MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hluska | 2025-05-11 16:31:22+00:00
This is an interesting topic and I’m not sure it has an answer. In 1995 advertising was really spray and pray. Testing ads was a really difficult proposition so we saw things like bearer coupons (mention this ad or bring in this coupon for 20% off!). The dominant advice out of radio was to play an ad constantly. That advice worked well for traditional media but not so well for advertisers. That model worked so well for advertisers that thirty years later, people around my age in my city can all sing the same five advertising jingles.

Google provided a toolkit to test ads and figure out which are most effective. Now the other side of that argument is that in industry, a massive of percentage of qualified people still spray and pray. The advertising industry as a whole is far from data driven.

At one point, there was an argument this was good for the planet. My newspapers are much thinner than they were 30 years ago when I could collect a metre of newsprint a month if I subscribed to the Globe and Mail plus a local. But I don’t think anyone can claim now that data centres are environmental miracles. This has also decimated local journalism to such a point that people are less aware of environmental catastrophes in their own relative backyards.

It’s possible the net effect was positive and advertising is more efficient. It’s more accurate to say advertisers have a toolkit to analyze effectiveness but many don’t or aren’t capable.

Edit - I’m going to give a very specific example of a radio jingle. If anyone is around forty or older and from a major city in Saskatchewan, they will be able to finish this.

“I said no no no no don’t pay anymore, no GST and no money down.”
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-11 16:31:36+00:00
Is it too late for me to pitch my AI driven startup that just takes a very common application ( task management) and adds some API calls to LLMs ?

Can I apply for YC again and get my annual rejection? So I can cry upper middle class tears.

I really need a business partner to keep me focused on features people actually want.

But my main business friend is focused on much more important things ( raising a new family) now.

Thinking about what's more important right now, making some games I know will make no money.

Creating a B2B startup that will also make no money.
by ech0riginal | 2025-05-11 16:31:49+00:00
> But that seems like a mechanism that could help reduce rising temperature

Correct me if I’m wrong, but afaik higher reflection rates would exacerbate climate change, not help it. Absorbing that radiation kickstarts photosynthesis, which in turn uses captured CO2, therefore I’d expect the amount of sunlight reflected has a negatively inverse relationship with the amount of CO2 captured. I could very well be wrong, I’m not a biologist, but higher rates of both sunlight & CO2 capture seem ideal in this instance.
by laserDinosaur | 2025-05-11 16:31:56+00:00
"It would never occur to me to watch someone else talk about or play a game online, let alone pay for the privilege"

I think that's specifically what made GiantBomb so different in the first place - people were tuning in for the personalities, more so than the game news. There were already a lot of places you could just go for game news and updates (like IGN and Gamespot), but GB had decades of industry stories that were worth tuning in for. All sorts of 'behind the scenes' stories and faces would show up, Jeff finding out about the Dreamcast being cancelled in a conference call while on the toilet with food poisoning, Drew going to a Starcraft tournament in South Korea when they were still fairly new, the crew getting blind drunk at a birthday where they duct taped whisky bottles to their hands, stories of the sheer nightmare of lugging equipment and setting up for E3 every year with Drew and Vinnys video diaries. It was a peek behind the curtain into how the industry works with a group of very likeable people that made it different - more than just a place to go and watch people play games.
by asdf6969 | 2025-05-11 16:31:59+00:00
Starlink is one of the few inventions that really could fundamentally change everything. It’s an enormous expansion of viable lifestyles and places to live. I know people who use it at the cottage, on a boat, while camping, etc. and if WFH + personal electricity generation (solar) improves the Jeffersonian yeoman software engineer fantasy could be real.

It really would fundamentally change my life and my relationship to power structures if I didn’t have to bend my whole life around living “in the system”.

Alternatively, Elon could just disable my life if I post something he doesn’t like online so maybe we’re not there yet…

Completely agree about neuralink and tesla
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-05-11 16:32:13+00:00
> Fandom is tremendously worse, since its SEO efforts drown actually useful websites.

