MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phtrivier | 2025-05-11 18:29:42+00:00
I don't know about "largely", but I can point to a least one instance where the most week know comedy show at the time in France ("Les guignols") had a bit about how the Y2K bug was a "scam" orchestrated by "Big Tech" to make people buy new computers - given that nothing terrible happened on Y2K.

The sketch was a riff about the kindergarten joke :

- why do you [insert weird action] ?

- to scare the girafes away

- but there are no girafes here

- of course, I've been [insert weird action here]

And I was a software engineering student at the time, and I tried explaining they were missing the point, but I think it will be how we're approached this time.

So, I think nothing will be done, or not enough, and bugs will happen in 12 years.

But, thankfully, all our computers will have been replaced to allow running js.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-11 18:30:41+00:00
Thinking about this a bit more, it seems that the reason there isn't a good way to sell licenses to software libraries generally is license enforcement. Unity and Unreal have a licensing system built-in that they enforce against gamedevs. Normal server software has no such thing.

That means the only threat you have as a producer of code (once the code is handed over) is the threat of withdrawing service. That means the only ways to sell licenses are:

* Build your own licensing service (or offer SaaS)

* Sell the code for a high price upfront

* Sell service contracts
by andrehacker | 2025-05-11 18:30:56+00:00
"The languages are in much flux" you meant python and not c/c++ because these aren't in flux

No I meant C++.

2011 14882:2011[44] C++11

2014 14882:2014[45] C++14

2017 14882:2017[46] C++17

2020 14882:2020[47] C++20

2024 14882:2024[17] C++23

That is 4 major language changes in 10 years.

As a S/W manager in an enterprise context having to coordinate upgrades of multi-million LOC codebases for mandated security compliance, C++ is not the silver bullet in handling the version problem that exists in every eco system.

As said, the compilers/linkers allow you to run in compatibility mode so as long as you don't care about the new features (and the company you work for doesn't) then, yes, C/C++ is easier for managing legacy code.
by sebastiennight | 2025-05-11 18:31:29+00:00
> Do I lose money on conversion rates? Yes

Depending on where your vendors are situated, you might avoid the conversion losses by having USD accounts AND EUR accounts.

We use two separate banks (for redundancy), each of which allows us to have incoming payments in EUR, USD, and a couple of lesser currencies (CAD, SGD) and we keep a balance in each.

And then we use the USD balance to pay, eg. DigitalOcean, and the EUR balance to pay eg BunnyCDN. So we mostly don't have to incur the conversion loss.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-05-11 18:31:33+00:00
I don't want to be harsh, but comparing an IP address to registered allocations isn't a sophisticated product. Have you considered that people just don't want what you're selling?

Please don't get me wrong: I also work in some spaces that are not highly valued by developers, so I empathize heavily. It's a pain in the butt trying to sell to programmers when this audience is literally one of the most difficult and obnoxiously inconsistently price sensitive. (Will spend thousands on hardware, scoffs at $1 apps.)
by b112 | 2025-05-11 18:31:46+00:00
I have yet to see a thing made better by LLMs.

I've seen things with more impressive results, but then interlaced with garbage results. Far less reliable is the outcome.

Whether it's the now horrible pixel camera app, search results, or really anything else, it's all garbage

Meanwhile, yay!, let's use a billion times the compute.
by bornfreddy | 2025-05-11 18:32:02+00:00
Actually, they are CT scanning them as the project continues. IIRC they reported about scanning a new (big) batch of them about a month ago.

You are right about not unrolling them though. Many scrolls were destroyed in previous attempts to unroll them physically, so it is fascinating to see how the technology has progressed to allow reading without unrolling.
by viralia | 2025-05-11 18:32:21+00:00
Viralia.net

We are a team who want to reinvent the web agency model.

We are planning to make a web agency work without any production, in an outsourcing business model, in order to make the others work while we find customers.

