MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by soraminazuki | 2025-05-15 15:46:04+00:00
Oh, so you're from that other universe. In America that the rest of us know, telecoms are among the most hated companies in the country [1]. Private equity are wrecking hospitals [2]. Drug prices are allowed to spiral out of control [3].

And oh my, you even went with the "airplane crashes are caused by DEI" racist BS. The FAA allowed Boeing to conduct safety inspections for their own planes [4], and that's supposed to be a "DEI problem" instead of a spectacular lack of real regulation?

You can't even cancel your gym without sending a certified mail [5], and that to you is "excessive consumer protection."

You need to get your reality in check.

[1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/internet-service-providers-ha...

[2]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/01/hospitals-slash-staff...

[3]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/dubious-56000-alzhei...

[4]: https://archive.is/2024.01.12-153350/https://www.ft.com/cont...

[5]: https://consumerrights.wiki/Click-to-cancel
Show HN: Undetectag, track stolen items with AirTag
by pompidoo | 2025-05-15 15:46:26+00:00
I developed a device that turns an Airtag on and off at specific intervals. Current Airtags are detectable right away and cannot be used to track stolen property. That device allows you to hide an Airtag in your car, for example, and someone that steals your car will not be able to use some app to detect it. The Airtag will also not warn the thief of its presence. After some hours, the Airtag turns on again and you can find out its location. It’s not foolproof, as the timing has to be right, but still useful.

What do you think?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-15 15:46:41+00:00
Ramsay really knows how to cook. Ramsay has managed restaurants and studied his craft and perfected his technique in the kitchen. He thereafter became an entertainer to share his love of cuisine with others. So yes, his expertise does often take a backseat to the entertainment value of whatever he's doing. But I believe that this is part of the thesis of the article we're discussing here: that Ramsay's extensive expertise does not prevent him from conveying bad information.

I would say that a lot of these examples fall under the category of "cargo culting". There is a lot of cargo culting in the culinary arts. Since a kitchen is basically a chemistry lab where biological miracles happen several times a day, no housewife or chef can be fully versed in the actual biochemical sciences that are governing what they do every day. There is so much "institutional knowledge" and "traditional know-how" that can't be written down or codified; it's merely handed on from one expert to the next. It's like Zen Buddhism, which has no formalized doctrine, but there's a lot of expertise to transmit from one master to the next!

Therefore a lot of cargo-culting intervenes here. Everyone has their idea of how to make perfect hard-boiled eggs. Everyone wants to show you exactly how to season a cast-iron pan. Everyone has one weird trick that will make the perfect roasted vegetables.

And I've found that nearly all these recipes online leave out vital information. If you don't already know how to cook, don't try learning by following online recipes. You'll fail bigtime. Also, any recipe on the side of a container, like the ones which come with your spice bottles or a box of yeast or something. They're omitting valuable expertise that only a seasoned chef will know. You'll always need to re-inject your experience when following someone else's instructions, because even if they intend to comprehensively explain the process, they'll always assume that you know how to get from Point A to Point B. Not everybody does.

I don't know the motives for passing along bullshit like that "room temperature steak" tidbit. Perhaps it's just to honor the people who taught him how to do it. Perhaps it's better safe than sorry. But oftentimes it's just cargo culting -- they've done it before this way, it turned out great, don't mess with perfection, just keep following the ritual correctly.
by neobrain | 2025-05-15 15:46:50+00:00
> I couldn't tell you the amount of times I've had to fight back against implementing yet another tracking tool at work, just to collect data that I know for a fact no one will look at after the first few weeks of the tool being there.

I'm curious, how does such a conversation usually go? Is your main angle to point out how useless the data ultimately will be, or did you find a resonating way to point out the negative effects on users?
by tom_m | 2025-05-15 15:46:59+00:00
They aren't increasing productivity. In the short term.

