MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitexploder | 2025-05-15 15:14:53+00:00
You are right but it misses the flavor of the problem. I was a consultant in infosec to F500s for many years. Often solving a problem involves simply knowing the right person that has already thought about it or toiled on the problem or a similar one. But when there are 100,000 engineers it becomes an order of magnitude (or two!) more difficult and that puts forth unique challenges. You can still call them “people problems” and they often may be. However if you try to solve them the same way you might solve it at a smaller engineering org you will get and be nowhere and be poorer for the time you spent trying it. Ask me how I know lol. The technical problems are also like that. Almost everything has an analog or similar thing to what you are probably familiar with but it is scaled out, has a lot of unfamiliar edges and is often just different enough that you have to adjust your reasoning model. Things you can just do at even a typical f500 you can’t just do at big tech scale. Anyway, you are directionally correct and many of these wounds are self inflicted. But running a company like Google or Facebook is ridiculously hard and there are no easy answers, we just do our best.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-05-15 15:14:56+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-leak...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/uber-became-big-by-ignoring-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber references over 100 articles of Uber's behavior. This is not bias; this is fact.
by gdubs | 2025-05-15 15:15:03+00:00
Incredibly useful for 'glue code' or internal apps that are for automating really annoying processes - but where normally the time it would take to develop those tools would add up and take away from the core work.

For instance, dealing with files that don't quite work correctly between two 3D applications because of slightly different implementations. Ask for a python script to patch the files so that they work correctly – done almost instantly just by describing the problem.

Also for prototyping. Before you spend a month crafting a beautiful codebase, just get something standing up so you can evaluate whether it's worth spending time on – like, does the idea have legs?

90% of programming problems get solved with a rubber ducky – and this is another valuable area. Even if the AI isn't correct, often times just talking it through with an LLM will get you to see what the solution is.
by mattlondon | 2025-05-15 15:15:07+00:00
Responding to myself since multiple asked:

Slow: many many journeys via bus are usually at least 4 to 5x slower than driving. Typical example for me to go to the nearest large supermarket from where I live (approx 2 miles) is a 7 minute drive (so average 18mph) and pennies in fuel/energy costs or a 44 minute bus journey with a 9 minute walk at the end (each way) that requires changing buses half-way and costs £1.75 x 2 = £3.50 return unless you get a hopper fair. it's actually quicker to walk-tube-walk (38 minutes) but that is I think £4.20 return just for a quick shop at the big Tescos! It would only take 41 minutes to walk the whole way, so a bus is actually slower than walking.

Unreliable: just this week the tubes all stopped due to a "power blip" meaning I missed an appointment. This morning the train I was on changed it's destination after I got on it, meaning I had to get off and go back to a junction and get another train, which incidentally I had to wait 7 minutes for and it was packed. There is a joke about "TfL minutes" because the minutes they show on the countdown clocks at bus stations and tube stations are typically significantly longer than real minutes. There barely goes by a month without at least the threat of industrial action either, meaning you have to reschedule things just incase (and usually these are called off at the last minute meaning the union got what they wanted, TfL can say they avoided the strike, but you and I have already had to alter our plans or rebook meetings or pay for extra childcare etc already but because it is called off within 12-24 hours you are too late to cancel your own plans without penalties etc etc)

Dirty: look at your hands after getting the tube and holding onto a handrail. Or blow your nose. It's dirty. No one can deny this. The air in the tube is worse than the air on the street in terms of PM2.5 etc - there have been many studies on this

General awfulness: try getting on a rushhour train. If you can physically squeeze on to a train that is. And if you do, it's a pretty unpleasant, sweaty, gross, frottagy horror story.

People who think that it is this amazing nirvana are deluding themselves. Are there worse places? Sure. But let's not delude ourselves that it is by any regard "good". I guess if you are visiting from somewhere else on vacation then there is a novelty-factor, but if you have to do the 9-5 grind for decades at a time, if you have appointments to keep, a boss that yells at you if you are late, kids to collect on time from school (or they grass you up to social services because you can't answer the phone because you are trapped underground), or anything that requires a cheap and reliable service that you can count on then it sucks.
by richardfontana | 2025-05-15 15:15:34+00:00
> The most flabbergasting thing was the absence of Metro ring lines around the center. The fact these have not been built, in 2025, when Metro transport networks in most cities are now over a century old, is telling.

