MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by princevegeta89 | 2025-05-31 17:15:02+00:00
Front-end is now a cesspool of numerous complex layers that try so hard to work with each other, all while only trying to deliver mostly the same kind of experience from 10 years ago or older.

Many big companies and startups blindly jump into the React/Vue/Angular stack, along with other complexities like Vite, Webpack, SSR, Zzzzzzzz... etc, where things are tied so loosely with 100s of dependencies and with a fragile underlying platform such as NPM. The output produced is only very marginally different from what could be achieved by the traditional MVC frameworks like Django/Rails/Phoenix etc. What do we lose here? a breathtaking amount of productivity and time. In addition, all the complex layers brought in place to make React FEs work with the backend such as GraphQL etc, also only increase the number of places you will have to maintain.

With SPA and all the modern snake oil like "serverless", engineers only will have to make changes at several places and implement some extra adapter logic, and spend a lot more time writing crap, than actually getting things out the door. With something as simple as JQuery which still holds its ground today, coupled with helper libraries like HTMX, Stimulus/Turbo, you can replicate 90% of the SPA experience, and ship things insanely fast, and maintain logic and state only on the backend. Your user only cares about seeing new features and existing features being easy to use. They don't give a fuck about whether you're using React or plain JavaScript or JQuery at the end of the day.
by theptip | 2025-05-31 17:16:09+00:00
I worry about this stuff a fair bit, of all the net-negative AI outcomes I think perhaps the most likely group is some variant of this combined with dystopian techno-feudalism that drives society into an attractor state that’s hard to get out of.

It’s by no means certain though, and i think the article takes an over-pessimistic take.

It’s true that uber drivers and doordashers get bid down, but this is the bottom rung of the ladder of unskilled labor; there is currently massive demand for this job.

If you look at restaurants I believe post-covid you see a different story, where workers are not racing to the bottom and instead employers need to offer way above minimum wage to fill roles. Trades would be an even better example, where skilled carpenters and mechanics are so in demand that it’s a comfortable six-figure job.

Personally I think all these low-skilled jobs are quite likely to be automated soon. How society responds to the influx of unemployed unskilled workers will be the crux. And of course the skill bar for automation will increase; in the long term many (most?) jobs are going to be automatable.

UBI or similar is the obvious solution, but Capital will of course oppose this vigorously. A new social contract will be needed; the slippery slope that the US is currently on does not end in a pretty place.
by globie | 2025-05-31 17:16:25+00:00
A "Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders" means exactly what I said: "legally bound to extract profit without these silly notions of empathy or trust".

The only notions of empathy or trust you see from publicly traded companies nowadays is the over-engineered calamity of ESG. If you have a single example of a moderately-adopted trend which demonstrates a genuine desire to do right by their society, or to build long-term trust at the expense of short-term profits, I'll readily adopt it into my world model.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-05-31 17:16:47+00:00
This is like asking if tariffs are so bad, why don't you notice large price swings in your local grocer right now?

In complex systems, you can't necessarily perceive the result of large internal changes, especially not with the tiny amount of vibes sampling you're basing this on.

You really don't have the pulse on how fast the average company is shipping new code changes, and I don't see why you think you would know that. Shipping new public end-use features isn't even a good signal, it's a downstream product and a small fraction of software written.

It's like thinking you are picking up a vibe related to changes in how many immigrants are coming into the country month to month when you walk around the mall.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-31 17:16:51+00:00
I can't help but wonder if those parts of the game kind of work as a dirty bit, a fat friend, that makes the rest of the game feel that much better.

Port Royale (and many other games) kind of take the core aspects of Pirates (open world, combat, trade, pinnace to ship of the line, retirement, piracy/privateering, and so on) and then try to expand on it allowing one to operate multiple fleets, developing cities, and many other such things - with no particularly annoying aspect. And they're enjoyable, but somehow don't come anywhere near Pirates, and I can't think of any particular reason why not.