They are very handy tools that can help you learn a foreign code/base faster. They can help you when you run into those annoying blockers that usually take hours or days or a second set of eyes to figure out. They give you a sounding board and help you ask questions and think about the code more.

Big IF here. IF you bother to read. The danger is some people just keep clicking and re-prompting until something works, but they have zero clue what it is and how it works. This is going to be the biggest problem with AI code editors. People just letting Jesus take the wheel and during this process, inefficient usage of the tools will lead to slower throughput and a higher bill. AI costs a good chunk of change per token and that's only going up.

I do think it's addictive for sure. I also think the "productivity boost" is a feeling people get, but no one measures. I mean, it's hard to measure. Then again, if you do spend an hour on a problem you get stuck on vs 3 days then sure it helped productivity. In that particular scenario. Averaged out? Who knows.

They are useful tools, they are just also very misunderstood and many people are too lazy to take the time to understand them. They read headlines and unsubstantiated claims and get overwhelmed by hype and FOMO. So here we are. Another tech bubble. A super bubble really. It's not that the tools won't be with us for a long time or that they aren't useful. It's that they are way way overvalued right now.
by paddy_m | 2025-05-15 15:47:14+00:00
You can never build enough parking spots if the cost of parking is $0. Optimally managed parking charges variably so that there is always about 10% of spaces free in a block.

The entitlement of drivers to think they have a right to park a metal box wherever they want for free in the middle of the most expensive real estate in the world is staggering.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-15 15:47:41+00:00
Probably more common is that software isn't developed with end-users as #1 priority; it's developed to advance business goals.

Those 2 goals align about as often as planets in our solar system.

To some degree this is true for open source software as well. Developers may choose to work on features they find interesting (or projects done in a language they feel comfortable with), vs. looking at user experience first. Never mind that optimizing UX is hard (& fuzzy) as it is.

Or all the work done on libre software to cater to various corporate interests. As opposed to power users fixing & improving things for their needs.
by exiguus | 2025-05-15 15:48:03+00:00
Perhaps I wasn't clear, but I was referring to a small tool or a specific feature that, in my opinion, embodies your approach. Keeping the scope clear and minimizing cognitive load—through practices like code splitting—are essential. Implementing tests, whether unit, component, or integration tests, as part of your testing strategy, helps provide quick feedback on recent changes. As you would do it on a traditional codebase.
by ahaickccjdjdbd | 2025-05-15 15:48:35+00:00
Amazon disagrees with you, and they’re one of the best union busters in the business.

https://archive.is/1khJw

> Store-risk metrics include average store compensation, average total store sales, and a "diversity index" that represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity

Nearly all top tech companies pushed DEI, and nearly all of them were found to be involved in anti worker activities in the past.

On top of that, you can find many books about how diverse democracies fail - here’s one from obamas reading list: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Experiment-Diverse-Democracies-...

Additionally, here’s a quote from Aristotle on diversity: “ And it is a mark of a tyrant to have men of foreign extraction rather than citizens as guests at table and companions, feeling that citizens are hostile but strangers make no claim against him”.

Adding racial diversity is a tried and true tactic over millennia to allow a small group to rule over a larger. It prevents the populace from organizing and keeps them divided. It’s no coincidence the billionaires who are overseeing the ever increasing wealth gap have pushed “diversity is our strength” and convinced a large portion of the population to defend this position.
by dgb23 | 2025-05-15 15:49:24+00:00
WC1 has fairly blocky movement and is grid based. It seems like units literally move from tile to tile so to speak.

If this is actually the case, you could try the Lee algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_algorithm. It's extremely simple and effective.

You might want to try adjusting it for diagonal movement and you probably don't want to store obsolete path sections, but only turns.
by genewitch | 2025-05-15 15:49:45+00:00
I begin to wonder if all the commenters in this thread have compromised devices. I'm on a 5 year old Samsung (the model is, I bought it new six months ago) - my Linux machines are fast (gentoo) and my windows 10 and 11 machines are fast. My kid's computer is an i3 7350k and he plays roblox, Minecraft, teardown on it with no issues. That computer is a couple years older than he is at 9-10 years old. That computer's twin is my nas backup with 10gbe running windows - the drive array refused to work at any decent speed on Linux and I didn't want jbod, I wanted RAID.

