MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dartharva | 2025-06-13 19:13:50+00:00
Author admits he held (and still holds) a lot of HP shares. Had he spoken out back then after the fiasco, HP's stock price would have tanked further. He'd be cutting down his own wealth unnecessarily, in addition to harming his prospects at the peak of his career.

Today he is probably past his corporate ambitions, and has a good personal relationship with current HP leadership. There is little to no harm getting it out now.
by vlucas | 2025-06-13 19:13:59+00:00
Good rant. I encountered this issue on my own app built with Next.js in production, on STATIC GENERATED blog/article pages. It happened randomly when clicking around through a bunch of pages back and forth. It's such bullshit. Next.js literally blocks static HTML pages with this nonsense "error".

I fixed it by removing all the <Link /> elements, which forces a full page reload vs. going through the client router (imagine using the server and HTTP?!). Ironically, doing this of course defeats a lot of the purpose of Next.js itself for those types of pages. The complexity has become too much. I like React for interactive things, but I will not build any more of my own sites with Next.js. I am now building things with Hyperspan (https://www.hyperspan.dev), which is more of a traditional server framework with interactive client islands.
by akudha | 2025-06-13 19:14:01+00:00
Apotheker had made the discontinuation choice without even informing the Palm team beforehand

Is this how big decisions are made in big companies? Or is this an exception? Shouldn’t people in high positions have basic humility to get the opinions of experts, have basic decency to inform before making massive decisions like this? Even if it was the right decision (I have no idea)? sounds insane
by woolion | 2025-06-13 19:14:10+00:00
I'm fine with that. I don't think it's much worse than the quirks of what you call non-formalists systems.

In your original comment, you mention:

All notions about uncountable sets being larger than countable ones, require separating the notion of truth from the reasoning required to establish that truth.

If you wanted to formalize something like that, you'd need the consistency of an absurdly large cardinal. I think it is an interesting type of question to explore, so it's fine to have these large cardinals.
by KomoD | 2025-06-13 19:14:32+00:00
> Everything is either pay walled, requires login, or the off chance I can see the article in full - there are so many trackers built into everything that my ad blocker breaks links. Case in point, I can’t even view the official Anker recall page.

Welcome to the internet, sadly this is what it has become. I always run articles through archive.is because they're a nightmare/impossible to view otherwise.

It gets even worse when you're on mobile, shit popping up everywhere constantly, ads in the middle of articles, auto playing video ads, etc.

I even pay ~$26/mo for a subscription to a local news site and they STILL show me ads.
by ok_dad | 2025-06-13 19:14:59+00:00
> The regex methods are unbelievably fast regardless of string length.

I immediately pinned regex as the winner, and here is why:

In Python, you can almost always count on specialized functionality in the stdlib to be faster than any Python code you write, because most of it has probably been optimized in CPython by now.

Second, I have to ask, why would someone think that regular expressions, a tool specifically designed to search strings, would be slower than any other tool? Of course it's going to be the fastest! (At least in a language like Python.)
by pfortuny | 2025-06-13 19:16:02+00:00
I am a civil servant (Spain), I cannot legally accept them.

But I have indeed been gifted a Christmas "basket" (with typical Christmas food) and from another student an amazon box with "serrano" produce. I could not refuse them (the first one because it was already brought to my office, the second one had no return address afaicr).

It was very very pleasing, of course. And neither was really expensive.

I think both students hit the exact level of compliment: singular but not extravagant.

ETA: thanks for the compliment.
by thunky | 2025-06-13 19:16:30+00:00
> The difference is I'm correct and you are not.

This is the kind of thinking that keeps this insanity going on forever.

You're demonstrating my point: we've lost track of "who started it" and it doesn't even matter now. It's too easy for each side to claim it's the other side's fault. They both have legitimate reasons to so it's easy to get support for those claims, too.