This cannot be emphasized enough.

A clean, no-cookied, location-off search for "Doom wiki" (no quotes) returns the terrible, low-information, awful-layout, often-outdated/incorrect Fandom Doom Wiki as the first result.

The actual Doom Wiki, better-designed and far more content-filled - which is called "The Doom Wiki", and with a domain that is literally just "doomwiki.org" - comes in second.
by sargstuff | 2025-05-11 16:32:34+00:00
?? code quality ?? more management quality. AI provides ability to spot possibility of 'issues'/conflicts sooner.

Really need to be adhering to set of defined specifications (functional / non-functional / domain specific), (work,project, etc). (and/or looking at what level(s) the specifications still relevant, post definition of specifications -- historically via different management levels). Note: doesn't necssarily mean riedgid specs first, code next, document.

Sigificant coding is "DFA" per setting/defining pre/post environment : repository check-in/out can be setup to do specification checking/diffing for auto-documentation, 'language/project features requirements, aka use, do not use, only use when, never use' can be done/filtered via . Above certain 'size', 're-inventions' would be an AI statisticall inference thing per amount of information.

Non-DFA aka "context sensitive" stuff : AI would only make sense if way to compare specifications with 'intentions'. aka generate confidence in how much newer coder has been on-boarded relative to coding attempts & project/work specifications. Perhaps also give work place management insite into how relevent things are (vs. "worker is the issue"). aka non-adherance to 'spec' because spec doesn't cover issue(s). Time to review spec. Still need human(s) in loop to figure out the relevant tangibles/intangibles. AI can certainly help identify ambiguities in specifications & how specifications are implimented/used. aka code debt & code drift
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-05-11 16:32:42+00:00
i remember back in the old days a MX queary for a single letter between 'a' and 'm' would be sent to that root. if they wanted to, they could resolve the response.

i remember having a conversation w/ paul vixie that he had either set it up (or was presenting it as a thought experiment) that he could have the email address "p@f". and i trust paul knew what he was doing with respect to DNS and RFC822 email.
by jspaetzel | 2025-05-11 16:32:43+00:00
I went to maybe slightly above average high school for my area and didn't have one. But there were programs where the school partnered with community colleges and students maintaining decent grades could attend classes elsewhere. And those had shop as well as other vocational programs.

They probably sent us home with a pamphlet with information at the beginning of the year, but I don't remember.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-11 16:33:03+00:00
> I don't agree. I think it's still just a toy that can't get anything useful done.

Yeah, sorry, but your view is not supported by data. There are billions of $ spent on tokens every year (between oAI, anthropic, goog, etc). This is not a toy anymore. People are using it, one way or another so it's useful to them - to the tune of billions of dollars. How useful it'll turn out to be in the abstract is still up for debate, but it is useful today.
by eWeSaYYY | 2025-05-11 16:33:10+00:00
P-hacking is allowed and encouraged outside physical science where getting stats of medicine and building a bridge wrong have obvious side effect

News media will whittle down their data set to get a result that only matters where cost of living is high, and there’s a tiny number of the workers overall.

Leads the innumerates in rural Somewhereville, Flyover, USA, to be all confused they don’t make SF salaries in the middle of nowhere.
by potoooooooo | 2025-05-11 16:33:10+00:00
Not all of these issues apply to VBA, which the top level comment brought up,even if they apply to VB6 and the other ones you mentioned. VBA isn't EOL, and Excel certainly isn't.

Lots of people are continually building sophisticated tools in MS Office even though it's not helpful for the resume because it's the path of least resistance for solving problems for the sorts of people who just learned VLOOKUP in 2021 and don't want to learn about XLOOKUP now.

Security, maintenance, interop, documentation... There are arguments to be made. It's not cut and dry that VBA is the worst option for any of those. The patterns for handling them are different than a web app repo or something, but it's not like they don't get thought of and handled on a daily basis.
by bradly | 2025-05-11 16:33:33+00:00
> As a result, the process of moving an existing app with a presumably stable infrastructure to a db-only one (often a separate db from your primary app) actually adds complexity/uncertainty, at least until you restabilize things.