Viralia is more than an agency, we aim to build a true brand and be on top of tech changes.

This new model will reach all of the world, we strongly believe that what we are doing, will make us future proof (that's because we don't have to struggle with tech stacks and we can outsource to third parties projects and more)

So that everyone benefits! :)

We offer you a piece of history of our company so that you can print it.

All the best to you and feel free to contact us on viralia.net if you need services we offer you the best prices and quality.
by smokel | 2025-05-11 18:32:57+00:00
Thank you for taking the time to respond to so many comments.

Note that my remark is more about my own semi-philosophical thoughts on the value of entrepreneurship, and not so much about your particular effort. Perhaps I should've made that more clear. And perhaps I should've posted it to Meta Hacker News, if there were such a place.

Should society motivate people to invest in learning technology, or to organize businesses, both just for the sake of it? I personally prefer the former over the latter, but I can see that both (as well as abstaining from either) have their pluses and minuses.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-11 18:33:03+00:00
Vancouver is in a fjord. Building artificial land is expensive because the water is deep and the currents are strong. They're aware of how to do it, because Seattle's port is mostly built on top of one of the world's largest artificial islands (harbor island). The depth of the fjord is actually a strength to Vancouver, because it means they're not limited on ship draft. Seattle is.
by sebastiennight | 2025-05-11 18:34:42+00:00
> Early on, prospective customers would tell me that they'd definitely buy if I had X feature, and I'd spend a week implementing it, and then the customer would disappear or say they couldn't purchase for some other reason.

The trick I've found for this is to pre-sell. Would you buy, now, knowing that the feature is on the roadmap and will be there soon?

If yes, and they vote with their credit card: we build ASAP, to fulfill the promise.

If no, it might mean you should not waste time on that feature.
by phtrivier | 2025-05-11 18:34:44+00:00
Except "those people" are the ones who will run the USA for the foreseeable future.

Fixing Y38 will require some public spending. If "researching cancer" is not considered worthy of public spending any more, I'm curious about how the nerds will manage to justify replacing lots of embedded chips "because maths".

If it takes the usual 8 years to replace the current administration with one that accepts listening to experts, and unless big donors can make a profit by organizing the transition, we can expect serious efforts to only start around 2032 globally. No idea if that will be enough this time, we'll see...

(On the bright side, maybe they can charge customers ? That would work.)
by MOARDONGZPLZ | 2025-05-11 18:34:56+00:00
I think their point is not worth addressing on its merits. I downvoted them because while the article itself focuses on an $18M grant in RI, it also plainly states that this is part of $2B program that's aimed at all states, tribal lands, and territories. With a kagi search that took less time than the poster took to write the comment, I was able to further find a whole site dedicated to the grant along with fact sheets on same, here: https://www.communitychangeta.org/about-community-change-gra...
by mbrumlow | 2025-05-11 18:35:06+00:00
State management, state manage management everybody yells when talking about web dev.

It’s not some sort of mystery, it’s just a global of your variables.

The example given clearly showed components backed by JavaScript. Which means you could implement a state management system in seconds.

But beyond that state management is overrated. I remember when react came out and somebody from face book was describing updating some pending message count number. And how they had trouble with it. The issue was they made shitty code, and the result of react was a solution that hid that shitty code. Because I bet to this day if you profile their example they still had the bug but the state management system silently hid it as a future performance problem.
by d_burfoot | 2025-05-11 18:35:17+00:00
Note that you can make things even simpler than this: just use vanilla JS to compose HTML strings, and plug them into divs using innerHTML = "...". When your state changes due to user input, just rebuild the page using the new data.

I've been building many simple apps using this technique, it works fine. I'm sure there is some kind of performance hit; it's almost never an issue. I have never seen any browser compatibility issues.
by dingnuts | 2025-05-11 18:35:20+00:00
> after my first conversation, where I got it to tell me a fair bit about how Postgres works

See, I always start with conversations about things I already know about, and they bullshit me enough that I'm wary of Gell-Mann Amnesia when asking them about things I don't know about. They output a lot of things that seem plausible but the way they blend fact and fiction with no regard for the truth keeps me extremely distrusting of them.

