the-counter Tylenol/Acetaminophen/Paracetamol but still, few people take 10-20 pills in one day of something that says "take 1 per day".
by laurentlb | 2025-05-13 07:48:04+00:00
Most transformations don't change the code that's executed.

const float x = sin(2); const float y = 2;

If you define these two consts, we can inline y everywhere it's used. But by default, we don't inline x as it would lead to more work at runtime (maybe it doesn't matter for sin, but other function calls can be expensive). If you notice performance issues, please file a bug.

Renaming uniforms is optional (there's a flag). If you use C++, you can generate a .h header file that contains both the minified shader and macros that tell you how they've been renamed.

So Shader Minifier will generate macros like:

# define VAR_time "f"

to tell you that "time" is now called "f" and you can use VAR_time in your C++ code.
by DoingIsLearning | 2025-05-13 07:51:03+00:00
> Just say what you mean

This greatly depends on work culture and ARL's - adulthood readiness levels.

Many people are not graceful with open criticism even if done privately and constructively.

Without falling into stereotypes culture still matters specially in an international setting. Some cultures expect a lot of innuendo and indirection, for example in British or Japanese work environments. West coast US typically expects a lot of positive praise even when pointing out negatives. Whereas others like the Dutch expect more direct or even literal speech.
by nighthawk454 | 2025-05-13 07:51:56+00:00
Frankly, you’re ignoring the definition at this point. A “good hash algo” only generates noise in the cryptographic hash sense. There are in fact other hashes. The fact that “semantic vectors” preserve a useful similarity is no different mathematically then LSH or many others (except that the models work a lot more usefully).

If you’re trying to say MD5 isn’t an LLM, then fine no argument there. But otherwise consider referencing something other than vibes or magic, because the definition is clear. “Semantic vectors” isn’t some keyword to be invoked that just generates entropy from the void.
by epiecs | 2025-05-13 07:52:39+00:00
It's the same when you drive a motorcycle with a sidecar. The way you drive it is just completely the opposite of driving a normal motorcycle.

FYI: I have both and the first time I drove my sidecar I ended up in a hedge :D

A good overview of the physics and how to ride these is the yellow book from Ural: http://welcome-ural.ru/documents/HowToRideUral.pdf
by johngai | 2025-05-13 07:53:04+00:00
We recently published a detailed comparison between SAP Business One and our AI-powered ERP system, Barawave. If you're a growing business or agency looking to escape the complexity and cost of legacy ERP systems, this breakdown covers where Barawave outperforms — from usability and automation to flexibility and pricing.

Would love feedback from the HN community, especially from those working in ERP, SaaS, or running growing businesses. We're always looking to improve.
by adrian17 | 2025-05-13 07:53:46+00:00
> I have to say that I used local search instead of trying to find something on the mozilla-central website.

On the contrary, I find searchfox to be the best code navigation tool I used. It has nice cross-language navigation features (like jumping from .webidl interface definition to c++ implementation), it has always-on blame (with more features too) and despite that it's really fast and feels extremely lightweight compared to GitHub interface. I really wish I had this with more projects, and I'll be sad if it ever dies.
by SCdF | 2025-05-13 07:54:27+00:00
> Unfortunately the project is not just code.

The literal project we are discussing is just code. It's literally just code. It doesn't have issues, PRs are disabled as much as they can be (by a GitHub action that automatically closes all PRs with a note that code should be submitted elsewhere), and all "other stuff" is disabled.

https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox
by hilbert42 | 2025-05-13 07:54:47+00:00
There's a lot we could still do.

Let's assume we go back to the pre-transistor era—1946 and earlier, the world then was a very different place but it was still very modern.

It's too involved to list in detail but just take a look at what was achieved during WWII. The organization and manufacturing was truly phenomenonal. Aircraft production alone during the War was over 800,000 aircraft, manufacturing aircraft at that rate has never been equalled since, same with ships.

We developed huge amount of new tech during the War including the remarkably complex atomic bomb and much, much more.

And we did all this without the transistor, integrated circuit, CPUs, internet and even smartphones!

Now consider the planning and organizational difficulties of D-Day—probably the most complex and logistically difficult understanding ever—without the aid of modern communications, the internet and smartphones, etc.—all of which depend on CPUs. Right, that happened too, and it was a total success.

I wonder how a generation brought up during the post-silicon era would cope if all that were no longer available. It could happen if we had another Carrington Event or one that's even bigger (which has occurred), or say with nuclear EMP events.