I'm having trouble imagining where a useful ring line could exist in the New York metropolitan area or within the city itself, given its geography, longstanding commuter movement patterns and other characteristics. Maybe you could have a relatively small ring just in midtown Manhattan?
by surajrmal | 2025-05-15 15:15:35+00:00
For the most part true, but there exists patterns I can do safely and easily in c++ which I cannot in rust. Structured concurrency being one of the major ones. If a child object takes a reference to the parent, I shouldn't need to do it by way of an Arc, but because of the fact that leaking memory is safe, this isn't possible to do in rust without using the unsafe keyword. So I end up with more refcounting that I want. (This is often in the context of async). I don't bring this pattern back to c++ with me.
by dundarious | 2025-05-15 15:15:35+00:00
Pardon me, but I prefer the original by 1 million miles.

let res = raw_api::query("SELECT * FROM Win32_Fan"); for obj in res { if obj.get_attr("ActiveCooling") == Value::Bool(true) { if let Value::String(name) = obj.get_attr("Name") { if let Value::UI8(speed) = obj.get_attr("DesiredSpeed") { println!("Fan `{name}` is running at {speed} RPM"); } } } }

If actually concerned about the need to know UI8, then create a typedef DesiredSpeedT or similar. This is equivalent to the struct Fan.

Edit: I understand the post is probably more of a playful exercise than anything else, but I really think the original is far far better (smaller, simpler, etc.) and hope that is not lost on people.
by abraxas | 2025-05-15 15:15:35+00:00
It's very good. Postgres by itself can handle a very high volume of inserts (I did over 100,000 rows/s on very modest hardware). But timescale makes it easier to deal with that data. It's not strictly necessary but it's very time series friendly (good compression, good indexing and partitioning etc). Nothing a pg expert can't accomplish with a vanilla postgres but very, very handy.
by ericmay | 2025-05-15 15:15:47+00:00
Counterpoint: It was true for quite some time that a college degree, any degree for that matter, was the ticket. Just because that has seemed to change, and to some degree it has, to a large extent it hasn't, doesn't falsify the past.

As I see it, the college degree and its cost has become a scapegoat for poor government and political organization. Jeez these kids went into how much debt to get a job making how much money!? Well, what are we doing to provide good entry level opportunity and training for our young people? crickets.

Well, our businesses and even our government agencies have outsourced the initial hiring screening to colleges and universities - even today's big tech companies only hire at certain universities.

Government agencies demand specific credentials, whether that's a 4-year degree in a specific topic of study or a certification of some sorts - think Tableau cert for a government data analyst job.

And to bring this all back to how we build and our crappy transportation infrastructure, our entrepreneurship rates are down too - so even if you don't want to go to a 4-year university but instead bake at home and want to open a shop, you can't afford it because the spaces available are too large, there isn't enough foot traffic, and to build something out in the suburbs where you'll get drive-through traffic good luck competing with the efficiency of very very large corporations - i.e. playing on their home turf. Want to sell produce on the side from your home garden? At what farmer's market? The one you have to pay $500 to set up a booth on the sidewalk that everybody has to drive through? Very difficult to supplement your income on that.

So the cost and "uselessness" of the 4 - year degree is pretty well understood and harped on. But we shouldn't over index on that when there are plenty of other associated issues that may be even more important. Basically, we're looking at this big target of college degrees and MBAs or whatever because that's easy to do so - number big make number small. But there are just far more associated issues that contribute to this broad problem and they need attention too.
by ksec | 2025-05-15 15:15:51+00:00
> JD.com (9618.HK), is selling the iPhone 16 Pro with storage of 128GB at 5,469 yuan

That is roughly $759, including sales Tax and import tax. So Chinese government collects around $100 of tax revenue. Compared to the US $999, before sales tax. Apple is effectively selling it below $659. Assuming JD is making some profits although that may not always be true.

