MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dahart | 2025-05-16 15:18:36+00:00
What does the lack of light quote prove? That’s a statement about color resolution, not range, and it uses “high dynamic range” and not “HDR content”. I think you’ve missed my point and are not listening.

Yes tone mapping is used on HDR images. It just doesn’t imply HDR. SDR gamma is tone mapping, for example, which the Wikipedia link you sent explains. Your claim is that Adams use of tone mapping is evidence that he is capturing “HDR content”. The paper you sent doesn’t use that language, it doesn’t ever say Adams was doing tone mapping, it says they develop a tone mapping method inspired by Adams’ zone system that extends the idea into higher dynamic range.

You’re using your own misunderstanding and mis-interpretation of my comments as evidence that they’re wrong. Hey I totally might be wrong about a lot of things, and sure maybe I’m completely non-sensical, but you certainly haven’t convinced me of that. I haven’t had trouble speaking with other people about HDR imaging, people who are HDR experts. All I’m getting out of this so far is that some people react very badly to any hint of critique.

From my perspective, I’m also only hearing bumbling errors, errors like that HDR is an adjective, that LDR doesn’t exist and nobody uses it, that using “range” is incorrect when I say it but not when you do and “window of luminance values” is better, and that Ansel Adams was doing HDR imaging.

Ben, we’re having a bona-fide miscommunication, and I wanted to fix it but I’m failing, and it feels like you’re determined not to fix it or find any common ground. In another environment we’d probably be having a friendly, productive and enlightening conversation. I’m sure there are some things I could learn from you.
by bluGill | 2025-05-16 15:18:37+00:00
I suspect you are cherry-picking. Not that your observations are wrong, but your validating kids seems like something that is very important a set of kids that I could see someone having a job dealing with, but that doesn't mean all kids need that - the set that doesn't isn't the set you will be working with.

> A school where they aren't allowed to learn about what they are interested in, and can only learn the government-mandated testable knowledge

We need to be careful here. While kids should have some opportunities for what they are interested in, the world doesn't need many professional video game or sport players. We need to force kids who are really interested in some things to learn skills that the world will need once they grow up. We are not in a "post scarcity" world, and there is no reason to think we will be, so they need to learn useful skills to contribute to society. It doesn't take long to teach someone to run a pick-axe (assuming they are physically able and we don't care much about safety) - but glad the world needs skills that are much harder to learn.
by diggan | 2025-05-16 15:18:54+00:00
> Is React the driver? Do devs just not know? Is management pushing garbage?

I'd say developers who aren't web developers trying to do web dev seems to be the cause of this. Understanding the platform you're developing for is pretty much table stakes for any developer, and not understanding when to use <a> is pretty much the most basic mistake you can make. Literally the first things you learn in web development is about linking to other pages, yet somehow still people fuck up putting a <a> into a webpage properly. Boggles my mind.

React makes it as easy as any other library/framework, but if you don't think about what ends up in the DOM, and why certain things have to be a specific way (often for accessibility and user experience), then you'll screw up even big and expensive projects like this apparently. 2x boggling since this project is literally all about user experience yet they get the most fundamental part of the web wrong.
by wenc | 2025-05-16 15:19:12+00:00
> I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.

Off topic: I think that’s generally true in an 8 hr work day, but I find in a 10 hr work day I can actually be productive for up to 7 hrs. It’s a non linearity due to chunking.

When I worked 8 hrs, I spent mornings reading news, did a bit of work (1-2 hours), then it was lunch time, then surfed a bit to ease my way back to work, and worked a couple hours (another 1-2 hours) and then it was time to go home —- leaving at 4:45 because if I left any later I had to fight traffic. So you’re right - about 4 hours.

Nowadays, I work a 10 hr work day, and I can actually squeeze about 7 productive hrs in. I do a bit of work in the morning (2 hrs), then lunch and then some news reading, and then back to work (3 hrs) until 3pm when I go for a walk. When I get back at 4pm, I still have 2 more hours so I manage to get more work in because 2 hours is enough time to start something substantial. In an 8 hr work day, I’m already getting ready to go home so am not inclined to start anything new.

The chunking works so much better in a 10 hr work day. Humans are poor context switchers, and it’s hard to start back up. But a longer work day lets me account for the startup time, and gives me more productive chunks of time. Traffic is also better after 6pm. 10 hr work days are also more leisurely because there are two long breaks (lunch and afternoon)

Of course I’m not advocating for this - folks have kids and other hobbies, and you shouldn’t have to give your employer more hours than contracted. But I’m just saying if one has to extract more productive hours in a work day, this seems to work.