Some things are slow, like discord on windows takes ~12 seconds before it starts to pop in ui elements after you double click. My main computer is beefy, though, 32 thread 128GB; but no NVMe. Sata spindle and SSDs. But I have Ryzen 3600s that run windows 11 fine.
by mannykannot | 2025-05-15 15:49:47+00:00
This is mentioned in the introduction here [1]. The version I'm looking at is an image, so I cannot easily copy-paste the relevant passage, but it seems to say that the efficiency gain comes from detonation causing the combustion to occur at a higher pressure than in the case of deflagration. Generally speaking, higher peak pressures increase the efficiency of heat engines, as this allows for greater expansion of the working fluid, and thus more work being done for the same fuel consumption.

With regard to your comparison, I guess this means that the detonation engine can have a higher pressure in the combustion chamber, together with a larger bell, a faster-moving exhaust, or some combination.

[1] https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2013-3971
by danans | 2025-05-15 15:50:02+00:00
> I think you're just grossly misunderstanding what I'm saying. If I can plug my phone into a monitor + keyboard + mouse & the phone can run VSCode with all my extensions, the point of a laptop drastically disappears.

In that case, you are tied to working in places that have a monitor + keyboard + mouse ready to plug into. Perhaps that isn't a problem for your work (or allows you to put needed boundaries around where you work), but there are many people who need to have an 11+" screen and keyboard in arbitrary places, like conference rooms, libraries, classrooms, job sites, etc.

> The point of avoiding a laptop is cost - I have a $3k laptop that's not providing any value over a monitor + keyboard + mouse especially when I already need the keyboard + mouse to do any coding.

I agree that a $3k laptop is overboard. Using a laptop like that for remote-desktop and web browsing has more to do with social-signaling. But it raises the question, did you buy the $3k laptop or did your employer? If it was your employer, is it your financial problem?

For my part, I do personal local development on an $800 laptop (a Chromebook) that works pretty great. If I were only using it for coding tasks with an external display and input devices like you describe, I bet I could just as well use a $200 laptop, but I do care about display quality in on-to-go use cases, so I spent more for a higher end display.

So I'm in full agreement that one should not throw away money at overpriced laptops, but the laptop form factor itself is still pretty indispensable for doing work in arbitrary places. Somehow, I don't see VR/AR goggles that Apple and Samsung are pushing replacing them any time soon.
by naasking | 2025-05-15 15:50:09+00:00
All well and good, but not an argument that the science here has to be publicly funded, and that a commercial research enterprise providing this library is not viable. The question was about what benefits come from the public funding, in particular, benefits that simply cannot be provided by a commercial enterprise or alternative approaches. You merely stated this was the case and I'm asking for the reasons.

Even supposing the costs associated with basic research can't be recouped commercially using existing technology, that does not suggest that alternatives are not possible. For instance, in a world in which this library was not created, perhaps the set of talented industrial chemists in our timeline would have studied physics or computer science instead and advanced quantum chemistry simulations that capture some, most or even all of the utility of this empirical approach.

I can look at what you describe and acknowledge that it's useful without automatically accepting that it's a) not commercializable, and b) impossible to work around, which is what you were implying.
by lesser23 | 2025-05-15 15:50:30+00:00
I have spoken to a few people in the "recruiting industry". In particular, one CEO of one. Both were rather frank discussions. Both told me that it is a complete waste of time to submit resumes and do follow up calls. Rather shocking. Indeed, they both suggested that networking and/or being nepo-hired is basically the only way you'll get in somewhere. That isn't a "big company with big goals" somewhere. This is a trend in almost every sector of software. If you're like a lot of people and need remote work due to not living in one of the 3-4 major tech hubs it's even harder.