That is to say: after your conversation, did you ask for citations and go read the primary sources? Because if you did not, the model likely mislead you about Postgres in subtle ways.
by westurner | 2025-05-11 18:35:35+00:00
Thanks, quite the useful simulator; I hadn't found that page yet. Additional considerations for circuit simulators:

What does the simulator say about signal delay and/or propagation in electronic circuits and their fields? How long does it take for a lightbulb to turn on after a switch is thrown, given the length of the circuit and the real distance between points in it?

(I learned this gap in our understanding of electron behavior from this experiment, which had never been done FWIU: "How Electricity Actually Works" (2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI_X2cMHNe0 )

FWIW, additionally:

Hall Effect and Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect;

"Tunable superconductivity and Hall effect in a transition metal dichalcogenide" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43347319

ScholarlyArticle: "Moiré-driven topological electronic crystals in twisted graphene" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08239-6

NewsArticle: "Anomalous Hall crystal made from twisted graphene" (2025) https://physicsworld.com/a/anomalous-hall-crystal-made-from-...

From "Single-chip photonic deep neural network with forward-only training" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42314581 :

"Fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect in multilayer graphene" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-07010-7

"Coherent interaction of a-few-electron quantum dot with a terahertz optical resonator" (2023) https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10522 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365579

> "Room-temperature quantum coherence of entangled multiexcitons in a metal-organic framework" (2024) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi3147

Electrons (and photons and phonons and other fields of particles) are more complex than that though.
by gregdoesit | 2025-05-11 18:36:09+00:00
Either Klarna is really good at pulling strings to get media coverage, or mainstream media does not fact checking themselves. About a year ago, the company was everywhere in the media when its CEO announced that it created an AI bot that is doing the equivalent of 700 fulltime customer service folks.

I did what seemingly no other publication reporting on it did: signed up for Klarna, bought one item and used this bot.

I was... not impressed?

Klarna's "AI bot" felt like the "L1 support flow" that every other company already has in-place: without AI! Think like when you have a problem with your UberEats order and 80% of cases are resolved without a human interaction (e.g. when an item is missing for your item.)

I walked through the bot's capabilities [1] and my conclusion was that pretty much every other company did this before (automating the obvious support cases.) The real question should have been: why did Klarna not do it before? And when it did, why did it build a wonky AI bot, instead of more intuitive workflows than other companies did?

My sense is that Klarna really wants to be seen as an "AI-first tech company" when it goes public, and not a "buy now pay later loan company" because AI companies have higher valuations even with the same revenue. But at its core, Klarna is a finance or ecommerce-related company: an not much to do with AI (even if it uses AI tools to make its business more efficient - regardless of whether it could use non-AI tools to get the same thing done)

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/klarnas-ai-chatbot/
by mnky9800n | 2025-05-11 18:36:12+00:00
Yes and you can even build symbolic engines that do this for you. I think the real question we must ask ourselves as data scientists or statisticians or whatever is whether we believe these data models represent the space of data fully or by happenstance. And if by happenstance is it because the data doesn’t capture the underlying processes that produced the data or are they uncapturable in this way and function approximators like neural networks or gradient booster machines are better. And is that because those function approximators capture interactions between the driving processes that otherwise go unseen or is it because those processes have fractional dimensions that control their impact that are not captured by data models. This all is summed up well by Leo Breimans two cultures paper in my opinion. I have gone back and forth on which “culture” is the correct representation of how processes produce data. If you buy that only function approximators truly capture the complexity of whatever processes you are observing then you have to wonder why physics works so well. That’s because, at least in my opinion, from the statistical point of view physics has spent centuries developing equations that are linear combinations of variables that are essentially data models according to Leo. I hope this opinion generates discussion because I don’t know what the answer is or if it matters that there is one.
by sgarland | 2025-05-11 18:36:19+00:00
> Ship first, worry about scale later

This is repeated constantly, but I fear that it is internalized as “write shitty code and throw money at it later.” If you have taken the time to learn your language well, you can avoid a lot of really bad decisions that don’t cost you additional time.