WWII Aircraft production https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_aircraft_produc...

WWII Military production: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_W...
by johngai | 2025-05-13 07:55:55+00:00
We’ve compiled a 2025 list of the top enterprise workflow management platforms, covering everything from traditional players to emerging AI-powered solutions like Barawave. If you're leading ops, managing distributed teams, or evaluating scalable workflow tools for your org, this curated roundup might help narrow the search.

We’d love to hear from others on what tools you're using—or planning to switch to—as automation and AI reshape enterprise productivity.
by jgraham | 2025-05-13 07:56:11+00:00
(I work at Mozilla, but not on the VCS tooling, or this transition)

To give a bit of additional context here, since the link doesn't have any:

The Firefox code has indeed recently moved from having its canonical home on mercurial at hg.mozilla.org to GitHub. This only affects the code; bugzilla is still being used for issue tracking, phabricator for code review and landing, and our taskcluster system for CI.

In the short term the mercurial servers still exist, and are synced from GitHub. That allows automated systems to transfer to the git backend over time rather than all at once. Mercurial is also still being used for the "try" repository (where you push to run CI on WIP patches), although it's increasingly behind an abstraction layer; that will also migrate later.

For people familiar with the old repos, "mozilla-central" is mapped onto the more standard branch name "main", and "autoland" is a branch called "autoland".

It's also true that it's been possible to contribute to Firefox exclusively using git for a long time, although you had to install the "git cinnabar" extension. The choice between the learning hg and using git+extension was a it of an impediment for many new contributors, who most often knew git and not mercurial. Now that choice is no longer necessary. Glandium, who wrote git cinnabar, wrote extensively at the time this migration was first announced about the history of VCS at Mozilla, and gave a little more context on the reasons for the migration [1].

So in the short term the differences from the point of view of contributors are minimal: using stock git is now the default and expected workflow, but apart from that not much else has changed. There may or may not eventually be support for GitHub-based workflows (i.e. PRs) but that is explicitly not part of this change.

On the backend, once the migration is complete, Mozilla will spend less time hosting its own VCS infrastructure, which turns out to be a significant challenge at the scale, performance and availability needed for such a large project.

[1] https://glandium.org/blog/?p=4346
by ben_w | 2025-05-13 07:56:33+00:00
It's important to have a good culture fit. This was one reason why, post-Brexit, I went to Germany rather than the US: I prefer unvarnished truth if I can get it, and failing that people telling me what I did wrong instead of puffing up my ego by telling me everything is amazing when they think it's rubbish*.

But accounting for that, too, is part of persuasion — even if it's not on this list.

* there's a set of graphs I can't find, objective quality on the x-axis, bell curves, vertical lines drawn in different places for each country, US labelling everything that's better than terrible as "amazing" and vice-versa for eastern Europe.
by johngai | 2025-05-13 07:56:42+00:00
We just published a head-to-head comparison between Jira and Barawave—our unified, AI-powered platform built for modern teams that want to streamline projects without the bloat. The article outlines where Barawave delivers better speed, simplicity, and cross-functional visibility (with fewer plugins and setup headaches).

Curious to hear from the HN community: What’s your experience with Jira alternatives in 2025? Is your team still using multiple tools or looking to consolidate?
by monkeyfun | 2025-05-13 07:56:52+00:00
Oh it wouldn't be easier than a moon base or simple orbital habitats. And as for Venus being scifi, anything to do with space colonization period is scifi right now; humans haven't even stepped foot on another celestial body of any kind in over half a century.

Rather my meaning was that it's (a little shockingly) the best suited planet for humans in terms of most closely and reliably resembling conditions humans could survive in, which relates to the terraforming notions I was replying to.

It'd be overwhelmingly harder to make all of Venus Earthlike than to just use the existing relatively Earthlike regions of the upper atmosphere to our advantage along with their unique properties. Cool off Venus and you just get a big ocean of liquid or frozen co2 to have to deal with after a loooong time and a lot of construction. Keep it like it is and a fraction of the resources/effort will yield far more utility while we can still enjoy a segment of the atmosphere.

Scifi? Of course!

Cool? Without a doubt!
by piva00 | 2025-05-13 07:57:12+00:00
There has been no conclusive post mortem, the issue is still under investigation[0], this is a blog post by a tech company, not an authoritative agency with findings, basically speculation being used as a marketing article...