But in any case I have been saying this for so many years I dont know why it hasn't gotten traction. Apple's has been pricing the world's iPhone to subsidise the Chinese market while maintaining their own margin.
by tzs | 2025-05-15 15:16:17+00:00
Identifying groups of people that could be customers but aren't because of some external factor and figuring out if you can do something to mitigate that factor is a perfectly normal part of business.

A company doing that isn't trying to solve the underlying issue. That is indeed, as you noted, probably something they cannot do and others are better equipped to handle it.

For instance suppose you find out that many women with young children are not coming to your business because they have no one to look after the kids while the mother is there. You might add a supervised playroom so the mothers can bring the kids and leave them in the playroom.

This doesn't come anywhere near solving the underlying issue of daycare being too expensive for many parents but it could increase your business and make the lives of those mothers tangibly better.
by raphinou | 2025-05-15 15:16:22+00:00
What I did is ask Google Gemini to generate me a static site generator using data in a sqlite database. It's a Show HN I just submitted [1], and you can see the generated website at https://freshstuff.net/

Might be an approach you could take too.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43995776
by klondono | 2025-05-15 15:16:47+00:00
I've tried this. Unfortunately, I don't know if the problem has been that they are the wrong people or probably I'm not that good at selling my idea.

Also, I relate that young people are more willing to help but also to quit. I have a younger brother who is a graphic designer; he supports me a lot, he is very disciplined, but I don't see where he can fit in my early software development cycle. I usually ask him for support when I need graphic pieces, but that is not that common, so in an ideal world, he would be my partner :)
by hinkley | 2025-05-15 15:17:27+00:00
I’ve worked at a couple places where someone had the balls to just get up and leave the meeting room at around 70-80 minutes to force a break. If we are going to be stuck in here I’m going to the bathroom and to get more coffee.

Usually by this point the stuffy room and long meeting have people going in circles. Getting up, opening the door, getting the blood moving while one or two groups have a little sidebar, usually causes the rest of the meeting to wrap up fast.
by ikuta417 | 2025-05-15 15:18:13+00:00
Hello HN,

I’ve struggled to find a simple, clean website for book recommendations with a sleek UI, so I built one.

BookDiscoveree is my first indie hacker project. It's a minimal tool for finding your next great reads, based on books you already love, and telling you what you will get out of a book.

How it works:

- (Optionally) choose a category (like “Actionable Insights” or “Light Fun”)

- Enter a few books you’ve enjoyed

- Get personalized recommendations from a curated list of 40,000+ top-rated books

- Each comes with a short AI-generated summary focused on what you’ll actually gain from reading it

Enjoy :)
by AbstractH24 | 2025-05-15 15:18:28+00:00
> It's going to be a slow burn for the working age population to realize your job is just a job and it isn't your identity

This is the stage a lot of my millennials friends seem to be in.

What I struggle with is spending most of my waking hours doing something that isn't part of my identity. Particularly as half of a DINK couple.
by kognate | 2025-05-15 15:18:45+00:00
Yes, this exists now. You can ask Claude to output the document in markdown format and then convert that markdown into HTML, or ask for the output in HTML. For example, using Claude 3.7 Sonnet the following prompt outputs a vanilla HTML document:

write two paragraphs extolling the benefits to mariners of the Jones act and provide the output formatted in vanilla html
by gwd | 2025-05-15 15:18:47+00:00
> When 2:50 rolled around and your meeting was supposed to end, do you think people actually ended the meeting? Noooooo. Absolutely not!

At U of M, they solved this problem by having classes officially start 10 minutes after the time they were advertised as. That is, a class listed as being 10-11am was actually 10:10-11am; nobody showed up until 10:10.