But I would argue that correct vs incorrect is entirely irrelevant. Nothing you or I can say can justify their actions.
by ninkendo | 2025-06-13 19:16:50+00:00
I can think of exactly two use cases for web browser push notifications:

- Web-based email

- Web-based chat

That’s it. Every other use case seems to be solving a “them” problem (how do we increase engagement?) and not a “me” problem.

Even if I wanted to hear about updates from a website (and I never do), I could sign up for emails. And If I don’t trust a website with my email, I certainly don’t trust them with sending me push notifications.

In fact, let me take chat apps off that list, because if I don’t have the webapp open in a browser window, the chat app should have the option to just email me about someone trying to message me (and ideally, letting the other party know I’m unavailable and letting them choose whether to send me the email.) So no, really just email and that’s it.

I’m super curious what your use cases are if you use web-based push notifications “all the time”.
by tough | 2025-06-13 19:17:17+00:00
same, i is a vowel, y is a consonant

TIL: When y forms a diphthong—two vowel sounds joined in one syllable to form one speech sound, such as the "oy" in toy, "ay" in day, and "ey" in monkey—it is also regarded as a vowel. Typically, y represents a consonant when it starts off a word or syllable, as in yard, lawyer, or beyond.
by ronaldsvilcins | 2025-06-13 19:17:45+00:00
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by Jtsummers | 2025-06-13 19:17:48+00:00
I don't use either of those services so I was unaware. So I guess there are still some apps out there without a proper iPad interface. I haven't encountered any in at least a decade though and they seem to be in the minority. Apple has gone to great lengths to make it easy to at least make something that fits on the iPad even if you don't try to make it properly native and use the screen real estate effectively. So that strikes me as laziness on the part of the Instagram and Bluesky app developers to not even try.
by paul7986 | 2025-06-13 19:18:36+00:00
As you noted those getting hired are through via deeper human connections; through your personal network and or friends' personal networks.

Any tool to spam hiring managers whether AI or not will be marked spam which is highly impersonable, ignored and not seen.

While directly reaching out to hiring managers on linkedin might be a good thing nowadays yet with spam tools such as this Linkedin will start marking them spam and they'll never be seen.

Best thing to do to find work is through your own and or friends' personal networks as you noted.. not this IMHO.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-06-13 19:18:45+00:00
In my experience, it does require a lot of skills. You won't notice them if you only interact with politicians through reading about them in the news, but successful politicians have a lot of charisma, are very good at remembering names and faces of people they meet once at a crowded party, and are good at spinning answers to make everyone hear what they wanted to hear.
by cantaloupe | 2025-06-13 19:18:47+00:00
This is only when no other effects/processes are accounted for. If every participant keeps their current funds in an account with the same interest rate, then the distribution permanently skews so that there is no longer bobbing. The rich stay rich. See this more detailed simulation linked in another comment: https://joshworth.com/jpw/does-this-simulation-explain-why-l...
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-13 19:19:36+00:00
> By 2011 Apple had launched iPhone 4s, Android manufacturers had sold 100M phones, and HP's latest and greatest mobile device looked like this

That looks just like a BlackBerry. What's the problem supposed to be? RIM sold 52 million of them that year.

They're much easier to use than modern phones, because you don't need to touch the screen. The only advantage of the full-screen iPhone / Android style is that you have a bigger image when watching videos.
by ewoodrich | 2025-06-13 19:19:36+00:00
Yeah, I am pretty confident I was able to keep apps running in the background on my T-Mobile G1 and some old forum posts I found seem to confirm my memory. [1] Multitasking/keeping apps in background and copy/paste were the big differentiators I remember on the first Android phones compared to the iPhone.

The app switcher UI for multitasking on Android didn't really exist yet though so WebOS was ahead there and I think that gave some people the illusion Android didn't support it at all.