This article [1] also calls out the rumor mill about renewables being a cause:

> Political groups such as the far-right VOX – which has historically pushed back against climate action such as the expansion of renewables – also pointed to the blackout as evidence of “the importance of a balanced energy mix”.

> However, others rejected this suggestion, with EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen telling Bloomberg that the blackout could not be pinned on a “specific source of energy”:

> “As far as we know, there was nothing unusual about the sources of energy supplying electricity to the system yesterday. So the causes of the blackout cannot be reduced to a specific source of energy, for instance renewables.”

> Others have sought to highlight that, while it was possible solar power was involved in the initial frequency event, this does not mean that it was ultimately the cause of the blackout.

It's all inconclusive and the narrative that solar is the culprit is being pushed by anti-renewables, let's wait until there's an official conclusion to the investigation instead of peddling bullshit.

[0] https://www.entsoe.eu/news/2025/05/01/iberian-black-out-ents...

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-we-do-and-do-not-know-ab...
by cjblomqvist | 2025-05-13 07:57:35+00:00
The UK (empire) didn't go down in a big war (although they fought in several, that also threatened them). It seems wars are definitely not needed for the transition to a nation rather then empire.

I'd say wars have historically been a part of all nations/geographical areas more or less continuously - and empires are more inclined to participate due to 1) being bigger and 2) thinking there's more to gain from those wars (usually due to capability/likelihood of winning).
by atoav | 2025-05-13 07:57:43+00:00
I think you might reading this strictly. Persuation is always in play. If you don't need to persuade someone actively that just means they are already persuaded in some way. Maybe that way was purely organisational (e.g. part of the normal operations) or it was by some higher up.

As an engineer I agree that an organisation should work as you described. But depending on where you are and what it is you need to do you might need to persuade somebody to do something. Or if the doing is implied you might need to persuade somebody to do something faster (means: they should priorize your thing above other things) or with a higher quality than usual (means: they should use more time, put their best hire to work or whatnot).

I agree that this isn't optimal, but each department may see other things as important. For accounting that audit might seem more important than getting your order done quickly, because for them it is the bigger, scarier and more complicated thing. So persuation sometimes just means reminding people why the thing you're doing is important.
by toofy | 2025-05-13 07:59:44+00:00
i don’t follow him specifically, but what i have seen are videos of him saying “analysis does not equal an endorsement” followed by him saying it was expected behavior given the messy circumstances there, followed up again with “and so i’m clear, analysis does not equal an endorsement”

i have also seen videos of him unequivocally stating “the murders by hamas on innocent people was unequivocally disgusting and wrong, even though they’re wrong, this doesn’t magically justify the multiple times over murder of other innocents just for some kind of retribution, thousands of them are innocent people too.” [1]

i have also seen pieces edited from the same videos that always seem to remove the first and last part contexts and only show the out of context pieces.

again though, i haven’t spent much time, only wanted to add the wider context that i have personally seen.

[1] paraphrasing because i honestly don’t have time to spend hours digging through videos, but the sentiment is spot on to what ive seen him say multiple times.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-13 08:00:30+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.

> Anything to do with "who are you and why are you here", which is a disturbingly large proportion of verbal exchanges, sounds like it could be established both more securely, robustly, and efficiently. We have computers now with things like secure hashes, uuids, certificates, etc. Any time you have enough bandwidth to talk to somebody you definitely have enough bandwidth to throw quite a bit of data around securely and reliably.

The problem is, for that to work, you'd need to push a worldwide coordinated effort to upgrade everyone. Hundreds of thousands of GA aircraft, historical aircraft, about 30k commercial aircraft and most likely hundreds if not thousands of different models. For each of these you'd need to develop and most importantly certify a digital avionics package. And you'd need to train about half a million pilots for commercial flight, on top of that all the GA pilots.

And no, "give pilots an iPad" doesn't count. That's what many airlines are already doing so pilots have an alternative to paper charts of approaches or on-ground navigation... but the old paper and radio? That all still has gotta be present because that stuff is actually certified to be redundant and (largely) fail-proof.

There's a reason innovation speed is very slow in aviation: it took decades worth of work and many thousands of deaths to get aviation to be what it is: the most safe way of transportation by far. You probably have a higher chance of getting hit by a drunk driver than to even get a small injury on a commercial airplane, because all the failure modes of airplanes and individual parts have been worked out. Every kind of new part, new systems and new material introduces new failure modes that have to be discovered, mitigated and the mitigation be distributed around the world.