I do remember a time when projects mattered. I believe my open source work 12 years ago was what got me the job even after I failed their coding test miserably.

It probably won't get better for a long time. I've been casually looking around for a new gig and even with over a decade of experience in software across the backend stack (bare metal and up) I don't fit a lot of the requirements. They want junior engineer grind, mid level pay, and staff+ level knowledge. As expected, it's a employer market now, and we're probably gonna be waiting for the glut of new CS grads, bootcampers, etc to give up and move on to other things.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-15 15:51:31+00:00
A degree has little real value nowadays.

I recently attended a college graduation of a family member. At the start of the ceremony, "latin honor graduates" were asked to stand. 2/3's of the graduating class stood up.

Believe it or not, it didn't used to be this way. Decades ago when I graduated, maybe 10-15% were honors graduates. Being in this group meant you were either smarter than average, you worked your ass off or both.

Nowadays, the main requirement for a degree is money. A degree proves very little beyond the fact that you obtained the money somehow and went through the necessary motions.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-15 15:51:48+00:00
Alternatively: visible and hidden neurons do not have internal connections within their own type.

I'm a bit unclear on how that isn't just an MLP. What's different about a Boltzmann machine?

Edit: never mind, I didn't realize I needed to scroll up to get to the introductory overview.

What 0xTJ's [flagged][dead] comment says about it being undesirable to hijack or otherwise attempt to reinvent scrolling is spot on.
by theamk | 2025-05-15 15:52:07+00:00
No, my assumption is that actually reading and following the requirements would increase the chance of the interview. It's like that Van Halen brown M&M Story - something that is simple to implement, but shows that the candidate actually read the requirements. Because after all, who wants to work with a person who just ignores half of the requirements they were given?

While we are talking, I was actually always wondered about candidate responses like that...

There is that spec, which starts with "minimal, terminal-inspired email client", and contains specific references to the products you want to imitate. Line 3 even explicitly says "Can use a fake backend", and to me, this shows pretty clearly that they don't care about backend, they need UI.

And then there is your submissions which basically has no UI to speak of. It's not even "minimal", as the basic features (like new mail indicator) are missing. Also, in no possible world you can call this "terminal inspired", it's 100% generic web app.

How on earth did you expect this submission to work, given the assignment they sent you?

Did you just skip over the original page and then forgot about it immediately?

Or did you read it, decided that "terminal-inspired web pages cannot possibly exist" and proceeded to implement completely different thing? In that case, why didn't you mention this in email ("and btw, I am going to ignore the part where you said I should build terminal-inspired email client because I think it's stupid.")

Or maybe you read the requirements, and randomly declared half of them "useless fluff" and decided not to implement them?

What was your thought process?
by kashunstva | 2025-05-15 15:52:09+00:00
I read Gatsby in high school over 40 years ago and don’t recall the assignments around it being quite so heavy-handed. It’s a novel that certainly invites thematic analysis and truly there’s only so much you can say about that; but the paper I ended up writing dealt with the symbolism and craft of the text and how that supported the theme. It’s odd because practically every other HS English assignment felt obligatory and unmemorable, but that one apparently did not.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-05-15 15:52:10+00:00
> but some of them are in the category of "the result has marginal value".

This is often false and lacks perspective too. Or closer to reality would be that people do use this work and simply don't pay for it. Maybe some complain if there is a security issue in a one-man-show library. In software this isn't unusual.

What you really mean is the "result is marginally monetized". Which itself has value ironically, but that is again a broader perspective.
by miki123211 | 2025-05-15 15:52:13+00:00
Another side of this coin is that the expected payoff from a project depends on how many unrelated projects your organization is engaging in, which is deeply counterintuitive to most people.