Actually come to think of it, most of every great game I can think of also had some really really terrible aspects. For a more popular example, the combat in Skyrim is some of the worst in any RPG. But perhaps these failings make the rest of the game shine that much more.
by bgnn | 2025-05-31 17:17:19+00:00
Very valid question. The whole industry is trying to do it, mainly with the hope of increasing profit margins to SW levels. But there are fundamental issues that is in the way (this is valid for ASIC design):

- We only use models to simulate the chip, and this is at best partial. Verification coverage if the code is one thing. There are thousands of effects from power supply network to thermals, reliability (device aging, electromigration etc) and a bunch of analog stuff which has weird failure modes which is almost impossible to fully cover before shipping it. So, we never actually know what would fail before tapeout. - Tapeour cost is immense. A full mask cost of an advanced node is easily $10 Million or more. You can always go to an MPW, but then they are rare for advanced nodes (1-2 times per year), putting an immense pressure on schedules. - Chip production takes time. For old nodes ~3 months, advanced nodes it's getting close to ~5 months. - Package design, test PCB design, their production takes a lot of time and money too. Typically package costs as much as the silicon to produce if the design is heavily IO limited and uses and advanced packaging solution. - Lab test preperation and test itself takes time. Typically you would need months of test to get a meaningful picture of the issues. You woul need to go through temperature and voltage cycles, on/off cycles etc. This of course depends on the end application. Automotive and data centers are quite demanding. - There is a lot of competition for pretty nuch the same product and there is a lot of vender lock-in as the customers don't want to redesign their system ever.

So at the end, if you are designing a complex ASIC, you will spend a lot of money and time per tapeout cycle. If you have a big issue, your customer will go to the next guy. You lost them for forever (or for this product cycle of 4-5 years, if you are lucky but that's death sentence for a start-up). Now you are tens of millions in negative without your main customer. Again, if you are lucky you can either find another customer or repurpose your design. This is increasingly difficult as complex chips often aim a narrow market. This makes everyone very risk averse, including your customers.

For less complex chips in old process technology nodes things can be sped up, and is already being sped up, by a lot of IP reuse or buying ready silicon proven IPs. The problem there is, the time to market isn't the determining factor anymore as anyone can make a functional chip relatively quickly, but what matters is who can do it cheapest. There's a reason why most audio codecs and 1Gbit ethernet PHYs in PCs are Realtek. This type of products aren't attractive for start-ups.

It's often a happy middle ground of these with a niche application which resonates well with the experience and the talent of the engineering team makes a good beginnings of a HW start-up. Even with the best team, you need minimum 2 years to show something though.
by righthand | 2025-05-31 17:18:07+00:00
This is naïve, the government and corporations are already working towards the dystopian result. Just because we don’t “know” doesn’t mean people can’t make an educated guess. You need people to put Llms on the good path before you can say the bad path won’t happen. Right now people are loyal to corporations that offer it, that’s the bad path.
by danabramov | 2025-05-31 17:18:18+00:00
I'm super excited about this. Hope it gets moved to its own repo so it's easier to find and send to other people. I was always curious about math, and Tao's Analysis was the first textbook that really showed me how it can be constructed in a rigoruous way my programming brain was hoping for. Then I got a bit into Lean, and similarly it was very satisfying but Mathlib is a bit complicated to learn math concepts from. So it's nice to see a bridge from the book to the tool.
by pas | 2025-05-31 17:18:33+00:00
the problem with rail is that it's hard to scale up (and down)

getting new tracks built takes waaay too long (because of NIMBY and simply because the road is usually already there)

there's no long-term thinking from politics, and no market forces converging to somehow over the years lead to some compounding (so the inefficiencies don't really translate to some big problem -- well, climate change and slower GDP growth)
by mathgradthrow | 2025-05-31 17:18:39+00:00
the entire premise of your objection is "what about women in porn?"

OC listed three jobs total, the premise being that jobs in which a tryout is a useful evaluation tool are rare.

There is no a priori reason to believe that the very different jobs that men and women have as porn actors should both fall into this rare category.

