MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by karmakurtisaani | 2025-05-13 20:07:32+00:00
Next Civ2:

- Research only towards monotheism and swarm with crusaders

- More interesting variation to break the game: go for republic as soon as possible, only build cities near water and other high trade squares. Put luxury to 80% and max out trade in cities by putting production to water/max trade squares. Build temples, market places and aqueducts and reach 1M population well before 0AD. Once population is maxed, put tax to 80% and instead of building, just buy what you need including enemy cities and barbarians. This leaves you a bit vulnerable, but when it works out it's a lot of fun. You can have massive cities built on isolated island etc.

E: Also, if you manage, build colossus, observatory and Newton's college in the same city. By the end you'll churn out new advances every 2 turns.
by nostrademons | 2025-05-13 20:08:12+00:00
People forget that "the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed".

I also discovered Google in 1999, and then worked there a decade later. I remember listening to the earnings calls around 2011-2012, and my coworkers would express disbelief in the questions that financial analysts would ask, because they totally missed the key drivers of our business performance. "It's simple," someone older and wiser told me, "they assume that the Internet is tapped out, no more people are going to go online, and so the only possible driver of higher revenue is higher cost per click." In reality, search queries increased 4x between 2009-2012. Large numbers of people were still discovering the Internet for the first time in the early 2010s. Hell, large numbers of people are still discovering the Internet for the first time now - Google still has a "next billion users" initiative (largely focused on India and South/Southeast Asia), and only about 35% of the world population are Internet users.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-13 20:08:17+00:00
What you should do --- back away and watch the tail.

They swing the tail around in a sweeping motion to knock you off your feet and toward their mouth.

How quickly they can do this and how far the tail can reach catches a lot of animals/people by surprise. I've seen them do this to dogs --- and dogs generally have pretty good reflexes --- better than the average people.

Once you're on the ground and less mobile, they attack with their teeth/jaws.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-05-13 20:08:20+00:00
Idk what Libertarian dreamland you people live in. Go try and live in a country with no regulations for things like pollution, hazardous waste, aviation safety, etc, etc and let us know how long you last. Powerful technologies necessarily can be dangerous. AI is going to be a major change driver and honestly if you deny that it's an incredibly powerful technology then I don't know what else to say.
by bgnn | 2025-05-13 20:08:26+00:00
So I tried to replace my personal computer with an iPad pro thinking that all I need is some basic apps + a browser. I connect it to a docking station and try to use it as a desktop computer, and I really love being able to take notes with a stylus.

The problem is, the OS is very limiting. The file manager of iOS is extremely dumbed down, even Firefox doesn't work properly on it, and desktop mode with stage manager is just stupid. So yeah, it's not a success so far.

Android though feels more open, so I would give it a try of their desktop mode isn't stupid. Firefox on Android is fully functional at least and that's a great start!
by ndneighbor | 2025-05-13 20:08:30+00:00
The number one issue I have with Android is that while this looks cool, because of the fragmentation of the OS delivery between vendors- I have no idea which phone or timeframe when I could see the rollout of Material 3 Expressive.

More than 10 years later, shopping for an Android phone with the latest OS is a nightmare. Android leadership keeps on getting shuffled around, Google changes priorities every 6 months it seems. Despite Apple flubbing the ball on AI, at least I know that the phone will be supported for at least 4 years.

They will need to improve on their ecosystem commitments if they'd like people like me to switch back.
by kazinator | 2025-05-13 20:09:22+00:00
What if the app isn't in a language that links to an .exe, where we can include the .res file compiled from .rc?

The language may have an .exe run-time, but we don't get to link that.

In that case if we want to use a .rc file anyway, it seems we would want to create a resource DLL out of it and dynamically load it.

(I'm aware that one reason for resource DLL's is for localizable strings. That use makes sense even of programs which can statically link the GUI layout resources.)
by MBCook | 2025-05-13 20:09:58+00:00
I think power was a real problem. A 2010 phone was bit as close to a laptop in performance.