Sure, technically it's the same thing, but there's a pretty massive anchoring effect for things on the hour. Still being in the meeting room at 11:01 feels a lot later than still being in the meeting room at 10:51.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-15 15:19:41+00:00
It's also complexity - added more than necessary, and @ a faster pace than hardware can keep up with.

Take font rendering: in early machines, fonts were small bitmaps (often 8x8 pixels, 1 bit/pixel), hardcoded in ROM. As screen resolutions grew (and varied between devices), OSes stored fonts in different sizes. Later: scalable fonts, chosen from a selection of styles / font families, rendered to sub-pixel accuracy, sub-pixel configuration adjustable to match hw construction of the display panel.

Yeah this is very flexible & can produce good looking fonts (if set up correctly). Which scale nicely when zooming in or out.

But it also makes rendering each single character a lot more complex. And thus eats a lot more cpu, RAM & storage than 8x8 fixed size, 1bpp font.

Or the must-insert-network-request-everywhere bs. No, I don't need search engine to start searching & provide suggestions after I've typed 1 character & didn't hit "search" yet.

There are many examples like the above, I won't elaborate.

Some of that complexity is necessary. Some of it isn't, but lightweight & very useful. But much of it is just a pile of unneeded crap of dubious usefulness (if any).

Imho, software development really should return to 1st principles. Start with a minimum viable product, that only has the absolute necessary functionality relevant to end-users. Don't even bother to include anything other than the absolute minimum. Optimise the heck out of that, and presto: v1.0 is done. Go from there.
by SapporoChris | 2025-05-15 15:19:56+00:00
While I wish it was a HIPAA violation, I am not sure it qualifies. "The HIPAA standards apply to covered entities and business associates “where provided” by §160.102. Covered entities are defined as health plans, healthcare clearinghouses, and healthcare providers who electronically transmit PHI in connection with transactions for which HHS has adopted standards" https://www.hipaajournal.com/what-is-a-hipaa-violation/#what...

Covered California is a health insurance marketplace. It is not an Insurance Carrier or an Insurance Clearing house. Perhaps they're guilty of something else?
by techpineapple | 2025-05-15 15:20:15+00:00
"Growing Tesla from a $59 billion company to a $650 billion company was pretty ambitious, but he did it; growing Tesla from a $1.1 trillion company to, you know, a $10 trillion company seems less realistic."

Isn't FSD Robotaxi and Optimus an infinite money hack that's going to make Tesla far and away the biggest company in the world? Musk keeps saying this so, it seems like a pay package that supports this is more than fair.

But actually, I know this was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it's really interesting navigating the relationship between sort of investors who drive up the value of Tesla because they think Musk can do amazing things, and also, no one thinking a pay package like this might be fair because Musk can't do said amazing things.

Like Tesla seems valued partially from the anticipation that potential he could rocket it to a 10 trillion dollar valuation.
by nayuki | 2025-05-15 15:20:17+00:00
Oh, this is a neat demo. I took Geoff Hinton's neural networks course in university 15 years ago and he did spend a couple of lectures explaining Boltzmann machines.

> A Restricted Boltzmann Machine is a special case where the visible and hidden neurons are not connected to each other.

This wording is wrong; it implies that visible neurons are not connected to hidden neurons.

The correct wording is: visible neurons are not connected to each other and hidden neurons are not connected to each other.

Alternatively: visible and hidden neurons do not have internal connections within their own type.
by unsolved73 | 2025-05-15 15:20:38+00:00
Interesting proposal.

The current situation is getting worse day after day because everybody want to ScRaPe 4lL Th3 W38!!

Verifying Ed25519 signature is almost free on modern CPUs, I just wonder why they go with an obscure RFC for HTTP signatures instead of using plain JSON Web Tokens in an header.

JWTs are universal. Parsing this custom format will certainly lead to a few interesting bugs.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-15 15:21:15+00:00
I don’t like this definition of “good engineer” because it seems degenerate with “good businessman” or “good product designer.”