Similarly, on the infra side of things (where this advice is usually doled out), maybe take the time to have a modicum of understanding about the tools you’re building on. If you’re using a DBaaS, your vendor almost certainly has monitoring built-in, often for free, or a nominal cost. USE IT, and learn what it is you’re looking at. “The DB is slow” could be anything from excessive row locks due to improperly-held transactions to actually hitting an underlying resource limit – and for the latter, 9/10 it’s a symptom of something that’s misconfigured, or not understanding your RDBMS’ operation.

For example, do you have a write-heavy table with a UUIDv4 PK, lots of columns that are heavily indexed, and some medium-large JSON blobs in it? Congratulations, you’ve created Postgres’ (and MySQL, but for different reasons) worst nightmare. Every write is amplified by the indexes, and even if you’re doing an UPDATE and are only hitting one of the indexed columns, all of them will be rewritten. The UUIDv4 PK means your WAL traffic is going to skyrocket from all the full page writes, and if your JSON blobs are big enough to be unwieldy, but not big enough to have be TOASTed, that’s another huge amplification to writes. All of this can easily result in hitting IOPS limits, network bandwidth limits, or CPU saturation from additional queries piling up while this one is dealt with, and all of it could be easily avoided by having a basic understanding of your tooling.
by monero-xmr | 2025-05-11 18:36:31+00:00
The real issue is so much of this stuff was superseded decades ago by technology. There was a woman on NPR moaning about how their funding to tell women to let babies sleep on their back will result in deaths https://www.npr.org/2025/05/05/nx-s1-5383871/trump-cuts-safe...

Doctors. The internet. We don’t need an entire apparatus to explain basic facts that can be a document sent via text message to new mothers in the hospital. The amount of useless busywork is absurd
by like_any_other | 2025-05-11 18:36:52+00:00
I've found it a bit difficult to track down exactly which EU law this stems from - https://migrant-integration.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files... makes reference to various council decisions, but those are not voted on by MEPs.

Regardless, even if this is the clear result of a vote, and not some creative interpretation of law, Ireland has 14 MEPs, Germany has 96, and the whole EU has 720. Ireland can be dragged into anything even if their MEPs are in unanimous opposition. And given Irish resistance to changing their laws in this direction, clearly they don't all agree, which is why the EU must threaten them into compliance.
by sixtram | 2025-05-11 18:37:07+00:00
We shipped our VB6 software on a 1.44 MB floppy disk. Actually, we had to add some random stuff to the installer to make our software fit on two floppies instead of one, so that customers would think our application was more complex. Our CEO wanted to make sure that the end user had to eject disk 1 and insert disk 2 during the installation. Sometimes you want to go big. So size matters.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-11 18:37:39+00:00
> When OpenDNS was first ordered to block pirate sites in France, the company made a simple but drastic decision to leave the country entirely, effectively affecting all French users. Last week, it repeated this response in Belgium following a similar court order.

Who would have thought that Cisco would be on the side of the good guys for once?!

As for Cloudflare, what they do is scary. The screenshot clearly shows a valid HTTPS certificate, so either they don't do DNS blocking but instead implement the block on their loadbalancer side or they mis-issue HTTPS certificates. The former is only possible when the target site is also served by Cloudflare (which leaves the question what Cloudflare does for domains that are targetted by a court order but not using Cloudflare loadbalancing), the latter would be a serious breach of how HTTPS certificates should be issued.

