MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matthewkayin | 2025-06-19 18:57:51+00:00
I think that rewrites are an important part of how software is written, and it's an important part of being "agile", in the sense that you can go in and write a prototype that's coded very simply without much regard for long-term architecture, knowing that requirements likely will change and that you likely won't get the design right on the first go anyways.

Coding is like writing, in the sense that it's often faster to write a sloppy first draft followed by a better second draft than it is to agonize over getting the first draft right on the first go. The first draft is generative. Its purpose is not to be good but instead to let you get something built quickly and to let you explore the problem, so that you know what edge cases you'll need to account for in your final architecture.

But this still of working will never get through management because the moment you show them a working product, they'll tell you to ship it and won't give you a chance to rewrite.

I think the best way to solve this is to flatten the hierarchy. Get rid of the notion of managers who rule over engineers and give ownership of the code back to the engineers. Have the engineers and product "owners" make decisions together in a democratic fashion.
by physix | 2025-06-19 18:58:12+00:00
> Build sociotechnical systems with “normal people” in mind

From the perspective of the composition of software engineering teams: Most of us have to make due with the average, we strive to find the above average and avoid the mediocre, but mostly we are teams composed of "normal" people. The article has some good advice for making the best out of a group of normal people. It particularly relevant because it's unlikely that you'll see anything else.
by JdeBP | 2025-06-19 18:58:16+00:00
A version of (say) FreeDOS that was layered on top of the EFI API instead of PC98 firmware interrupts would be quite interesting. That would be a major architectural change to most of the programs, of course. But one would have provided the EFI Shell with essentially a complete suite of MS-DOS (albeit not PC-DOS or DR-DOS) commands. That could probably be quite easily ported to (say) ARM whereas the original still has x86isms.

On the other hand, did you see https://github.com/FlyGoat/csmwrap when it came up a few weeks ago?

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44101828

There are already projects to provide replacements for the vanished Compatibility Support Module.
by xyzzy_plugh | 2025-06-19 18:58:37+00:00
I used to share this mindset, and I still agree that individual ownership is possible for engineers. Unfortunately many, many engineers simply do not want it. I would reckon most if not all engineers are comfortable with ownership at the team boundary, but many simply do not care beyond that. It's just a day job.

Individual ownership at the individual engineer boundary can breed distrust within a team or org, but often alienates team members who like their job but aren't trying to lead, at least with respect to what ownership entails. In this blended environment someone almost always ends up without agency. Sometimes no one gets agency. Who wants that?

It's surprisingly simple and effective by comparison to give a team agency and ownership, usually in part because of the dynamic of having a manager or lead to begin with.

Simply put, there are too many modes of failure at the individual level for software ownership to settle there comfortably: staffing changes, job security, career growth are the obvious ones, but the dysfunction (even in otherwise healthy orgs, there's always some amount) will find the shortest path to complete the circuit here.

I like to think of it like a gearbox. If you only have one gear, and you break it, or wear out all the teeth, then you don't get to go. If you have many gears, well, the ride may be uncomfortable at times, but you'll keep moving.
by andrepd | 2025-06-19 18:58:58+00:00
> and designed the first circuits, including a cool optimization for addition

Curious, what trick? :)

Wishing for mainstream CPU support for anything but IEEE numbers was always a pipe dream on anything but the decades-long term, but I gotta be honest, I was hoping the current AI hype wave would bring some custom silicon for alternative float formats, Posits included.

> the addition operation takes up quite a bit more floorspace, and just quantizing to int4 is with grouped scaling factors is easier with existing gpu pipelines

Can you elaborate on this part?
by tptacek | 2025-06-19 18:58:59+00:00
We very definitely do have IPv6. I'm using IPv6 right now. Last numbers I saw, over 50% of North American hits to Google were IPv6. DNSSEC adoption in North America is below 4%, and that's by counting zones, most of which don't matter --- the number gets much lower if you filter it down to the top 1000 zones.
by nlawalker | 2025-06-19 18:59:04+00:00
Adults everywhere are using it to "cheat" at work, except there it's not cheating, it's celebrated and welcomed as a performance enhancement because results are the only thing that matter, and over time that will result in new expectations for productivity.