An M4 Mac is way more powerful than an iPhone 16, but the iPhone is powerful enough to prove a much better experience on normal tasks compared to what that 2010 phone could at the time.

Basically I think everything has enough headroom that it’s not the compromise it would’ve been before. The biggest constraints on an iPhone’s performance are the battery and cooling. If you’re plugged in the battery doesn’t matter. And unless you’re not playing a fancy game cooling may not be an issue due to headroom.
by ajross | 2025-05-13 20:10:22+00:00
That's misunderstanding the hardware. All memory access on a 286 was through a segment descriptor, every access done in protected mode was checked against the segment limit. Every single one.

A "far pointer" was, again, a *software* concept where you could tell the compiler that this particular pointer needed to use a different descriptor than the one the toolchain assumed (by convention!) was loaded in DS or SS.
by bazzargh | 2025-05-13 20:10:37+00:00
Back in... 2006ish? I got annoyed with being unable to copy text from multicolumn scientific papers on my iRex (an early ereader that was somewhat hackable) so dug a bit into why that was. Under the hood, the pdf reader used poppler, so I modified poppler to infer reading order in multicolumn documents using algorithms that tessaract's author (Thomas Breuel) had published for OCR.

It was a bit of a heuristic hack; it was 20 years ago but as I recall poppler's ancient API didn't really represent text runs in a way you'd want for an accessibility API. A version of the multicolumn select made it in but it was a pain to try to persuade poppler's maintainer that subsequent suggestions to improve performance were ok - because they used slightly different heuristics so had different text selections in some circumstances. There was no 'right' answer, so wanting the results to match didn't make sense.

And that's how kpdf got multicolumn select, of a sort.

Using tessaract directly for this has probably made more sense for some years now.
by noosphr | 2025-05-13 20:10:45+00:00
>replace their OCR pipelines with Flash for a fraction of the cost of previous solutions, it's really quite remarkable.

As someone who had to build custom tools because VLMs are so unreliable: anyone that uses VLMs for unprocessed images is in for more pain than all the providers which let LLMs without guard rails interact directly with consumers.

They are very good at image labeling. They are ok at very simple documents, e.g. single column text, centered single level of headings, one image or table per page, etc. (which is what all the MVP demos show). They need another trillion parameters to become bad at complex documents with tables and images.

Right now they hallucinate so badly that you simply _can't_ use them for something as simple as a table with a heading at the top, data in the middle and a summary at the bottom.
by xtracto | 2025-05-13 20:11:28+00:00
You made me login to reply :) , thanks.

Back in the early 2000s when I was finishing my Software Engineer BSc degree I saw the choice of becoming a "generalist" vs becoming a "specialist". I actually liked EVERYTHING technology wise: From Neural Networks to Game development (graphics with OpenGL) to algorithms, Web development, to Java JNI, assembler and whatnot. I couldn't see myself focusing in one thing.

Fast forward to 2025, I'm 44 years old and have been 24 years in the industry. In the last 5 years I've had 3 jobs: One, helping a startup move form a non-scalable monolith system (ruby) to a very scalable microservices one. I was CTO of a crypto-exchange company, building ECS/nodejs based microservices and then an App (React Native). And right now I am helping some young guys in a startup doing AI based Tax reconciliation (helping exporting companies recover their VAT).

In my opinion, right now is the BEST moment to be a developer. Coding with Cursor is magic. Implementing an API in python with FastAPI is so freaking easy and quick. I don't have to worry about recalling a lot of details, but mainly think on problem solving.