Unless, of course, you're reflexively looking to take offense at the idea that men and women are not interchangeable.
by arcticbull | 2025-05-31 17:19:36+00:00
I would say unless you find playing the miles and points game to be very enjoyable, which I do, you're better off with a cash-back card. For most people the Citi Double Cash at 2% is a great bet, if you have $100K in investments with them, you can get 2.625% back via Bank of America's Unlimited Cash Rewards card.
by alwa | 2025-05-31 17:19:47+00:00
In fact, this is one of the central design points he mentions within the first two lines of TFA: no point in a clock with a milliseconds place if it doesn’t display each millisecond legibly.

> Summary

The specifications for the clock were as follows:

* Millisecond precision, with no perceptible jitter

* Display clearly, without flicker, when filmed at very high framerates (20,000fps or more). The brightness should still automatically adjust, of course, and without the use of PWM
by YZF | 2025-05-31 17:20:24+00:00
I clicked through to your list. First name.

"Hayel Abdul Hamid" head of security for Fatah.

- Not a political leader/politician. Head of security for Fatah is a combatant role.

- The perpetrator was Hamza Abu Said, a Palestinian bodyguard, who had been born in Wahdat refuge camp, Jordan, in 1963. So he wasn't assassinated by the IDF, he was assassinated by another Palestinian faction!

Tunisia, January 1991, not relevant at all to this discussion/question.

> Surely on this website we can operate in better faith than that?

Apparently not?

Let's examine in the context of the original statements: "One interesting note about the Hamas example is that it was the last election for the same reason a lot of countries have a last election: a powerful foreign imperialist nation intervened. In this case, Israel intervened directly to prop up Hamas in order to ensure Palestine destabilizion and prevent the election of a more leftist government. This was achieved through assassinations by the IDF of Palestinian politicians as well as directly funding Hamas."

"Which Palestinian politicians did the IDF assassinate?"

Yes, the burden is on you to provide support for the false claim that the elections of a more leftist government is somehow prevented by the IDF assassination of Palestinian politicians.

Since we're trading Wikipedia links here's an actual relevant one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Palestinian_legislative_e...
by mNovak | 2025-05-31 17:20:37+00:00
I mean, if a mega corp like Google or Amazon had plus/minus 10% of their headcount, as a lay observer I don't think I'd really be able to detect the difference in output either.

That doesn't mean it isn't a real productivity gain, but it might be spread across enough domains (bugs, features, internal tools, experiments) to not be immediately or "painfully obvious".

It'll probably get more obvious if we start to see uniquely productive small teams seeing success. A sort of "vibe-code wonder".
by user_7832 | 2025-05-31 17:20:48+00:00
Excellent website! I manually still "collect" fonts in a text document using a font finder extension. I couldn't make out but is there a way to:

a. add any website you find that has a good font/paring, optionally with comparisons? (For example polestar's Unica77 is nice, I remember coming across NB International somewhere which is similar in some ways but nicer)

b. maintain one's "own" list of websites with good font/pairings?
by munch117 | 2025-05-31 17:23:06+00:00
FP does not introduce imprecision. Quite the contrary: The continuous rounding (or truncation) triggered by using scaled integers is what introduces imprecision. Whereas exponent scaling in floating point ensures that all the bits in the mantissa are put to good use.

It's a trade-off between precision and predictability. Floating point provides the former. Scaled integers provide the latter.
by princevegeta89 | 2025-05-31 17:23:14+00:00
This is the case at many teams in almost all companies. One sad reality is people want to keep their jobs and so they tend to inflate stacks and codebases so much so that they can "keep working on things" for a long long time.

Sorry to hear your situation but I found there's hardly any point in debating with your team on moving towards simplicity - just better to keep your head down and take that paycheck every 2 weeks.

My goal is to build a microstartup with a small team - and for that I am definitely going to choose the traditional JQuery/HTMX/Turbo setup with a server that renders templates. To hell with React.
by LiamPowell | 2025-05-31 17:23:48+00:00
> It would've been interesting to see an EMI/C report.