This has been my experience too, unfortunately. Before Que hit v1.0 things were definitely dicey trying to find an ACID compliant queue library for Rails–everyone was so into Redis and Sidekiq, but Que is still the only ACID queue lib around for longer than four years if that is meaningful to you.
by ZFleck | 2025-05-11 16:34:16+00:00
The answer is probably, unhelpfully, "it depends". I attended a fairly large high school, and we probably had a dozen shop class offerings. A much smaller school just a few miles away had no infrastructure to support any shop classes.

It's probably even more nuanced than that, though. My parents both attended very small schools in small towns, and both offered shop classes. All four schools mentioned were / are located in the Midwest, though, and none in large cities.

If I had to guess, I'd say probably the majority of schools in the US offer some form of shop class(es). But I don't believe any would necessarily be part of the standard curriculum. Generally, these classes are elective.
by renewiltord | 2025-05-11 16:34:21+00:00
It is not very common to find pre-Kanishka works. I hope that we get some insight into human lives around this time. One of the things I find fascinating about ancient times is how similar humans of then were to us. Akrotiri (similarly preserved by volcanic eruption) was millennia before even the works in this discovery and yet seemed strangely familiar and normal when visiting.
by intended | 2025-05-11 16:34:58+00:00
Anti Trust is not lawyer speak for winning strategies. It’s a specific term, and theres a time and place to use it. Anti trust is what people, especially programmers, have been saying from time immemorial when these firms became this big.

Inefficient markets are bad for humans and are bad markets. The allocate resources inefficiently. The google graveyard is (arguably) a case in point.

The reason Khan reached the FTC was because her thesis at college, made the case that amazon’s actions reduced customer welfare. A fact that was covered here, on HN. This isn’t something a community notices unless it matters to them.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-05-11 16:35:08+00:00
A QR code dedicates around 30% to metadata (positioning, timing data, version numbers). There are very few metadata arrangements shared across all QR codes, so you can recover 30% of the code with almost no computation.

The other 70% is dedicated to "data", on which the Reed-Solomon-coding is applied. If your QR code is absolutely stuffed to its limit (about 2kb data), you can still destroy up to 51% of the image before the Reed-Solomon coding will start to fail at 30% redundancy.

Most codes only store a few hundred bytes of data, so you can afford to destroy a lot more before the payload is also destroyed.

I'd expect the minimal-viable QR code for a 100 character URI can be very degraded.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-11 16:35:16+00:00
I was programming in Turbo Pascal at the time, which was still 16-bit. But when I upgraded my 286 to a Cyrix 486, on a 386 motherboard[1], I could utilize the full 32-bit registers by prefixing assembly instructions with 0x66 using db[1].

This was a huge boost for a lot of my 3D rendering code, despite the prefix not being free compared to pure 32-bit mode.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix_Cx486DLC

[2]: http://www.c-jump.com/CIS77/ASM/DataTypes/T77_0030_allocatio...
by mindslight | 2025-05-11 16:35:25+00:00
> One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades

I've got to wonder if a deeper dynamic is that you now have to be relatively "smart" to go into the trades because perhaps the teaching/curricula is lacking, making it so that more base general intelligence / self starting on abstract concepts is required to actually learn in the first place. Trade classes should be an opportunity for people who missed the verbal-communication-of-abstract-topics meta-intelligence to develop their intelligence focused around a narrower topic that they taking a liking to. But if the teacher is really uninspired, and the curriculum shies away from actually creating larger cool things or playing with different techniques, (or becomes about following the manual for procedures for poorly-documented poorly-written throwaway proprietary software) I can see it coming off as yet another "when are we going to need this" high school class.
by malux85 | 2025-05-11 16:35:31+00:00
Thank you!