Or do as the Germans do. I worked out of Germany once and saw that everyone worked 3 hrs, then 30 minute lunch, and then 4 hours. Coffee breaks sprinkled in between, but everybody was almost robotic in their focus.
by biorach | 2025-05-16 15:19:23+00:00
None of those were independent projects or open standards. VScode and pyright are both MS projects from the get-go.

Sabotaging forks is scummy, but the forks were extending MS functionality, not the other way around.

GitHub was a private company before it was bought by MS. Rate limiting is.... not great, but certainly not an extinguish play.

EEE refers to the subversion of open standards or independent free software projects. It does not apply to any of the above.

MS are still scummy but at least attack them on their own demerits, and don't parrot some schtick from decades ago.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-16 15:19:33+00:00
> Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both

Poland was not in the USSR. Polish remained the working language in the Polish People's Republic

> Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate

Hindi-Urdu was never exterminated by the British. In fact, it was the British that helped make it the de facto language in most of South Asia.

Before the British, Dari was the working language of administration. When the British began co-opting local administrations in the 19th century, Hindi-Urdu was used as the primary register, and my family has ancestral documents showing this change (Dari/Farsi to Urdu/Hindi to English for land documents).

---------

The only dead language that I can think of that was revived was Hebrew, but modern Hebrew is entirely different from that which was spoken millennia ago, and is a mixture of litigurical Hebrew, Arabic (plenty of Mizrahi influence along with the Sabra movement during the start of Israel), Russian (heavily used for mechanical terms), and German (heavily used to scientific terms).
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-16 15:19:54+00:00
My dentist recommended an electric toothbrush, I saw at Target I could get one that takes AA batteries for about half the price of a rechargeable one. I have a large stock of NiMH rechargeable AA batteries so when it runs out I can pick out batteries from the bin. I change batteries once a month or so, the laser charger doesn't seem too necessary to me.
by beeflet | 2025-05-16 15:19:56+00:00
payment channels and the "lightning network" present solutions to the micro-transaction problem for bitcoin. They are worth looking into. However on bitcoin, they wouldn't be sufficient alone to scale up the network.

The problems of bitcoin go back to the 2017 block size wars. I think it is possible to scale the network up through a combination of measures (bigger blocks, payment channels, atomic swaps). But for better or worse, the current (BTC) developers have prioritized maintaining bitcoin's legacy and have split off from the other group of developers (BCH and others) specializing it into an efficient payment network. So BTC itself is a bad example of what cryptocurrency is capable of today, it has old network parameters that sort of gimp it. Those $1 fees you're seeing are not representative of the current state of technology.

You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices. The floor of 0.1 cents is prohibitive for a lot of micro-transactions. It's not hard to imagine a world in which 1 satoshi is worth a couple dollars or something, which would pretty much eliminate the use case of micro-transactions altogether.
by lesser23 | 2025-05-16 15:20:34+00:00
> I stopped doing the extra work, no longer respond to questions that are out-of-hours, and have finally realized that the company really isn't my 'friend' or 'family'. But best of all, when I'm at the office I can just coast and do practically no work whatsoever - and not only does no-one notice, I've even been getting more managerial praise for my performance.

Perhaps I’ve been jaded by the industry after being in it so long but this struck me. I haven’t felt this way about any company, good or bad, in a long time. After surviving probably my 10th layoff across 5 different companies I can’t imagine ever being loyal, considering anyone at a company a “friend”, and most certainly not “family”.

I agree with your feeling that remote has really made me more productive. But I believe that’s because of the opposite of what you stated. I loved the ability to get a bunch of stuff done and then zone out the rest of the day. Without the constant interruptions, open office, etc I was able to get one giant burst of productivity and then check out. I was on paper “10x” and just omitted the fact I was only working 2/3 time.

Recently with RTO and myself being remote only I’ve been led to burnout. The company I am at has changed the merit equation from good work to showing up to the office. As a result, I end up picking up more slack during my workday as my coworkers get lunches, game rooms, parties, etc. I am still expected to grind and they are not. I sure do miss the remote first days.
by sidrag22 | 2025-05-16 15:20:52+00:00
paid for a year of claude all at once and deeply regret it the last month or so. seems like it just tries to do so much extra lately. feel like half of my prompts lately are just reiterating that i dont want it to try to do more than i ask...

if i dont do that it always seems to throw out 3 fresh files ill need to add to make their crazy implementation work.

ive pretty much swapped to using it just for asking for minor syntax stuff i forget. ill take my slower progress in favor of fully grasping everything ive made.

i have one utility that was largely helped by claude in my current project. it drives me nuts, it works but im so terrified of it and its so daunting to change now.
by speakfreely | 2025-05-16 15:21:35+00:00
> The Cartels have substantially more power than the state.

This is a common misconception. The state can absolutely dominate any cartel in Mexico, they just choose not to for political reasons.