He was a bad engineer: early implementations of Facebook were buggy, insecure, and not featureful. I agree that engineering is not valued in-and-of itself generally (it is just a tool), but instead of turning it into something inherently valued by changing the definition of it, we should just admit that it isn’t valued in-and-of itself. I mean, in all fields (other than some art, maybe) the end result is valued more by outsiders than the process to get there…
by corytheboyd | 2025-05-15 15:21:38+00:00
FWIW sounds like a great use case for some rules files. I’ve only worked with Cursor and Roo but they both support it.

This of course only works for the “stop recommending X” part of your problem, but maybe something like the project here helps fill in with up-to-date documentation too?

Both Cursor and Roo also support URL context additions, which downloads the page and converts it to a machine readable format to include in context. I throw documentation links into my tasks with that all the time, which works out because I know that I am going to be sanity checking generated code against documentation anyway.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-15 15:22:39+00:00
At least you can often sit down in Tokyo if you aren't traveling on peak. In Beijing, you never get to sit unless you are clever about your route (e.g. taking the line 10 the long way around when going to West Beijing, rather than transferring to line 1 in guomao). A 1 hour+ trip standing feels a lot longer than 1 hour.

As you say, the solution of course is to not go that far on a daily basis. You can make your life convenient, as long as you are living alone.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-05-15 15:23:00+00:00
I work in the billing space at Lago, so I think I can add a bit of color (though I'm also somewhat confused).

Technically speaking, billing and payments are two separate things.

For example: OpenAI needs to calculate how much you need to pay for the tokens you consumed across all of its models. That usage aggregation, calculation and then issuing of an invoice is billing—payments is only the transfer of money.
by ohr | 2025-05-15 15:23:10+00:00
That's understandable, but I think it depends on how many different structs like this you have and how many fields you need to work with (for our usecase, we had tens of structs with tens of fields each).

There's also an Alternatives section in the article about other approaches that can achieve similar results, but of course 'do nothing' is also a valid option.

Edit: > If actually concerned about the need to know UI8 ..

Just a small note: even if you don't care about the fact that it's a UI8, you still have to use the correct type. For example, if the field happens to be returned as UI4, this code won't work!
by ujkhsjkdhf234 | 2025-05-15 15:23:16+00:00
This is meta because the immediate flagging of anything tangentially related to Musk or Trump is tiring and the exact opposite of critical thinking. Despite knowing that Hacker News rulers love Musk and Trump, I would expect better from the alleged critical thinking community. If this were Google instead of Grok, it would be front page. Oh wait, it was Google at one point[0] and it was front page.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250
by thegeomaster | 2025-05-15 15:23:29+00:00
What is absolutely essential to present here, but is missing, is a rigorous evaluation of task completion effectiveness between an agent using this format vs the original format. It has to be done on a new library which is guaranteed not to be present in the training set.

As it stands, there is nothing demonstrating that this lossy compression doesn't destroy essential information that an LLM would need.

I also have a gut feeling that the average LLM will actually have more trouble with the dense format + the instructions to decode it than a huge human-readable file. Remember, LLMs are trained on internet content, which contains terabytes of textual technical documentation but 0 bytes of this ad-hoc format.

I am happy to be proven wrong on both points (LLMs are also very unpredictable!), but the burden of proof for an extravagant scheme like this lies solely on the author.
by bentcorner | 2025-05-15 15:25:29+00:00
My team does this, most scheduled meetings are scheduled 5m/10m after the hour. Meetings usually end at the hour or before. Our calendar defaults to start/end on the hour so sometimes one-off meetings will start/end on the hour but those are usually 2-3 people and focused on solving some problem so they don't usually last the full time anyway.

For the larger scheduled meetings, if they drag over the hour because of some conversation our culture is that people leave/drop if they're not interested.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-15 15:25:39+00:00
Don't get me wrong, Postgres is awesome when things work.

But, for example I was working on a .net project and entity framework decided it couldn't migrate Postgres tables correctly.

I'm not a SQL person, at this point my options are to drop tables, and let .net recreate them or try and write my own migrations.

This just isn't an issue with Firebase. I can add all the fields I want directly on the client.