[1] https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/t-mobile-g1-android-pho...
by 7thaccount | 2025-06-13 19:19:48+00:00
Upvoted as my experience was similar. I owned 3 windows phones over the years and they were always an absolute joy. The UI was very polished, the call quality was terrific, the camera was awesome, and it did have plenty of apps even if it was a tiny percentage of android or iPhone. To be honest though, I've never been one to care about apps. My experience was anyone who actually took the time to play with one loved it. The hard part was getting people to give it a try. AT&T also did an awful job at the store too as none of their employees knew anything about it.
by Kranar | 2025-06-13 19:19:55+00:00
But it's not the fastest, it's actually incredibly slow and in general regexs are very slow. The key insight is that string processing in Python is very slow, and that regex here outperforms everything else because it's the only approach that is implemented in C.

With that insight it should follow that using another implementation in C should outperform even the regex, and indeed the following simple Python method that this article for whatever reason ignored vastly outperforms everything:

def contains_vowel_find(s): for c in "aeiouAEIOU": if s.find(c) != -1: return True return False

That's because s.find(c) is implemented in C.

In my benchmark this approach is 10 times faster than using a regex:

https://gist.github.com/kranar/24323e81ea1c34fb56aff621f6c09...
Ask HN: Any way to get some OpenAI/Anthropic credits for school students?
by amanchanda | 2025-06-13 19:20:05+00:00
Hey Folks,

My son is in the 10th grade and has started learning programming with me recently. He is doing a short internship with me during his summer break.

As part of this internship, he has to work on a GEN AI project. I was curious if OpenAI or Anthorpic provides some basic credits to students experimenting like this?

Nothing major, but like $15-20 credits. I can very well buy the credits for him, but he will get an extra kick if he gets them through them instead of me buying them for him.

Any pointers are welcome.

TIA.
by horsawlarway | 2025-06-13 19:20:42+00:00
Sometimes.

Which is actually part of why I clicked into the article - I expected it to get into the complexity of trying to detect if 'y' was a vowel as part of the search, and instead got a mostly banal python text search article.

You can see the technical rules for when 'Y' is a vowel in english here:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/why-y-is-sometimes-a...

Y is considered to be a vowel if…

The word has no other vowel: gym, my.

The letter is at the end of a word or syllable: candy, deny, bicycle, acrylic.

The letter is in the middle of a syllable: system, borborygmus.
by 999900000999 | 2025-06-13 19:21:02+00:00
Source isn't really a publicly available engine. Valve doesn't appear to have much interest in licensing it.

You're not wrong about Godot, but;

1. You can always fork/modify it. Getting a source code license for Unity is a 6 figure proposition.

2. Being open source is a big deal. No phone home spyware(Unity). Keep 100% of your revenue.

3. C# support is OK. Its very slowly getting better.

I'm not a Godot zealot, one if it's biggest weaknesses is a community incapacitated of criticism. But still, your getting something very capable for small scale projects for free.

Unity, if Microsoft brought them out and fixed the business side, would easily be my engine of choice.

I learned to program in it. But I don't trust Unity the company. Every time you turn around they're laying off more people or doing something else strange.

Unreal is very bad for the smaller scales projects I actually build.

Lately I've been making weird prototypes using niche engines. I like Raylib, but it's just a rendering system. It's a much harder path to getting a game made.

If you know someone building a better Godot let me know. I'll try it this weekend.
by piker | 2025-06-13 19:21:07+00:00
That's not the killer feature. I'm not sure where you got that impression. It's the integrated whole which is the feature. Sorry it seems not to work on firefox, but I'll definitely work on that. It's a desktop application with a "web preview" that is being presented here. Most lawyers never interact with the web preview (or the website for that matter) because it just arrives on their desktop.

Agree to disagree on the UX, but points very much appreciated!

[Edit: what OS and generally what type of edit? Firefox on Windows is working, but perhaps there's a specific edit which caused it to crash. Thanks so much!]
by trentnix | 2025-06-13 19:21:35+00:00
I’m not sure what it is about this post that sets me off so. Maybe it’s the “LinkedIn”-friendly prose. Maybe it’s the “lessons learned” which reveal nothing remotely insightful. Or maybe it isn’t this guy at all and is just my general frustration with modern big tech that bleeds its customers and abruptly dismisses products, projects, and employees to buoy its stock price.