It's going to take a while for those new expectations to develop, and they won't develop evenly, just like how even today there's plenty of low-hanging fruit in the form of roles or businesses that aren't using what anyone here would identify as simple opportunities for automation, and the main benefit that accrues to the one guy in the office who knows how to cheat with Excel and VBA is that he gets to slack off most of the time. But there certainly are places where the people in charge expect more, and are quick to perceive when and how much that bar can be raised. They don't care if you're cheating, but you'll need to keep up with the people who are.
by GolfPopper | 2025-06-19 18:59:33+00:00
Not just hard things, but much harder than they've done before.

Note that Booster appears to be coming along pretty well. But Ship, which has a much, much more difficult mission profile than Falcon 9, is really struggling, because going to orbit and back is far more difficult than going most of the way to orbit and back. (Please forgive the abstraction - I don't have the relative numbers at hand.)
by iscoelho | 2025-06-19 19:00:22+00:00
"at absolutely enormous expense"

Citation? A BGP hijack can be done for less than $100.

"You can't just name call your way to getting this protocol adopted"

I do not care if you adopt this protocol. I care that you accurately inform others of the documented risks of not adopting DNSSEC. There are organizations that can tolerate the risk. There are also organizations that are unaware because they are not accurately informed (due to individuals like yourself), and it is not covered by their security audits. That is unfortunate.
by api | 2025-06-19 19:00:43+00:00
If you want the net to support end to end connectivity we need IPv6. Otherwise you'll end up with layers and layers of NAT and it will become borderline impossible.

A lot of protocols get unstable behind layers of NAT too, even if they're not trying to do end to end / P2P. It adds all kinds of unpredictable timeouts and other nonsense.
by ezst | 2025-06-19 19:01:09+00:00
> there was a lot of hints of ChatGPT fluff.

What does that mean? Are you implying that I used a LLM to formulate my comment? A comment about the dangers of LLMs for civic and respectful discourse?

> Ultimately saying a LLM is only useful in niche situations

is a fact. LLMs are not something new or obscure, we have plenty of open-source/weights implementations keeping in check the outlandish marketing promises of the big players and their "SOTA" models.

> …is a tell of the boat passing you by.

is an opinion, giving an emotional twist to something that really doesn't deserve one. All it shows is that you bought into LLMs being more than what they really are, and welcome the (admittedly cool and tempting) marketing above the truth and your critical and independent thinking on the subject.
by johnxie | 2025-06-19 19:01:19+00:00
LLMs aren’t perfect, but calling them a “cult” misses the point. They’re not just fancy heuristics, they’re general-purpose function approximators that can reason, plan, and adapt across a huge range of tasks with zero task-specific code.

Sure, it’s not AGI. But dismissing the progress as just marketing ignores the fact that we’re already seeing them handle complex workflows, multi-step reasoning, and real-time interaction better than any previous system.

This is more than just Lisp nostalgia. Something real is happening.
by throw0101d | 2025-06-19 19:02:19+00:00
> We very definitely do have IPv6. I'm using IPv6 right now.

I'm not. Neither is my home wireline PON ISP, even though they have it on their mobile network (but my previous ISP did).

Also, every time there's an IPv6 article on HN there are entire sub-threads of people saying it's never going to come along. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44306792
by fxj | 2025-06-19 19:02:35+00:00
Munich has a smaller version of the Octoberfest all year around. Beer Gardens everywhere, many people wearing "Tracht". The tourists love it and the munich people love the money. It has some nice places like the English Garden or the River Side. Also the Farmers Market in the city centre is nice to hang around. It is not for the young crowd but more for the settled and wealthy ones. Very much like Zürich, but bigger. The mountains are close and the lakes around Munich are famous. Also many nice castles like Schloss Nymphenburg, the Residenz and of course the castle built by Ludwig II. Lots of historic buildings. The city was founded 1158 and parts of the old city still exist.
by leakycap | 2025-06-19 19:02:37+00:00
I'm interested in this topic and stay on top of most threads/discussions about PWM.

