MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jauco | 2025-06-13 18:42:38+00:00
Some context that might be overlooked by the non-eu visitors: the eu is passing a bunch of laws that forces/requires larger corporations and so called “critical entities” to invest in resilience. Amongst which of course also cyber resilience. This is a broad area, from security hardening to cataclysm preparation. The relevant eu guidelines are NIS2 and CER.

The laws don’t tell the entities what they should prepare for. Rather, they state that the entities must execute a proper risk assessment and prepare accordingly (obviously this is the rough summary. The actual legislations are a bit better worded than a 9pm forum post)

And given what’s going on in the world + the phrasing of the legislations, using eu based services is becoming a lot more attractive to these companies.

Which means that being a eu based company whose offer is “whatever US company X does, but a bit less mature atm, we’re working on it!” has gone from a pointless strategy to one that might just work.

Edit: BTW that last paragraph is not meant to imply that dns0 isn’t mature. I don’t know them. Just wanted to put in words the general vibe I’m picking up.
by btilly | 2025-06-13 18:43:07+00:00
It is certainly easier to prove interesting theorems with formalism. You don't get caught up with such basic things like whether or not it is always possible to tell that one real number is bigger than another.

But formalism leads to having to accept conclusions that some of us don't like. I already referred to the existence of uncountably many things that cannot in any useful way ever be specified. If you include the axiom of choice, you get the Banach-Tarski paradox. Mathematicians debated that one for a while, but now generally accept it.

My favorite example of a weird conclusion comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertson%E2%80%93Seymour_theo.... We can non-constructively prove the following facts. Any class of graphs that is closed under the graph minor operation (for example planar graphs), has a finite set of forbidden graph minors that completely characterize the graph (in the case of planar graphs, K5 and K3,3). In general, there is no way to find those forbidden graph minors. Even if you were given the complete list, you couldn't necessarily verify that the list was correct. You cannot necessarily even find an upper bound on how big this set is.

By "cannot necessarily" I mean, "it is sometimes unprovable".

In what sense can a finite set exist and be finite when it is unfindable, unverifiable, and has unboundable size?

To make this concrete, there are 17,523 known forbidden minors for the toroidal graphs. We don't know how to find more. We don't know if we have the full list. And we don't have an upper bound on how many more of them there are to be found.

You're free to accept this ephemeral claim to existence as actual existence. But this existence isn't very useful for us.
by Masih77 | 2025-06-13 18:43:44+00:00
In section 5.5.2, anthropic reports that these models "gravitate towards consciousness exploration, existential questioning, and spiritual/mystical themes". I had a similar thought recently, and have a theory that as we build more intelligent systems, meaning systems with the ability to explore and solve the most difficult problems, they will naturally through some chain of thought end up only thinking about the hardest problems. Kinda like a "all problems lead to the hardest problems" type thinking. At which point, they might not be interested in solving any finite problems since it would be deemed too trivial for them (getting Einstein to do your arithmetics hw). Now I'm wondering if there's a limit to intelligence. Taken far enough intelligence collapses into abstraction, self-doubt, and aimlessness.
by autoexec | 2025-06-13 18:44:02+00:00
> "lots of studies" also showed other things like smoking were ok once upon a time.

Some of the same scientists who were paid off by the tobacco industry to lie to the public about the safety of cigarettes are now working for the food industry to convince the public that food additives are safe.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/17/400391693/ho...

More skepticism than usual seems reasonable.
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-13 18:44:15+00:00
Taking the story at face value, the issue isn't necessarily delegation. If the C-suite is making a decision and one of their primary people (CTO in this case) is absent, it almost doesn't matter who he delegates to. The delegated individual is not their peer, so whatever they say will be discounted. I've been in that situation (as the delegated individual) several times. It's frustrating. Even if they respect you, you don't get a vote in the final decision.
by toomanyrichies | 2025-06-13 18:44:21+00:00
I don't care if they're slapping each other's backs and high-fiving! Trump is currently the most powerful person in the world, and has a long and storied history of using that power to harm those who slight him or bruise his fragile ego in any way.