But my gut reaction after reading was “what a bunch of self-serving nonsense”.

From “they needed me to babysit the CEO and board” to “I still believe in HP despite destroying 1.2 billion in value while I was on an 8-week break” to “the DECIDE framework”, it’s a masterclass of modern tech executive bloviation. They are always so confident and convincing as they explain their cognitive dissonance, preaching to audiences stuck in the same reality-distorting game. The tech market is a mess because these same types are utterly paralyzed over the path forward now that LLMs have emerged but full of so many words to explain how they have it all figured out.

But this guy insists it isn't his fault. He was just unlucky that he wasn't there to be the beacon of reason their leadership needed:

> Their exact words still echo in my mind: "The CEO and board need adult supervision." Think about the implications of that statement. HP's own technical staff, the people closest to our innovation work, believed that senior leadership couldn't be trusted to make sound technology decisions without someone there to provide oversight and guidance. They weren't wrong. The numbers proved it in the most painful way possible.

Hollywood-grade drama and warning sirens all around, but a few paragraphs later…

> Despite watching the WebOS disaster unfold, despite being blamed for not preventing it, despite everything that went wrong during that period, I still believe in HP as an organization.

Mercy. The author thinks he's provided an apology to explain his culpability in the failures of the Palm acquisition but, instead, he's just made it clear he has awful judgement.

HP is far, far away from the once-great version of itself. For example, once they achieved dominance, HP ensh*ttified their printer business beyond any reasonable tolerance level to squeeze every last dollar out of its customers. They abandoned all pretense of technical excellence or innovation or customer satisfaction and embraced dark patterns to please their MBA masters.

Like so many of their peers, they see their employees as headcount and their customers as vassals.

That’s the type of decision-making HP values. That's the type of company HP is. And this guy, his excuses, and his experience are a shining example of why.
by sysmax | 2025-06-13 19:21:46+00:00
You need to do it in smaller, incremental steps. Outline the overall architecture in your head, ask the AI to create empty structs/classes. Build it. Ask it to implement one part, leaving others empty. Test it. Ask it to add the next thing, and so on.

Every step should only affect a handful of classes or functions, that you can still keep in your head and easily verify. Basically, same thing as if you were doing it by hand, but at a higher abstraction level, so faster and less mentally tiring.

Shameless plug: I am working on a new cross-platform IDE designed for just this kind of workflow. It has basic C/C++ support already: https://sysprogs.com/CodeVROOM/?features=why
by dan-bailey | 2025-06-13 19:21:51+00:00
I asked myself this same question years ago. And then I asked the mentor who had built me up — he told me to do the same for others. And so I did. And now there’s a group of people out there whose lives are better because their careers are better, and if I can take pride in anything that I’ve done in my life, it’s that. (And when they ask, I just tell them to pay it forward.)
by stick_figure | 2025-06-13 19:22:09+00:00
This is actually tracked at a publicly visible URL: https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-cl...

And the include graph analysis: https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-cl...

The annotated red dots correspond to the last time Chrome developers did a big push to prune the include graph to optimize build time. It was effective, but there was push back. C++ developers just want magic, they don't want to think about dependency management, and it's hard to blame them. But, at the end of the day, builds scale with sources times dependencies, and if you aren't disciplined, you can expect superlinear build times.
by layer8 | 2025-06-13 19:23:04+00:00
It depends on the word, and possibly even on dialect. There isn’t a 1:1 mapping between characters and vowels. Vowels are fundamentally a phonetic concept, not a graphemic one.

This is also why Unicode doesn’t have a “vowel” character property. Otherwise you could use a regex like `\p{Vowel}`.
by hluska | 2025-06-13 19:23:12+00:00
I’ve been in a position to get and give help many times in my life. Paying people back doesn’t do much. Paying people forward creates genuine impact. At points in your life, you will be in a place to help others. Help them. If they pay it forward too, kindness becomes a growing movement.