I have the hypothesis that the people that are struggling are the "specialists". Suddenly with AI it doesn't matter that you know the in and outs of Java, Hybernate and the whole stack. There's more value in solving problems. I am happy that I chose the "generalist" path. I think AI will reduce the demand the "specialist" skillset.
by vlovich123 | 2025-05-13 20:11:39+00:00
You're arguing semantics IMHO. In my mind speculatively decoding every single byte offset & then resolving at the end of the cycle which to take is a form of heuristic execution because the heuristic is "decode all possible executions". And 4 vs 8 is a pretty sizeable difference. Moreover, the pre-decoder requiring knowing the op-codes at the end means all instruction decodes are serialized on decoding 16 instructions whereas Apple can just decode each op independently & only decodes 8.
by jimbob45 | 2025-05-13 20:11:54+00:00
The dangerous behavior should be opt-in, not opt-out. I appreciate that C gives you all of these neat footguns but they need to be hidden to find for only those who need them. Stuff like implicitness being the default for functions, int wrapping, and non-initialized variables just give rise to bugs. And for what? So first-year students can have their unoptimized code be 0.00001% faster by default? It's dumb.
by rurp | 2025-05-13 20:12:40+00:00
A huge amount of staffing cuts were to teams working on things like moderation or combating bots, which are areas Elon doesn't care about continuing development on. He's not so much doing more with less but rather doing less with less. We can debate about whether or not the projects he cut were worthwhile, but given the company's disastrous finances I wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt.

The bull case is that he sacrificed Twitter capital in exchange for political capital, which I think is pretty sound. But that doesn't really apply to most CEOs running most businesses.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-05-13 20:12:42+00:00
None of the recommended alternatives show what you are authenticating for.

The proprietary auth solution as well as SMS will show "To authorize a transaction of $12,345.67 to account ..., enter code 123456". SMS isn't secure because there are various ways for the attacker to get the code aside from phishing.

The apps are a royal pain for the user, but they enable this flow, and they are secure for the bank.

The bank has limited incentive to make the user happy, but a lot of incentive to a) minimize fraud, b) be able to blame the user for the remaining fraud.

That's why you will keep getting shitty, user-hostile authentication apps, and that's why banks will keep losing some (but probably not enough to make them care) customers to neobanks that are prioritizing user experience. And why neobanks will enshittify once they are no longer willing to buy adoption by accepting more fraud.
by leksak | 2025-05-13 20:13:04+00:00
I took a look at your resume to see if I would have relevant work for you but doesn't seem like it.

Maybe having vibecoding listed as a skill on your resume is a problem?

Alarm bells also go off when I see "Github (advanced)"

While you are powerless to change it I would also be concerned reviewing this resume as with the sole exception of your consultancy your longest tenure anywhere is just two years.
by kypro | 2025-05-13 20:13:09+00:00
I don't want to argue the validity of AI taking jobs, but I really miss the tech job market in mid 00s to early 10s so much.

It was genuinely such an exciting time back then. People were still optimistic about the web and new platform like mobile. There was so much to build, yet relativity few people working in tech. And those of us who were weird enough to work in tech loved it. It felt like almost every week there was some new startup asking around for tech talent and they'd take almost anyone they could get. And when you joined you built cool things that had never been built before.

Today tech feel so stale. People who work in tech are not techies, but just see it as a career. There's so few novel things to build that SWE has basically become a profession of plumbing already built libraries and SaaS tools together. Even startups feel so much more mature from the get go. Back then startups were often bootstrapped projects by a dude in his bedroom. Today before a single line of code is written startups already have CEOs, CTOs, CFOs and several million dollars of investment.

Perhaps this guy should have kept up with trends, but 20 years ago the dude would have had a job at a company where he was respected greatly for being the dude who could throw together an e-commerce store in a few days or something. He probably would have been building genuinely new stuff with a team of other people who loved tech.
by rwieruch | 2025-05-13 20:13:40+00:00
Hey Jason, just saw your email and wanted to reply here.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the postcards really worked. We sent them to various regions across Germany, but my guess is they ended up in a pile at the campground reception and never reached the actual owners.

That said, we manually scraped around 500 campgrounds near us, designed postcards that highlighted CloudCamping’s key selling points, and sent them out using a different mailing service. Since we didn’t hear back from anyone specifically mentioning the postcards, I assume they didn’t convince anyone in the end.