> I doubt there are any long-term effects of it.

I would have thought the same, but it seems to be a common experience that once someone becomes PWM sensitive it actually sticks with them.

I've been a techy my whole life; the iPhone 12 mini seemed to be the device that triggered my PWM sensitivity and since then I have been extremely sensitive to any device with PWM.

Although I have tried to keep PWM devices out of my life, I can still quickly tell when the TV in a lobby or the airplane entertainment display has PWM and there's not much you can do about it.
by simba-k | 2025-06-19 19:02:46+00:00
Yep, we can essentially convert from SQLAlchemy into an MCP server.

Auth/Security is interesting in MCP. As of yesterday a new spec was released with MCP servers converted to OAuth resource servers. There's still a lot more work to do on the MCP upstream side, but we're keeping up with it and going to have a deeper integration to have AuthZ support once the upstream enables it.
by axus | 2025-06-19 19:04:02+00:00
Here's an article, the power relationship was exercised by denying parole that would have otherwise been granted without a profit motive: https://archive.ph/0gVie

"Since 2018, about 575 companies and more than 100 public agencies in Alabama have used incarcerated people as landscapers, janitors, drivers, metal fabricators and fast-food workers, the lawsuit states, reaping an annual benefit of $450 million."
by derefr | 2025-06-19 19:04:25+00:00
You're assuming a very simplistic model of API coupling, where there are only "applications" and "libraries that the application compiles into itself." But:

• There are also runtimes, installed separately from the application. You might be able to fork the JDK, but people want to run your Java application on their JRE, not yours.

• There are proprietary applications that nevertheless expose APIs to code against. A Photoshop plugin author can't fork Photoshop to expose fields of the plugin host.

• There is the OS itself. You can fork the Linux kernel (and gcc/clang) to expose some internal data your application needs as a system call — but unless you get all that code upstreamed, your application is now entirely non-portable, running only on your own servers at best.

• Most commonly of all, there are system libraries. You can certainly fork (and co-distribute / bake in) a library like libicu or libxml — but no major OS will be willing to ship your app or lib as a system package of its own, if it does that. They'll want your app/lib to depend on the existing packaged version of those libs.

None of this matters, of course, if you develop proprietary-service backend software for a living. You can maintain a menagerie of weird lib forks, shove all the build artifacts into a docker image, and it'll work for you. But much (I'd say the majority) of the world's programming is not in proprietary-service backends, and so needs to actually depend on code it doesn't control.
by ivape | 2025-06-19 19:04:34+00:00
IMHO if you assume the people around you are incompetent or malicious then that’s exactly what you’ll find.

What are you implying, that you are some kind of God? So if you see them as bad, often bad appears, and if you see them as good, then often good appears? That's some magical stuff there.

Further, if the people around you are actually incompetent or malicious then awareness of that fact won’t change the outcome anyway.

True. But we're here talking about managing serious operations, in which case being keenly aware of the above fact helps make decisions and they don't all have to be "evil" decisions and can often be quite beautiful solutions. You can reallocate people to optimize them without firing them, feeding one more person.
by TheodorSTTH | 2025-06-19 19:04:43+00:00
After watching more inspirational TikToks than I care to admit, I realized they rarely lead to lasting change because I consume them passively. The short motivation spike feels good, but it reinforces an endless scrolling habit and ultimately hurts productivity. Active learning feels harder but sticks better.

MindLike offers interactive tasks instead of passive videos. Inspired by figures from Marcus Aurelius (strategic reflection) to Thomas Edison (iterative experimentation), each lesson guides you through short exercises so you practice rather than just consume content. You earn progress percentages, stars, and streaks as you complete lessons like "Adaptive Visionary Leadership".