This is my first project where I integrated many things together, and it went through a few iterations (I replaced the lights twice)

I think the key was: patience

There were many times where I didn’t have the right connections, or screws, or cables or I needed more diodes when I probably could have got away without it - things like this - where I refused to take a shortcut, ordered the part in the mail and waited, which often meant I couldn’t proceed - so “that’s enough today”
by haswell | 2025-05-11 16:35:38+00:00
What is your position on open source projects? Should someone who writes software in their spare time who decides to share it publicly be forced to stop doing so?

I’m more open to harsher limits on commercial software, especially in certain categories. But underneath all of this we’re discussing an ecosystem and a culture which can’t be cleanly separated.

Some of the binary thinking I see in this thread would be deeply damaging to parts of that ecosystem with potentially major unintended consequence. Open source software is critically important for human rights/freedom. Taken at face value, many of the comments here directly threaten that freedom.

I’m not assuming that’s your stance, but I’m curious how you see the open source aspect of this considering how significant its role is - especially in the security space.
by gommm | 2025-05-11 16:36:14+00:00
Exactly, it's not an either/or situation. I've worked on a codebase that did 3-4k/s jobs through sidekiq and in this case sidekiq is obviously the best option (although we also used a go sidekiq client for certain tasks that didn't need the rails app context) but using sidekiq from the beginning is premature optimization. You can easily start with Solid Queue and switch over to sidekiq when you actually have data that tells you that it'll potentially become a bottleneck. Premature optimization is a complexity cost.
by davemp | 2025-05-11 16:36:24+00:00
I’m using zig for embedded builds currently. All of the mcu files are still in C (arm thumb isn’t first class supported in zig) but the host software is sometimes zig. Being and to easily develop on and for any host platform is such a pleasure. I can just tell junior devs to download zig and a vscode extension and they’re off to the races.
by CrulesAll | 2025-05-11 16:36:53+00:00
I did not realise people read things without the ability of context to help them. I am sure Patton read the commentaries without any knowledge of Rome at all, a lack of any military techne, nor the ability to critique it(pretty sure I mentioned this.) As for translators, I think you might have missed the point Patton was making about a certain type of historian. Patton recommended the autobiography as source 0. Not the only source(straw man.) Perhaps I needed to spell that out? By reading multiple sources(Dr. D'Este regarded him as one of the most well read officers in history. He was clearly dyslexic as well, and like most dyslexics, it has nothing to do with intelligence. On the contrary, it results in a phenomenal memory ability. See the British Barrister George Carman for similar traits.) Patton was able to get a gestalt. He always found the original source, particularly the mindset, to be most valuable. "The author doesn't mock capitalism or strivers" and then proceeds to list out the common bog standard anti-capitalism and strivers 'arguments'. He does not mock them. Of that you are correct. It's more of an angry tirade that is just rehashed champagne socialism. I could give you a far better critique of the current form of capitalism. The quite odious stench of libertarianism and their no rules capitalism laid the framework for where we are now. We end up with oligopoly. This leads to employees having no choice, and a toxic work environment led by the 'radical candor' mindset. See Ray Dalio(Copeland's book about this cancer is great.) Look at Andy Grove's 'constructive criticism' which infected every area of corporate America and practically destroyed it. Toxic radical candor, oligopolies, and lack of employee protection laws creates the environment we have now. Author knows nothing of these and just presents the standard tenured baizuo arguments.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-11 16:36:56+00:00
>I can only see harm being done from not privately reporting them

Because you need to take a look at the fuller picture. If every vuln was published immediately the entire industry would need to be designed differently. We wouldn't push features at a hundred miles per hour but instead have pipelines more optimized for security and correctness.