Still, it was a fun experiment, and who knows, it might work better in a different context!
by MBCook | 2025-05-13 20:14:01+00:00
I am pretty skeptical that I would like the size but I’m certainly interested in seeing what they come up with.

They like to wait until stuff is “ready” to their standard. Android had 3G, 4G, and 5G first. OLED screens too.

Early folders had a lot of issues, but I know a lot of that has been sorted for years.
by andrewaylett | 2025-05-13 20:14:37+00:00
It always surprises me that system changes like Alternate and Direct Law, or Sukhoi's Direct Mode, are quite so different from normal operation. I'm sure they have a really good reason not to make Normal Law better mimic Direct Law (but with all the safety systems), and maybe the reason I don't understand it is because I tend to read about the times when dropping into Alternate or Direct Law resulted in an incident?

One of the patterns I try to follow in designing our operations is that the tasks we need to follow in an emergency should be as close to routine as we can make them. We don't have a manual override to deploy into production in case of emergency, we make sure that our normal deploy process is suitable for emergency use. Which means we won't make the emergency worse by messing up a manual deploy.

Similarly, my car has some fancy drive-by-wire features -- the steering is dynamic, and the throttle balances the electric motor and petrol engine seamlessly. But the manufacturer didn't change anything fundamental about the controls, and if the power steering fails (or the cruise control stops working, or the radar can't track the vehicle in front) I lose some affordances and some safety systems but I can still drive the car.

It is true that the non-normal modes are supposed to only very infrequently activate, but with that in mind it should surely be more important to not drop users into a totally different control regime?

Hoping someone has some more insight. I don't have anything to do with avionics in general, and the day job isn't safety-critical, but I'm always keen to learn and I've definitely learned a lot over the years that I can apply to the day job by reading about how people design systems to stay safe when a failure means loss of life.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-05-13 20:14:50+00:00
If you care about always having the latest software with the latest Google features just get a Pixel. 7 years of OS and security updates: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en

Google doesn't control what other vendors do; that's the beauty of open source. (You can argue how open Android really is these days but it's still more open than iOS.)
by GeorgeCurtis | 2025-05-13 20:14:56+00:00
Currently you can't run us embedded and I'm not sure how you could sidestep the DSL :/

We're working on putting our grammar in llama's cpp code so that it only outputs grammatically correct HQL. But, even without that it shouldn't be hard or expensive to do. I wrote a Claude wrapper that had our docs in its context window, it did a good job of writing queries most of the time.
by karlgkk | 2025-05-13 20:15:06+00:00
> I have no idea which phone or timeframe when I could see the rollout of Material 3 Expressive.

Not a problem with a pixel

> More than 10 years later, shopping for an Android phone with the latest OS is a nightmare

Not a problem with a pixel

> They will need to improve on their ecosystem commitments

Not a problem with a pixel
by kristopolous | 2025-05-13 20:15:14+00:00
Information density. LLMs are great at stringing words together but don't pack ideas tightly.

Also there's the personality. I've talked with chatgpt enough...

I'm open to the entire account being an agent. That's certainly possible.

There's a new market for astroturfing virality. Create hundreds of agents on various sites and have them engage in pablum and occasionally mention your product.

We're entering a phase where you can't just have a dumb model to filter that out
by JamesSwift | 2025-05-13 20:16:00+00:00
The thing that made me switch, funny enough, is the 'budget phone' category. The Moto G line and low-end Pixel line completely abandoned the "small, 200-300 dollar phone" segment. And so I got a brand new iphone SE for $200. Havent gone back, and probably wont at this point now that I've moved over and use the family plan for apple one etc.
by quelup | 2025-05-13 20:16:24+00:00
> You have that website, but no one is gonna use it because there are thousands of better, more populated alternatives

Might be true, don't know until we test, get feedback, iterate, etc.