Google Play Store (100% free): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.toga.mindl... Discord & website: https://www.mindlike.tech

Does this resonate with you? I'd love to hear your thoughts!
by out_of_protocol | 2025-06-19 19:04:51+00:00
https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front

See various charts. For example, this table:

https://res.cloudinary.com/cloudinary-marketing/images/f_aut...

For decoding,

Webp - ~70Mpx/s,

jpeg - 100 to 300 Mpx/s

Jpeg xl - 115 to 163

Avif (single thread) - 32 to 37

Avif (multithread) - 90 to 110
by leakycap | 2025-06-19 19:05:32+00:00
Yes-many do.

It's difficult for PWM-sensitive Mac users right now, as the majority of Apple devices for years have had rough PWM and of course there is no hardware alternative.

I'm stuck on a MacBook from years ago because the only current MacBook I can buy is the Air line, which I'll probably buy soon to replace my aging 2018 MacBook.

No currently for sale iPhone is PWM-free. The iPhone 11 (non-Pro) was the last mainstream device Apple made with a PWM-free backlight. The SE 3 (2022) was also PWM-free, but is no longer available from Apple beyond what stock is still around.
by alganet | 2025-06-19 19:05:53+00:00
> Use composition instead. Inheritance was a hack in the first place.

Composition is great. It's the preferred way.

However, if you take it to the extreme (composition only, never inheritance) you sometimes end up with really weird meaningless objects that have only a single method and a one-to-one relationship with another object.

Private methods are ideal for making those abstractions easier to understand. A private method, therefore, is equivalent to an object that has a one-to-one relationship with another object (it's only composed there) and a single method.

A protected method is similar, but allows whoever subclasses it to replace that single one-to-one "mini object" inside with another one-to-one "mini object".

When used within this mindset, it greatly simplifies code. It lets you simplify a branch that has only a single leaf into something easier to read.

Together with classical refactorings (extract method, move method, extract class), they're a precious tool.

Of course, typing is a consideration as well, but I'm talking exclusively about their role in granularity control.

It is unecessary, but convenient. It can be misused. Composition can also be misused.
by tikhonj | 2025-06-19 19:06:02+00:00
the real problem is not that we can't measure productivity, but that we can't even fully define an abstract productivity metric—what does "productivity" even mean?

we can come up with some notion that talks about the net effect of an individual (the "wins about replacement" of programmers), but that tells us absolutely nothing about how any given individual achieves that; hell, the net effect of any given individual is presumably a function of the entire context and the rest of the org, not just of the individual!

alternatively we can try to define more direct notions of "productivity" even if we can't measure them, but those notions end up varied, multidimensional and, again, painfully context-specific—it's absolutely a useful thing to think about, but it does not let us pin down what a "top 1%" engineer "really" is, or even if that's a meaningful notion
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-19 19:06:22+00:00
It's not inherently a short term viewpoint, that's just the typical and natural result of adopting this view. Measuring long term impacts is hard. Attributing them is even harder.

Here's a real scenario. I worked for a company that evaluated by impact. They had a cellular modem with known issues in the field. A replacement was designed to fix those issues, but couldn't be backwards compatible. The cost to immediately upgrade the field units was high, so deployment was delayed to a cheaper, later time. One way of looking at this is that the decision saved millions of dollars and that argument was made. After the evaluation and before the deployment, a set of older field units failed in such a way that it made headlines across the country, which would have been prevented by the new units.

So, was the impact of those decisions negative the whole time in an unknowable way? Did their impact become negative as soon as the incident occurred? If the incident was still possible but hadn't occurred, would the impact be different?