Every project carries with it three possibilities: that of success, where the company makes money, that of failure, where the company does not, and that of a "critical failure", where the project goes so wrong that it results in a major lawsuit, regulatory fine or PR disaster that costs the company more than the project was ever expected to make.

If you're a startup, the worst that can happen to your company is the value going to 0. From an investor's perspective, there's not much of a difference between burning all the money ($10m) and not finding product-market-fit (normal failure), or your company getting sued for $3b and going bankrupt (critical failure). The result is the same, the investment is lost. For a large corporation, a $3b lawsuit is far more costly than sinking $10m into a failed project.

You can trade off these three possibilities against each other. Maybe forcing each release through an arduous checklist of legal review or internationalization and accessibility testing decreases success rates by 10%, but moves the "critical failure rate" from 1% to 0.5%. From a startup's perspective, this is a bad tradeoff, but if you're a barely-profitable R&D project at big co, the checklist is the right call to make.

This problem is independent from all the other causes to which bureaucracy is usually attributed, like the number of layers of management, internal culture, or "organizational scar tissue." Just from a legal and brand safety perspective, the bigger your org, the more bureaucracy makes sense, no matter how efficient you can get your org to be.
by evanelias | 2025-05-15 15:52:46+00:00
On the other hand, at least MySQL/MariaDB has built-in support for index hints. Postgres does not, and you can absolutely still get bitten by unexpected query plan changes. It's rarer than bad plans in MySQL, but it's worse when it happens in pg -- without index hint support, there's no simple built-in solution to avoid this.
by geodel | 2025-05-15 15:53:04+00:00
I totally agree that there are whole host of reasons for this. One of them I think is plainly a ton of work which was novel and custom in past is now subsumed in base infrastructure of today's world. Despite big tech and other vendor keep pushing of new things lot of people and companies are finding base level acceptable for many tasks which would need custom work in past. So no growing demand custom software for everything.

We can already see for example as per Ericsson report[1] after exponential demand for mobile data and speed it is now plateauing and next decade will not see huge growth. As users are finding things they do and apps they use with phones are now fast/good enough.

1. https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-repo...
by airylizard | 2025-05-15 15:53:16+00:00
Hey, thanks for kicking the tires! The run you’re describing was done in mid-April, right after GPT-4.1 went live. Since then OpenAI has refreshed the weights behind the “gpt-4.1” alias a couple of times, and one of those updates fixed the em-dash miss.

If you reran today you’d see the same improved pass rate I’m getting now. That’s the downside of benchmarking against latest model names; behaviour changes quietly unless you pin to a dated snapshot.

For bigger, noisier prompts (or on GPT-3.5-turbo, which hasn’t changed) TSCE still gives a solid uplift, so the framework’s value stands. Appreciate you checking it out!
by paddy_m | 2025-05-15 15:53:24+00:00
Ezra Klein talks about everything bagel liberalism where the left tries to layer every cause (diversity, unions, low income housing) onto a core good idea like building more housing or transit infrastructure. It gets in the way of the goal. housing is good because otherwise people would be homeless.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/02/opinion/democrats-liberal...
by tom_m | 2025-05-15 15:53:25+00:00
Cursor is pretty bad in my experience. I don't know why because I find Windsurf better and they both use Claude.

Regardless, Gemini 2.5 Pro is far far better and I use that with open-source free Roo Code. You can use the Gemini 2.5 Pro experimental model for free (rate limited) to get a completely free experience and taste for it.

Cursor was great and started is off, but others took notice and now they're all more or less the same. It comes down to UX and preference, but I think Windsurf and Roo Code just did a better job here than Cursor, personally.
by lesser23 | 2025-05-15 15:53:58+00:00
What I find interesting is that despite, as you said, FAANG doesn't really have the "genius appeal" it used to have they still demand it. You would sort of expect a company that is in the glacial stages of movement to have more capital and more leeway. If anything, the competition for these positions has gotten even worse despite the work not being anything close to revolutionary or novel at all.