> mostly a dick

On that I'll agree ;) realistic part is relative - you're also just guessing what 'people' want and assume everyone is like you. Based on the above assertion I hope not. Time may prove you right or wrong - no harm in testing an idea.
by HelloUsername | 2025-05-13 20:16:27+00:00
Related:

Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873531 02-may-2025 280 comments

After 53 years, a failed Soviet Venus spacecraft is crashing back to Earth https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43831602 29-april-2025 46 comments

Soviet-era spacecraft plunges to Earth after 53 years stuck in orbit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43949025 10-may-2025 0 comments

A Soviet-era spacecraft built to land on Venus is falling to Earth instead https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43938644 09-may-2025 1 comment
by Hackbraten | 2025-05-13 20:16:31+00:00
If you use a password manager, you might not be part of the target group that benefits most from a second factor.

A decent password manager nudges you into using unique passwords per service. Good password managers also offer you a browser extension, which injects the password directly into the DOM instead of using the clipboard, and checks the domain, too. It's not 100% secure, but at that point, 2FA may be a diminishing return already.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-13 20:16:41+00:00
Yep! Exactly! The decrease in brain drain doesn't necccesarily imply broader economic equality.

Earning $30k in China or India where median household incomes are $5k and $3k respectively means you are afforded a lot of luxuries that makes moving to a higher paying developed country difficult.

People who aren't able to work high salary STEM jobs are desperate for a better option, and that's the majority in those countries.
by perihelions | 2025-05-13 20:16:58+00:00
The other recent threads,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873531 ("Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry (leonarddavid.com)" — 291 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43831602 ("After 53 years, a failed Soviet Venus spacecraft is crashing back to Earth (gizmodo.com)" — 50 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43944167 ("Cosmos 482 Descent Craft tracker (utexas.edu)") — 9 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43942194 ("Cosmos-482 descent craft re-entry prediction (esa.int)") — 5 comments
by bradgessler | 2025-05-13 20:17:05+00:00
It feels like we're in a phase where hiring is slow for a lot of reasons:

1. Lot's of great talent on the market. It's a great time to be owning a company right now in terms of hiring.

2. The reality and perception of AI making it possible to do "more with less". I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people"

3. Even without AI, software teams can do more with less because there's simply much better tooling and less investment is required to get software off the ground.

4. Interest rates and money is simply more expensive than it was 3-5 years ago, so projects need to show greater return for less money.

It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet. There's a general sense of optimism that AI will solve a lot of huge problems, but we don't really know until it plays out. If you believe history rhymes, humans will figure out what AI does well and doesn't do so well. Once that's worked out, the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up around the new norm.
by dnamlin | 2025-05-13 20:17:47+00:00
Soooo many handles to remember to free in the right order, even before you got into OLE/COM. It was a lot of fun to come up with your own C++ wrappers to put them under RAII -- and this was before "smart pointers." You sort of had to iterate on a few versions of that, trying out mechanisms to scope sharing, to understand why MFC was the way it was.

Fond memories of the #winprog IRC channel. Discussions there, theForger's tutorial, and Charles Petzold's books got me going on Startup Control Panel and the like.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131106030702/http://www.mlin.n...
by Soupy | 2025-05-13 20:18:26+00:00
I also run a small B2C company (https://pastmaps.com). Here's what worked for me:

First 1000 users: daily manually done reddit posts. Very time-consuming and annoying, but it gets the job done. Just make sure the content drives users back to the site and is actually relevant, interesting, and valuable

Next 100K users: programmatic long-tail SEO. obviously this is unique to my own product, but I realized that people were organically already searching for the data contained within the maps I host. By focusing on organizing that data and making it understandable to Google, I started a traffic flywheel that's paid off massively.

I'm now exploring programmatic social media marketing as the next lever for the next 1M users as it directly drives even further benefits on the SEO side

One last thought - whatever growth channel you pick should really align with the product you are building. Some products are a great fit for SEO, others not. Some are awesome for Tiktok/Reels, others not. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution.

Good luck!