> relearning their ancient languages that were nearly destroyed by their colonizers

Nahuatl is actually a colonizer language. The Aztecs brutally subjugated other native peoples, so brutally in fact that those groups were extremely eager to ally with the Spanish to overthrow the Aztec empire.
by lasdp | 2025-05-16 15:21:48+00:00
As a user I love apple products for making payments safe. I can get a refund if the item I bought is not as advertised or I bought it by mistake, I don't need to figure out how to cancel a subscription, it's couple clicks to cancel for any subscription. I don't want apple to allow purchases outside the app as I'm afraid companies will leverage their power to redirect users outside of App Store to bypass those "payment safety" features that do not benefit them and will use fishy tactics to increase their profits.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-16 15:22:06+00:00
Yes, its early popularity was very much management-driven, based on magazine articles and the like. Its object-oriented design (often presented as if something new) was supposed to make programmers fungible, and its portability was supposed to let you build an app that would run on anything. And it had a Real Corporation behind it, which appealed to corporate management.

In the late 90s, I got stuck making a scheduling program in Java, but it had to run on the 16-bit Windows systems of the time. That was a huge pain, because the 16-bit version didn't have all the capabilities that management was expecting based on the hype. These days, I sometimes have to install enormous enterprise applications that tie up north of 32G of RAM even though they're just basic hardware management tools that would take a fraction of that if built in something like C++ with a standard GUI library. I manage to avoid Java most of the time, but it's been an occasional thorn in my side for 30 years.
by dughnut | 2025-05-16 15:22:07+00:00
My employer is tightening the screws. I get it. RTO externalizes costs and privatizes benefit. The incentives are not aligned for remote work, and it’s a publicly traded firm with an obligation to maximize shareholder value. I get it. While middle management should know if line of business employees are actually producing useful work, regardless of location, expecting 40 or 50-somethings to be engaged at work and not spend their day running personal errands is not realistic. So physical presence is the shareholders’ only option.

I see it as a pay cut where commute and prep hours are uncompensated, and I adjust my valuation of the job accordingly.
by ben7799 | 2025-05-16 15:22:11+00:00
Java beta & 1.0 were released my Freshman year of college and I've been writing Java ever since. With the exception of one job where we tried to write a Java-style Enterprise security cloud application in Python every commercial product I've worked on has been built in primarily Java, often times with other languages on the edges of the application.

The key thing I think with Java is the programming model & structure scale well with team size and with codebase size, perhaps even in a way that tolerates junior developers, outsourced sub-teams, and even lower quality developers. All of those things end up becoming part of your reality on big Enterprise products, so if the language is somehow adding some tolerance for it that is a good thing.

The other things around Syntax and such that people complain about? Those are often minor considerations once the team size and code base size get large enough. Across my career there has always been the lone guy complaining that if we did everything in a LISP derived language everything would be perfect. But that guy has almost always been the guy who worked on a small tool off by himself, not on the main product.

Java has changed a tremendous amount as well. A modern Java system has very little in common with something written before Generics and before all the Functional code has been added. Where I work now we have heavily exploited the Functional java add-ons for years, it has been fantastic.
by ramesh31 | 2025-05-16 15:22:54+00:00
>Resume driven design is one of the worst forces in modern technology. Every designer is looking to make a name for themself by building a bespoke design system/language/framework. The best design is less design.

Goes equally for engineering these days. How many re-implementations of the same idea have been driven over and over again so that someone can claim "open source project with 800 stars" on their resume? It's nauseating and poisons the well for people trying to find a reliable lib. Add to that the social media "influencer" folks who crap out some pointless tiny repo and push it to their followers who don't know any better, resulting in 5000 stars for something that is completely half baked and has no chance of ever being maintained or extended.
by mjl- | 2025-05-16 15:22:59+00:00
Using tls client auth certificates for submission would make slightly more sense indeed. But who would request LE certificates to install them on desktops/phones of individuals? That sounds more complicated than managing your own client certificates.

In my mail server, accounts can use TLS client authentication with submission and imap. But only the public key in the certificate is used, to identify the account. No verification of name or before/after time. You just save the public key with an account, or remove it when you no longer want to allow it. No external CA to trust, or internal CA to run, and no automatic expiration of your connectivity.

As for LE: I think they want to keep things simple. AFAIK they are a relatively small organization. Every task they take on weighs on them. They also don't sign certificates for use with S/MIME.
by cestith | 2025-05-16 15:23:16+00:00
This is a good article as far as it digs, but it misses an important fact of government regulation that allowed the things it reported as from government and private cooperation.