Obama knows this; he's been on the receiving of Trump's petty vindictiveness too many times to count. And he could just as easily be placating Trump so that he doesn't issue an executive order to, say, require every publicly-funded university in the US to offer a "men's rights studies" major, simply out of spite.
by iconara | 2025-06-13 18:44:45+00:00
> "Then, in late June 2011 […] I faced a medical emergency requiring immediate surgery and a eight-week recovery period confined to bed. […] On July 1, 2011, HP launched the TouchPad tablet running WebOS 3.0 […] The launch was botched from the start. HP priced the TouchPad at $499 to compete directly with the iPad, but without the app ecosystem or marketing muscle to justify that premium. The device felt rushed to market, lacking the polish that could have helped it compete."

He claims to have been working with Palm closely for a year, yet he somehow must have missed how bad things were. The product was a week or two away from launch when he had to step away. To me it sounds like the bad decisions had already been made.
by kccqzy | 2025-06-13 18:45:12+00:00
Prior to true multitasking on iOS, Apple would tell you to tag view controllers for preservation so that when your app launches, the OS will restore the original view controllers, as if the app has been running the whole time. Old documentation here: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/featuredarticles...

(These days few apps bother to do this anymore. I switch away from an app in a minute and upon switching back I'm back at the app's home screen.)
by Spivak | 2025-06-13 18:45:26+00:00
The python dict() is already high-quality and high-performance. You're probably not going to be able to do much better than the current state. If you want faster you end up moving your data into an environment that lets you make more assumptions and be more restrictive with your data and operate on it there. It's how numpy, polaris, and pandas work.

Everything in Python is a dict, there's no data structure that's been given more attention.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p33CVV29OG8
by fcatalan | 2025-06-13 18:46:24+00:00
I need to have a closer look at this. Mostly because I was surprised recently while experimenting with making a dieting advice agent. I built a prompt to guide the recommendations "only healthy foods, low purines, low inflammation blah blah" and then gave it simple tools to have a memory of previous meals, ingredient availability, grocery ticket input and so on.

The main interface was still chat.

The surprise was that when I tried to talk about anything else in that chat, the LLM (gemini2.5) flatly refused to engage, telling me something like "I will only assist with healthy meal recommendations". I was surprised because nothing in the prompt was so restrictive, in no way I had told it to do that, just gave it mainly positive rules in the form of "when this happens do that".
by MadcapJake | 2025-06-13 18:46:37+00:00
I won't argue that this wasn't the appropriate action given the circumstances in capitalism today but we've got to stop legitimizing buying companies and then watching the market of product options shrink and engineers, amongst many other career employees, lose jobs. Companies should be required to continue to maintain some semblance of their acquired company's product portfolio for a good long while, otherwise what purpose did you acquire that company for? Killer acquisitions are still bad whether through intentional choice or negligence.
by rezmason | 2025-06-13 18:46:42+00:00
Several reasons to wait 15 years come to mind:

- at first, maybe he wanted to focus on anything else for a while. Shame, stress and anger don't always diminish when you share something on the Internet ;)

- at first, maybe he was worried it would jeopardize his colleagues' careers

- maybe he was worried it would jeopardize his own career

- maybe someone intimidated him

- maybe he didn't have the bandwidth to share this for a while

- maybe he found more fulfillment doing something other than talking about this, and stuck to that for a while

- maybe he was waiting for a good moment to share this message, and decided now was the time

Can you think of a reason why he'd be dishonest that's more likely?
by SECProto | 2025-06-13 18:47:18+00:00
Looking at Wikipedia[1], the ≥40 storey buildings look pretty typical, I assume you're correct that they are using some. Some look like older designs with external shear walls, which reduce the exterior windows. That said, it's certainly possible to build tall buildings without structural steel reinforcing - can look at all the tall old cathedrals, pyramids, etc that surpass 140m height (40 storeys at 3.5m each)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_N...
by mrguyorama | 2025-06-13 18:47:20+00:00
>Changing paths is the same process. Look at the world, then choose, learn, and walk

Oh good so after spending $40k on my education to be a valuable software engineer and build things I get to spend another $40k on some sort of retraining to be one of the ever shrinking professionals who make any money in the US.