There is almost no downside currently for me to write insecure shit, someone else will debug it for me and I'll have months to fix it.
by sandworm101 | 2025-05-11 16:37:02+00:00
I went to law school with a guy who grew up in a state with "normal" highschools and "technical" schools for those not earmarked for higher education. Being a big football-type guy, he was directed to the latter. His mother fought to get him back into the "normal". Had she not done so, we would never have been classmates at law school. The technical school lacked the higher-level math and language courses that are important when applying to university.
by shayonj | 2025-05-11 16:37:42+00:00
Likewise - that’s why I mentioned that orchestration backed by PG and treating sidekiq + Redis message bus goes a long way. You get the durability, and the ability to re-enqueue jobs in case of availability issues with Redis.

Sidekiq’s reliable fetch provides other kind of durability, esp when recovering from process crash extra.

Agree on all points re: job lifecycle
by BoardsOfCanada | 2025-05-11 16:38:13+00:00
The vendor responses seem pretty strange:

> Magesolution (MGS) did not respond, but the backdoored packages can still be downloaded from their site as of Apr 30th.

> Tigren denies to have been hacked, but the backdoored packages are still available on their site as of Apr 30th.

> Meetanshi claims that their software has not been tampered with, but confirmed that their server got hacked.
by gruez | 2025-05-11 16:38:29+00:00
>I read that using pirated sites is ok if you do it for learning

1. I don't think anyone has been prosecuted for accessing/using pirated materials. The people who have been prosecuted for torrenting were liable because torrent clients also upload, thereby making them go beyond merely accessing/using.

2. Claiming that those sites (ie. live soccer streams) is "learning" is a stretch. Moreover no such "learning" exemption exists, at least in the US. The closest you have is fair use, which has a 4 part test. "Learning" is one of the tests, but isn't a sole determinant. Photocopying textbooks wholesale is obviously illegal, even if it's for "learning".
by neonsunset | 2025-05-11 16:38:36+00:00
I was going to complain how Avalonia still has issues with large binaries even with NAOT but I just tested it on https://github.com/sourcegit-scm/sourcegit on Windows, and the resulting size of the folder without symbols (the binary and like 4 dlls) is ~55MiB. The binary itself is 41MiB which is as much as Qt6-based qBitorrent binary takes on Windows. So it seems while Avalonia works well enough on macOS, the size of binaries and memory consumption are higher than on Linux and Windows huh.
by throwanem | 2025-05-11 16:38:52+00:00
Will you please stop attempting to advertise what I assume to be your portfolio companies in response to comments here?

My point in any case is precisely as you note: People rarely stick to diets. Semaglutide for obesity therefore presumptively is a maintenance medication. That is, if I diet and take semaglutide and lose fifty pounds, and then cease both treatments, I will almost certainly gain back fifty-plus pounds. But - as I understand it, at least - if I only take semaglutide and make no effort at dietary regulation, I will still lose weight, because the medication limits hunger and increases satiation: even with an entirely slovenly eating habit, I won't do myself the damage I would otherwise, but only so long as I remain on the medication. If I stop, I'll minimally gain back weight and likely rebound in the manner of a yo-yo dieter. I have not been "cured." And it is the novel obesity application, not the longstanding diabetes indications, which is the breakout moneymaker. (I said I wouldn't cavil about that, not that it didn't bear talking about.)

I concede I might have a different view of the matter if I had a weight problem, but it is not actually complicated to diet off fifty or sixty pounds to a healthy weight and body composition, and then stay that way. It's only difficult, in that it requires more or less reorganizing one's entire life for years, to support the firm entrenchment of new and healthier habits. That's obviously not something everyone can do. For those unable, I'm glad options like semaglutide also exist. I just don't see any reason to dissemble over what they can actually do and what they cannot.
by techpineapple | 2025-05-11 16:38:55+00:00
I don’t know what the solution is exactly — I sort of romanticize an old school hard core like boarding school education with strict headmasters and oak paneled walls.

I also wonder what’s the point of an education (such as mine) that just throws insult after injury year after year of low grades and “you’re just not reaching your full potential.”

The alternative of making a person feel better while failing to prepare then for their lives and careers isn’t great. I don’t want to hire a person who “knows Geometry” but can’t apply it in their day to day job in a timely fashion.