Bell Labs existed largely because AT&T as a huge monopoly was under a consent decree that it could not leverage its technology outside the telecommunications industry. From that internal research and development branch of the company came the transistor, the laser, the communications satellite, the photovoltaic cell, the charge coupled device, underseas communication cables, the MOS transistor, the vocoder & voder (earlist audio codecs), modern cryptography, information science including binary encoding systems, zone melting for semiconductor purification, FET transistors, the electret microphone, OFDM encoding, Unix, C, SNOBOL, Awk, AMPL, C++, optical fiber, TDMA phone network, the discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect, laser cooling, SONET optical communications network, DSL, quantum factorization, W-CDMA communications, and one of the earliest de facto standard books on compilers (the Dragon book, in multiple editions).

The above list is incomplete. Imagine the modern world without one company gifting so many inventions and discoveries to the world. Oh, and they also happened to discover the cosmic microwave background in case you’re more of an astronomy buff than a computer geek.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-05-16 15:24:07+00:00
All these posts and no one mentioned their numerous, recent, abusive deeds around Windows or negligent security posture, all the while having captured Uncle Sam and other governments.

MS has continued to metastasize and is in some ways worse than the old days, even if they’ve finally accepted the utility of open source as a loss leader.

They have the only BigTech products I’ve been forced to use if I want to eat.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-16 15:24:19+00:00
If you're seriously interested in this topic, I'd suggest https://www.youtube.com/user/Drachinifel

Upside: He's a professional British naval historian, and knows this subject extremely well.

Downside: That I recall, he's never produced a video that concentrates on answering the "why was the Royal Navy so dominant..." question. Instead, he's covered the subject in bit and pieces across a huge number of videos.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-16 15:24:46+00:00
We "invest" more than almost anyone. 38% higher than the OECD average. I don't find discussions about throwing more money at the problem to be constructive so much as a way to ignore other issues at play.

I don't really see how this affects e.g. what I do for my children. I will absolutely be turning them into the closest to superhuman the current state of treatments lets me, traveling internationally if I need to. If someone else decides to segregate access to treatment, that is a separate, wrong act that will not hold me back from giving my children every advantage possible.

(Yes, I understand this is a positional arms race, but 1. that doesn't change the individually-optimal outcome, and 2. that doesn't change that society net benefits from it.)
by oldandboring | 2025-05-16 15:25:02+00:00
Meanwhile, as I read this, the very next link on HN after this one is: https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurf-wave-9-swe-1

in which Windsurf is forging ahead with an agentic LLM product that endeavors to not only replace software engineers but actually take over the entire software engineering PROCESS.

We're at a very interesting point, where investors and corporate interests are crystal clear in their intent to use LLMs to replace as many expensive humans as possible, while the technology available to do so is not there yet. And depending on your own perspective, it's not clear it ever will be, or perhaps it'll eventually be "good enough" for them to downsize us anyway.

I keep thinking about compilers. The old timers had been writing assembly by hand for years. The early C compilers were producing defective garbage output that was so incredibly poor that it was faster to keep coding by hand. Then the compilers got better. And better, and better, and now pretty much nobody inspects the output, let alone questions it.
by hiatus | 2025-05-16 15:25:05+00:00
Have you been through any sort of audit like SOC 2 or ISO 27001? Can't see any enterprises even engaging in a conversation without something like that.

As a person who works in security in a large enterprise, I'd expect some kind of audit, pentest results, and more available in some type of trust center. And that's before we even send a security questionnaire that digs into your processes and controls.
by thunkingdeep | 2025-05-16 15:25:10+00:00
Complete assclown behavior throughout. It would be one thing if this had been going for for a month or two, maybe a quarter or two… but ten years?! They’re clearly fucking you over out of either malice and/or incompetence, and by allowing it to go on, you’re politely enabling them to do this bad behavior to someone else’s business.

If you feed stray dogs, you end up with a neighborhood full of dogshit everywhere you step. Bill them; if they don’t pay, talk to an attorney.
by thewebguyd | 2025-05-16 15:26:31+00:00
> since employees with slack time can no longer be trusted to hopefully work on something that's beneficial for the company.

This is firmly the fault of the company(ies). When raises are so few or so little that the only way to help yourself is to change companies, or when despite your "dedication" to the company you are afraid of layoffs at anytime, you aren't going to care about the benefit of the company and are solely looking after your own interests.

Companies expect loyalty but give none back in return anymore, and employee attitude now is a direct result of the company's behavior.
by busterarm | 2025-05-16 15:26:49+00:00
It's almost not worth commenting here because of the reaction I expect to receive. There are a ton of people in this industry who received every opportunity in life because of class and yet are unwaveringly sure that this industry is a meritocracy.

My company hires its software engineers out of the "top schools" and it almost feels like I wrote this post. We have a lot of people who got here through hard work too, but the problem with the other group is that they're completely convinced that their ideas are correct. On everything.