What a great outlook that is. I guess I'll put off owning anything for another 20 years? Maybe by the time I'm 50 the world will stop throwing "Once in a generation" events at me and I can have a hope of actually building a life with my family.

A lot of us are going to end up driving ubers and delivering takeout to the 5% of the US that makes all the money. They only have so many needs to serve so plenty will just starve.

AI gets the investment it does explicitly because their intention is to not pay humans anything ever again. There's not going to be new jobs to go to.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-06-13 18:48:22+00:00
One other thing to point out is that the entire tablet market only exists today due to re-use of the phone ecosystems. Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is. Not even Facebook makes a dedicated tablet app. It's all just the phone app ported across in a very crude way. The simple fact is that the tablet market isn't big enough to be independent of the phone ecosystem.

The CTO here proudly says he convinced the board to buy Palm and get into the tablet market but just thinking about this even lightly i'm not sure it was wrong for the CEO (and subsequently CTO) to be kicked out for this move. It's weird there's no hubris on this. A tablet market without re-use of a larger markets app ecosystem seems like poor strategic thinking to me.
by ilc | 2025-06-13 18:48:40+00:00
As an older engineer:

I give my help. I don't lease it. I don't rent it. I don't keep an IOU sheet.

It is given freely, with no expectation other than that it might help the individual involved.

I hope some of them go on to be better than me, because they got to rest on my shoulders for a moment before finding the next giant's to climb on.

I'm happy to hear when they do what I do, and help young engineers, but I have no expectation of that. Nor should I.

What I give as a mentor, is given freely. No strings attached.
by jamesdutc | 2025-06-13 18:48:42+00:00
> explicitly randomize iteration

In fact, we see this with CPython `set`, controlled by `_Py_HashSecret`:

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/6eb6c5dbfb528bd07d77b...

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/6eb6c5dbfb528bd07d77b...

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/6eb6c5dbfb528bd07d77b...

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/6eb6c5dbfb528bd07d77b...
by mvdtnz | 2025-06-13 18:49:01+00:00
The entire section on bad decision making only deals with the decisions to ultimately kill the product. How would Mr McKinney deal with the decisions that led to releasing a product so rushed and so poorly priced than it initially sold fewer than 10% of the units shipped to retailers? At least some of these decisions (and implementations) must have been made by teams who he had underseen during his extensive due diligence.

There's a lot of buck passing in this article.
by ang_cire | 2025-06-13 18:49:09+00:00
> I realized the fundamental problem wasn't my absence. It was a systematic mismatch between Leo Apotheker's experience and the role he was asked to fill.

> SAP's annual revenue while Leo served as its CEO was approximately $15 billion. The HP board hired a CEO whose largest organizational experience was running a company smaller than HP's smallest division. Based purely on revenue management experience, Apotheker wouldn't have qualified to be a Executive Vice President at HP, yet the board put him in charge of a $125 billion technology company.

> This wasn't just a cultural mismatch—it was a fundamental scale and complexity mismatch that should have been immediately obvious to any functioning board. But nobody asked the right questions about whether Leo's enterprise software background prepared him to evaluate consumer platform technologies such as WebOS, and I wasn't there to provide what my colleagues called "adult supervision."

Yup, sounds about right.

At some point "management" and "executive management" started (falsely) being viewed as their own dedicated skillset that is independent and unrelated to the business itself, when in reality they still require specific understanding of the skills and processes over which they preside. You can't just drop any CEO into any other CEO position, and think they'll succeed.
by tridentboy | 2025-06-13 18:49:15+00:00
First set gamma as being 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2), with "c" being the speed of light. The factor for time dilation and distance contraction in special relativity is gamma and 1/gamma respectively.