And in the end I believe that courts need to be educated on how the Internet works. Companies should not be allowed to target DNS, they should be forced to target the actual entities doing the infringement - and if the target isn't in the scope of Western jurisdictions (that have various legal-assistance treaties), it's either tough luck (e.g. if the pirates are in Russia, China or other hostile nations) or they should get their respective government involved to use diplomatic means.
by EA-3167 | 2025-05-11 18:37:44+00:00
It may not be FUD, but it's a really minor result from an absolutely tiny (n=10) study in rats, out of a fairly minor Turkish university. At the very least I would add, "In a small number of rats in a single study" to the title, given the associated politics around vaccination these days, and the reality of how few people read beyond headlines.
by donohoe | 2025-05-11 18:37:47+00:00
I'm not against frameworks, but in many cases, they're unnecessary. I've always questioned why we should add 100KB of JavaScript to a page before writing a single line of real code.

My team and I built https://restofworld.org without any frameworks. The feedback, from surveys, outreach, and unsolicited emails, has been overwhelmingly positive, especially around usability and reading experience.

We might adopt a framework eventually (I do appreciate how their opinionated structure can cut down on endless debates), but for now, plain JavaScript serves us really well.
by YZF | 2025-05-11 18:37:47+00:00
Sad and not surprising. Presumably when you are in the US with US sized total compensation this is even more of a problem. It is also a sign that the technical buffer layer (people like directors, VP, CTO) is not functioning well and also points to issues with company vision and roadmap.

I don't think it's wrong per se to suggest that Google should not be in the business of "Go" e.g. but presumably there are many other areas where similar technical expertise can be used in this size of company.

That said I've seen good people get stuck in large companies. They are put in a certain bucket and find it very hard to change. Sometimes leaving is the correct answer.

As someone who switched to Go in its early days (from C++) and had some interaction with the community (bugs, conventions etc.) it's a little sad but I think also just the way things go.
by cmonBro22 | 2025-05-11 18:38:48+00:00
Sure, but the runtime is not exactly designed to guide you to the best way to do this. Hence the prevalence of frameworks to paper over the runtime.

I openly admit that I'd rather learn a new framework than touch anything to do with figuring out how the browser is intended to behave in practice. What an abomination and insult to humanity.

Edit: holy shit y'all do not like the earnest approach to technology
by nozzlegear | 2025-05-11 18:39:29+00:00
> Exactly! Latino is a thing created my the US to separate themselves from us. But we all have a very similar history, colonized countries, native Americans almost eradicated then assimilated, slavery, migration from Europe and Asia. The only difference is that the US got richer.

Maybe I'm off base here, but are you aware that most Hispanic people in the US proudly call themselves Latino? It's not a term that Americans use as a mark of separation, it's a cultural/identity thing. You can be Latino American and American American (like from the US), they're not mutually exclusive.

I might be missing your point though, are you saying that the US uses the term differently than the rest of Central and South America?
by peanut-walrus | 2025-05-11 18:39:43+00:00
As someone who has been working in security for past 10 years and systems / network admin for another 10 before that, I don't even know what a firewall is supposed to be any more.

Also, since I've worked on military systems a lot, I suppose a military grade firewall is just iptables for which someone has written a shitty gui (that might as well just be a webshell) and packaged it into a green rugged box.
by agarren | 2025-05-11 18:40:00+00:00
> Monopolies can only be created by government dictate, like old AT&T or modern cable companies.

By virtually every definition I can find, a monopoly is a an entity that functions as the sole, or effectively the primary, provider of a good or service in some market. That seems to perfectly describe Google’s position wrt web-based advertising. Do other ad-platforms exist? Absolutely. Do they exhibit the kind of market dominance or control that Google does? Nowhere close.

> Google has no power to stop them.

Fact? I’d argue that Google’s sheer size and dominance means they don’t need to stop them. Potential competitors simply don’t stand a chance given Google’s size, number of resources, and reach. Explain how that’s not a significant factor into Google “power to stop” a potential rival?