It's a two layer board with no attempts made to keep loop areas small, it's going to be bad. Most of what I read of this seems fine at a glance but that part about EMI sticks out as complete nonsense.

Edit: I have nothing against it being a two layer stackup as part of the art of it, I however don't like that they're also claiming that it's designed to have extremely low radiated emissions while doing so.
by garrettgarcia | 2025-05-31 17:24:50+00:00
> It is certainly intellectually dishonest to claim that the government funding anything you don't like is a violation of your "intellectual freedom".

Agreed. I never claimed that of course, and neither did the authors. What they claimed is that government funding ALWAYS comes with strings attached, therefore the only way to have true intellectual freedom is to reject all funding. Moreover, the difference between government strings and private funding strings are that only government strings come under the threat of force.
by yawaramin | 2025-05-31 17:25:06+00:00
On a slightly different note, I am using Fibonacci backoff for a couple of things here and there and (subjectively) finding it a bit nicer than the standard 2x exponential backoff. I have it on a system that waits for a few days to raise an alert on missing data and I find the alerts on a cadence of 1, 2, 3, 5, 8... days are a bit tighter but still not overwhelming.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-05-31 17:26:18+00:00
There's a popular saying, e.g. used by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, that "AI won't replace you - a human using AI will replace you", which may be temporarily true while AI isn't very capable, but the AI CEOs are claiming AGI will be here in 2 years, and explicitly saying that it will be a "drop-in replacement remote worker". Obviously one of these is wrong - it's either just a tool to be learnt and used, or it is in fact a drop-in replacement for a human.

One can argue about the timeline and technology (maybe not LLM based), but it does seem that human-level AGI will be here relatively soon - next 10 or 20 years, perhaps, if not 2. When this does happen, history is unlikely to be a good predictor of what to expect... AGI may create new jobs as well as detstroy old ones, but what's different is that AGI will also be doing those new jobs! AGI isn't automating one industry, or creating a technology like computers that can help automate any industry - AGI is a technology that will replace the need for human workers in any capacity, starting with all jobs that can be conducted without a physical presence.
by rendaw | 2025-05-31 17:26:43+00:00
From https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/are-bidet...

> Over washing the anus risks removing the sebum, which lubricates the surface. There have been reports of problems caused by over drying of peripheral areas

> This leaves the body vulnerable to dermatitis and possibly invasion of staphylococcus aureus bacteria.

From https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8553346/

> Outbreaks of resistant bacteria have been reported to be due to the contamination of the cleaning nozzles of bidet toilets in hospitals

I.e. the nozzles do get contaminated and if body isn't able to fend off the contamination bidet use can cause infection.

From https://www.journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S0195-670...

> Of the 292 [hospital] toilet seats sampled, warm-water nozzles of 254 (86.9%) were found to be contaminated by one or more of the following organisms

I'm not convinced this is actual sanitation.

Edit: I should say, I know due to physical and diet circumstances taking a shit might leave you with more or less of a mess that could be uncomfortable or inconvenient - but I don't think unqualified praise for bidet use, suggesting bidets as a superior lifestyle choice, etc is good.
by uludag | 2025-05-31 17:26:57+00:00
I thought the whole idea of automation though was to lower the skill requirement. Everyone compares AI to the industrial revolution and the shift from artisan work to factory work. If this analogy were to hold true, then what employers should actually be wanting is more junior devs, maybe even non-devs, hired at a much cheaper wage. A senior dev may be able to outperform a junior by a lot, but assuming the AI is good enough, four juniors or like 10 non-devs should be able to outperform a senior.