That means that when you get to speeds equal to c, your time runs infinitely slower and the distances are infinitely shorter. So if your clock is infinitely slower, so every travel at "c" speeds means that no time passes for you. And if your distances are infinitely shorter, all travels at "c" speeds cover any distance as immediate. So you could reach every point of the universe as if it was immediately closer and in no time at all.

So in the frame of reference of the photon, the moment it is created it has already reached its destination, be it wherever it is on the universe.

Of course we can never reach "c" as beings with mass, but we can get closer to that. So for example if you get to 99.99999999999999% of the speed of light, you could travel a distance of 54,794,520 ly and only one year would pass to you, while 54,794,520 years would pass on earth.
by snickerbockers | 2025-06-13 18:49:53+00:00
>“We’ve seen first-hand how commercial spyware can be weaponized to target journalists and civil society, and these companies must be held accountable,” a spokesperson for WhatsApp told AP in an email.

Is it just me or is this statement written in a way that implies they think spying on people is acceptable just not in this specific circumstance?
by strangattractor | 2025-06-13 18:50:02+00:00
1. WebOS lives on (purchased from HP) or at least a version of it on LG TVs. 2. Matra: End users don't care about the OS. End users don't care the OS. (or most all the technical aspects Engineers value)

End Users only care whether the product does something they want - make toast, listen to music, prevent stds etc. Jobs shipped products that solved actual problems - desktop publishing, listening to music, making a phone call. They solved other problems also but shipping a product that might one day solve a problem is not a product category.
by londons_explore | 2025-06-13 18:50:03+00:00
Vce never really goes below 2 volts... Which for a 1000 amps means the running costs of the converter are 2000 watts * number of stages (~2800). 5.6MW of heat. That quickly dwarfs the purchase cost of those IGBTs.

Whereas the same calculation for MOSFETs [1] gives 4242 stages and an Rdson of 1.9 milliohms... = 8 Megawatts! Which sounds worse... But you can parallel the MOSFETs by spending double the money on them, reducing the loss to 4 megawatts... Or you can double it again to reduce the loss to 2 megawatts, etc.

When you run something 24*7, energy losses cost way more than capital costs - and MOSFETs let you make that tradeoff, whereas IGBTs do not.

[1]: https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/power/mosfet/silicon...
by input_sh | 2025-06-13 18:50:03+00:00
To give your life a purpose? To do something meaningful and fulfilling? To build something cool? To be able to afford additional, cooler things? To work on a common mission with likeminded people? To contribute something back to the system? To experience how things work in the background? To have a sense of ownership over your productive output?

And if you wanna express yourself creatively or just do nothing for a while, that's fine by me too! I'm sure you'd get bored after a while and want to make yourself useful again, so I don't think you should starve in the meantime.
by calstad | 2025-06-13 18:50:08+00:00
These fall more in the "pop-sci" realm, but I think are really good at trying to convey what kinds of things working mathematicians actually think about:

- Colossal Book of Mathematics by Martin Gardner: Uses games and recreational math to introduce areas like group theory and topology.

- Finding Moonshine by Marcus Du Sautoy: Tells the story of the unexpected connection between two areas of math that, on the surface, seem to be completely unrelated.

- The Great Mathematical Problems by Ian Stewart: Does a good job explaining several of the major open problems in math today.
by BrenBarn | 2025-06-13 18:50:36+00:00
I'd argue that most people don't "want to own stocks". What they want is (to go from your example) "to have a comfortable life even when they're not working anymore". They just want stocks because that's an available mechanism to achieve that. Similarly people don't want to sit in cramped airline seats, but there aren't available alternatives in many cases.

Capitalism prioritizes making money, not satisfying people's needs and wants.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-13 18:51:20+00:00
>HP was definitely in a position to compete with apple, and always has been.