It’s kind of embarrassing for me when people come out of my past to thank me. Honestly, I don’t always remember what I did. It’s not fun having to say phrases like “well, I’m glad I did that thing I did” when I know it’s meaningful to the other person.
by lipowitz | 2025-06-13 19:23:33+00:00
Thank you Cassandra.. But you could.be right about all of these geopolitics and it still wouldn't change the fact that NVIDIA announced a billion RISCV chips in their GPUs so far or that China is not going to throw away its insurance policy if the US looks friendly for 4 years. I don't know what you are hoping people keep paying license fees on, but everyone from TSMC to the final consumer is going to be all the happier dividing that money up without a license whenever possible.
by akavel | 2025-06-13 19:24:07+00:00
Also interested; how can I message you?

By the way, I just wanted to also say I love big chunks of this whole comments section; so much pure positivity and human beauty in one place, so soothing, uplifting, and inspiring to me. Thanks hereby to everyone sharing around here how they're consciously recognizing and acting in various amazing ways on the good they received.
by Henchman21 | 2025-06-13 19:25:36+00:00
It doesn’t seem at all wise to give the least ethical among us access to a super intelligence. Not trying to single out Zuck specifically, though his challenges with ethics do seem well documented.

Rather, I’m speaking about the entire industry. Humanity isn’t demanding this, only those at the top seem to want it, and they seem to want it so they can keep more share of the pie for themselves, and decrease the size of everyone else’s share.

It feels like we’re at a very ugly crossroads.
by AdrianB1 | 2025-06-13 19:26:34+00:00
It is not specific to HP, but to the top management style of that era; I know multiple companies that went through similar things, some from inside (can't give names), it was a similar story: moving from deep technical expertise to soft "software and services" mantra that fits weak CxO. At the same time other companies that had more technical CxO did much better, these are the companies that are on top today.

There is no much differentiation in the IT services space, lately they provide worm bodies to clients and not much more, or nothing at all. There is no competition, there is no differentiation, it is the place where old elephants go to die. And the CEO of HP at that time had the vision to go there.
by Breza | 2025-06-13 19:27:35+00:00
One of my friends is a public health lobbyist and she is used to having to explain to stakeholders that THIS formatting mark in the PDF means they're adding text but THAT formatting mark means they're deleting text. It's not immediately obvious and every state has its own way of presenting information. I'd argue that DC does it best, but I haven't looked at every legislature.
by ninkendo | 2025-06-13 19:27:51+00:00
In such an environment I’m doomed anyway, even if I’m vetting code. I don’t understand why the goal has to be “the ability to spot attacks specifically designed to prevent you from detecting.” For what you’re describing, there seems to be no hope at all.

It’s like if someone says “don’t pipe curl into bash to install software”, ok that may or may not be good advice. But then someone else says “yeah, I download the script first and give it a cursory glance to see what it’s doing”, wouldn’t you agree they’re marginally better off than the people who just do it blindly?

If not, maybe we just aren’t coming from any mutual shared experience. It seems flatly obvious to me that being able to read the code I’m running puts me in a better spot. Maybe we just fundamentally disagree.
by sysmax | 2025-06-13 19:27:53+00:00
That's not how you do it. Ask it first to create exhaustive tests around the first version. Tell it what to test for. Then, ask to change specific things, one at a time, re-run tests between the steps, and ask it to fix things. Rinse-repeat-review. It is faster than doing by hand, but you still need to be calling the shots.
by IntrepidPig | 2025-06-13 19:28:18+00:00
Nothing about this makes any sense. We’ve already got a number of people pointing out flaws like why did he wait 15 years to write about it, why does it look like it was written by an LLM, and is it really reasonable to blame such a massive failure completely on your peers and not take an ounce of responsibility yourself? But these things all start to make sense once you actually reach the end of the article and realize it’s all a ploy to sell you his fancy new equivalent to a self-help book, which you can tell is legit because its name is a forced acronym. Can we take this off the front page please?