This obviously not being the case shows that we're not in a AI driven fundamental paradigm shift, but rather run of the mill cost cutting measures. Like suppose a tech bubble pops and there are mass layoffs (like the Dotcom bubble). Obviously people will loose their jobs. AI hype merchants will almost definitely try to push the narrative that these losses are from AI advancements in an effort to retain funding.
by osigurdson | 2025-05-31 17:28:29+00:00
The issue with floats is the mental model. The best way to think about them is like a ruler with many points clustered around 0 and exponentially fewer as the magnitude grows. Don't think of it like a real value - assume that there are hardly any values represented with perfect precision. Even "normalish" numbers like 10.1 are not in the set actually. When values are converted to strings, even in debuggers sometimes, they are often rounded which throws people off further ("hey, the value is exactly 10.1 - it is right there in the debugger"). What you can count on however is that integers are represented with perfect precision up to a point (e.g. 2^53 -1 for f64).

The other "metal model" issue is that associative operations in math. Adding a + (b + c) != (a + b) + c due to rounding. This is where fp-precise vs fp-fast comes in. Let's not talk about 80 bit registers (though that used to be another thing to think about).
by boulos | 2025-05-31 17:28:32+00:00
I've also come around to --ffast-math considered harmful. It's useful though to help find optimization opportunities, but in the modern (AVX2+) world, I think the risks outweigh the benefits.

I'm surprised by the take that FTZ is worse than reassociation. FTZ being environmental rather than per instruction is certainly unfortunate, but that's true of rounding modes generally in x86. And I would argue that most programs are unprepared to handle subnormals anyway.

By contrast, reassociation definitely allows more optimization, but it also prohibits you from specifying the order precisely:

> Allow re-association of operands in series of floating-point operations. This violates the ISO C and C++ language standard by possibly changing computation result.

I haven't followed standards work in forever, but I imagine that the introduction of std::fma, gets people most of the benefit. That combined with something akin to volatile (if it actually worked) would probably be good enough for most people. Known, numerically sensitive code paths would be carefully written, while the rest of the code base can effectively be "meh, don't care".
by chucksmash | 2025-05-31 17:29:44+00:00
> That there's any cultural "degenerative debauchery" is an extraordinary claim. Can you back up this claim with evidence?

What's the sense in asking for examples? If one person sees ubiquitous cultural decay and the other says "this is fine," I think the difference is down to worldview. And for a pessimist and an optimist to cite examples at one another is unlikely to change the other's worldview.

If a pessimist said, "the opioid crisis is deadlier than the crack epidemic and nobody cares," would that change the optimist's mind?

If a pessimist said, "the rate of suicide has increased by 30% since the year 2000," would that change the optimist's mind?

If a pessimist said, "corporate profits, wealth inequality, household debt, and homelessness are all at record highs," ...?

And coming from the other side, all these things can be Steven Pinker'd if you want to feel like "yes there are real problems but actually things are better than ever."

There was a book that said something about "you will recognize them by their fruit." If these problems are the fruit born of our culture, it's worth asking how we got here instead of dismissing it with "What do you know that the anthropologists and sociologists don't?"
by Athas | 2025-05-31 17:29:53+00:00
The problem with fixed point is in its, well, fixed point. You assign a fixed number of bits to the fractional part of the number. This gives you the same absolute precision everywhere, but the relative precision (distance to the next highest or lowest number) is worse for small numbers - which is a problem, because those tend to be pretty important. It's just overall a less efficient use of the bit encoding space (not just performance-wise, but also in the accuracy of the results you get back). Remember that fixed point does not mean absence of rounding errors, and if you use binary fixed point, you still cannot represent many decimal fractions such as 0.1.
by vinnymac | 2025-05-31 17:30:13+00:00
Small piece of advice you should be debouncing your primary input at the very least, especially because you insert an entry into the browser history for every character typed (consider only doing that on submit). Plus if any calls are made to the network in response to a key press you’d add unnecessary pressure.

Presently trying to navigate back to the comments from your site after typing out a domain required far more effort than navigating backward a couple times.
by meindnoch | 2025-05-31 17:30:39+00:00
Sure, but signed distance fields by definition have a constant gradient magnitude, aren't they? They measure the distance from the surface, which grows linearly in the normal direction.

But it is true that general implicit surfaces don't necessarily have constant magnitude gradients. I.e. F(x,y) = x^2 + y^2 - 1 vs. F(x,y) = sqrt(x^2 + y^2) - 1