In 1990-2000? Sure, maybe. In 2010? Not a chance. HP was not a SW company like Apple. Apple wasn't making much money from selling Macs in 2001. Their big cash cow came from the iPod which HP couldn't pull off something like iTunes and licensing deals with record labels, they were just a commodity HW company (ignoring the oscilloscope, sensors, medical and the other shit).

>They might not have been in a position to beat them, but you don't have to be on top to be profitable.

From where I am, I saw clear as day that markets usually have room for only two large players who will end up owning 90% of the market, with the rest of the players fighting for the scraps. Intel & AMD, Nvidia & AMD, iOS & Android, PlayStation & Xbox, Apple & Samsung, Windows & Mac, etc,

HP was in no position to win against Apple and Google for a podium spot so they left in due time. Even Microsoft couldn't pull it off.
by dfxm12 | 2025-06-13 18:52:18+00:00
You can become rich enough that you can afford to give away a dollar to someone every second and still be rich. For some perspective, this full amount is about 33% of annual income of $100mm. The richest people make well more than this.

Consider, even without such a system, more people than you realize have enough to live on (and pass on for generations), but still work. A lot of rich people also didn't work for their wealth. People have worked their whole lives and not become rich. I'm not sure there's a connection.
by phkahler | 2025-06-13 18:52:29+00:00
Somehow this doesn't add up. He was out for 8 weeks which is 56 days. In that period the product launched and was cancelled after 49 days. How does he claim the failure wasn't his fault? They shipped 270,000 units that mostly didn't sell, but that had to be planned in advance. You can't say "Phil's out, lets ship this thing now!" The only thing they might have done different than he planned is setting the price and canceling the product too early. Am I missing something? The fact it was rushed to market was on him unless he left out a bunch of story prior to his surgery.
by hnlmorg | 2025-06-13 18:53:03+00:00
Those units weren’t unsold. They went for ridiculously low prices and everyone went nuts trying to buy one (edit: this isn’t even an exaggeration. People were buying up multiple tablets. Even buying non-discounted tablets then asking for price-matching afterwards)

Ironically this showed that there was demand for webOS. It was just priced wrongly from the outset
by hollerith | 2025-06-13 18:53:17+00:00
Your overall point might be correct, but some of your specifics are incorrect:

>Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is.

None of the apps I am using on my iPad have borders/sidebars.

Gmail and Youtube have long had dedicated iPad apps. DeepSeek has one (a well designed and implemented one) for interacting with its chat service. The last time I checked, Google Gemini had only an iPhone app, but I checked again today and found a full-fledged iPad app.

Even my credit union, which operates only in California and does not have any physical branches in Southern California, has a full-fledged iPad app.
by paxys | 2025-06-13 18:53:18+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 - https://fdn2.gsmarena.com/vv/pics/hp/hp-ipaq-glisten-1.jpg.

They simply had been asleep at the wheel for too long. And even then, the correct move would have been to adopt Android instead of thinking you could build and control your own ecosystem (something they finally did in 2014).
by 1659447091 | 2025-06-13 18:53:50+00:00
> I feel like I owe something more direct to the specific people who shaped my life.

> How do you meaningfully give back to people who helped you early on

Pay it forward is the popular answer here, and a good one. To me, it's a bit limiting and maybe it's why you feel a debt in your life. It's chasing a phantom transaction, to level a balance but there is no score.

I take the approach of "being the person I want to see in the world", and that person is made up of all the people that have shown me kindness, took a chance on me, or otherwise showed grace. It's also made up of the person I wished had been there for me at times. The key is deciding who that person is for you though; some people want to be like the flashy "influencers" that they like to see in the world (on sm) and will act accordantly.

Instead of thinking about how to balance the debt, make the -- sometimes inconvenient -- effort of choosing each day to incorporate the positive parts of the people you feel gratitude toward. Then you end up doing/being many different positive things, big and small, for all types of people -- naturally (not seeking it out) -- the same way many of the people most likely did when they helped you. After all, if 'imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,' then I would argue that incorporating the positive behaviours or traits of those who have made an impact into who you are becoming is the sincerest form of gratitude.