People aren't good at evaluating things that haven't happened yet, so they'll tend to focus on the things they can see immediately in front of them. That incentivizes engineers to build things that have immediate short term impacts and discount long tail risks which can't be reliably evaluated.
by geysersam | 2025-06-19 19:06:51+00:00
The danger depends a lot on the details of the technology. You're assuming the results would be noisy enough that they're more or less useless. But what if they're not that noisy? Maybe it's easy to distinguish if a person passed near the filter or >100 meters away based on the intensity of the collected signal? Maybe you can even approximately distinguish the age of the DNA. Suddenly that sounds quite useful for tracking and for use in courts
by d4mi3n | 2025-06-19 19:06:58+00:00
I agree with the author that YAML as a configuration format leaves room for error, but please, for the love of whatever god or ideals you hold dear, do not adopt HCL as the configuration language of choice for k8s.

While I agree type safety in HCL beats that of YAML (a low bar), it still leaves a LOT to be desired. If you're going to go through the trouble of considering a different configuration language anyway, let's do ourselves a favor and consider things like CUE[1] or Starlark[2] that offer either better type safety or much richer methods of composition.

1. https://cuelang.org/docs/introduction/#philosophy-and-princi...

2. https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark?tab=readme-ov-file#de...
by clvx | 2025-06-19 19:07:01+00:00
This is a hard no for me. This is the whole thing about reconciliation loop. You can just push something to the api/etcd and eventually it will become ready when all the dependencies exist. Now, rejecting manifests because crd’s don’t exist yet is a different discussion. I’m down to have a cache of manifests to be deployed waiting for crd but if the crd isn't deployed, then a garbage collection alike tool removes them from cache. This is what fluxcd and argocd already do in a way but I would like to Have it natively.
by 9rx | 2025-06-19 19:07:20+00:00
> There are also property rights, environmental reviews, availability of skilled workers, and lack of capital.

There is no magic in this world like you seem to want to pretended. All of those things simply boil down to people. Property rights only exist because people say they do, environmental reviews only exist because people say they do, skilled workers are, well, literally people, and the necessary capital is already created. If the capital is being directed to other purposes, it is only because people decided those purposes are more important. All of this can change if the people want it to.

> HN users sometimes have this weird fantasy that with enough political will it's possible to make enormous changes but that's simply not how things operate in a republic with a dual sovereignty system.

Hell, the republic and dual sovereignty system itself only exists because that's what people have decided upon. Believe it or not, it wasn't enacted by some mythical genie in the sky. The people can change it all on a whim if the will is there.

The will isn't there of course, as there is no reason for the will to be there given that there are better options anyway, but if the will was there it'd be done already (like it already is in a few corners of the country where the will was present).
by quantadev | 2025-06-19 19:07:30+00:00
Thanks for the link. I'm not even saying GR isn't emergent from something else. All I'm saying is that it contains the sum total of what is currently the proven mathematics governing gravity.

I myself have many 'unproven' things about Physics, that I believe, with a high degree of probability (near certainty). Dig thru my past posts for lots of them. For example, I believe Minkowski Space is indeed itself emergent. I think our entire universe exists on the "surface" of a 3D Event Horizon (manifold). I don't believe in the Big Bang, because our reality 'formed' not from a singularity (exploding out), but like a Black Hole (falling in). So I'm open to lots of ideas, but just pointing out the what we currently know as General Relativity, isn't even that complex, and is just about a shape (curvature/tensor) at every point in spacetime. It's all we've "proven".
Ask HN: Technology to protect immigrants and public lands?
by bix6 | 2025-06-19 19:08:22+00:00
Hello HN,

Like many, I am very upset with the current political situation in the US. As a tech person, I would like to use my skills to help protect our country, but immigrants and public lands in particular, as those are two areas I am extremely passionate about and they are both under severe duress.

Last night I was thinking about ways I could help. I started thinking about using traffic cameras to monitor ICE so that community members can stay better informed, but apparently that is illegal (unless you're Palantir). So now I'm trying to think of other tech-based solutions that I could legally implement to help.

Is anyone aware of any groups or projects worth volunteering for? Or any ideas for projects that you think need doing but haven't been done yet?

Thanks in advance!