MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pdimitar | 2025-06-01 21:45:34+00:00
> Laurent Bossavit, an Agile methodology expert

Congratulations, you got me to stop reading just at the start of the article.

On topic, I don't think any good engineer ever claimed the title of the article. The "more expensive" part stems from having to rush and maybe do a sloppy job, introducing regressions, higher hosting costs or other maladies.

So the "higher cost" might just be a compounding value borne out of panicky measures. Sometimes you really do have to get your sleeves rolled up and timebox any fix you have in mind and just progress and/or actually kill the problem. Often though, you just deflect the problem to somewhere else temporarily where the "bleeding" will not be as significant. Which buys you the time to do a better job.

Titles like those of the articles are highly dramatized. I am surprised any serious working person ever took them seriously.
by dralley | 2025-06-01 21:46:11+00:00
Russia thought they could take Kyiv in less than a week. If you're judging this war by their own goals, then they absolutely failed.

A long protracted war complete with the destruction of their strategic airforce and Black Sea Fleet was not something they would have even conceived of being the outcome back in January 2022.

That doesn't mean Ukraine "won". But barring any kind of black swan event in their favor, Russia definitely "lost".
by makeitdouble | 2025-06-01 21:46:23+00:00
> Heavily rehearsed presentations are dumb anyway inside a company, we’re not doing PR, there’s no black turtleneck here.

At some size, it becomes needed.

For the average employee it will come a time they need to convince higher ups of doing something they don't have any plans to do.

For managers/VPs they'll need to get people onboard for controversial and widely impacting changes.

Rehearsal and a well prepared and presentable message will be needed if you want to put the odds on your side.
by predictsoft | 2025-06-01 21:46:44+00:00
I once played Ultima 6 from a RAM disk on an ST with 4MB RAM. Game install from 'Hard disk' to RAM disk - it didn't realise. And then I used bigger size floppy disks (940KB I think) and a fast copy utility to get those 3 disks to start the game and when done, save the game and save it all off to 3 floppies. It was totally fast!
by isaacremuant | 2025-06-01 21:47:10+00:00
> Sure, man. Funny that I mentioned "web of trust" as a potential solution, a fully decentralised system designed by people unhappy with the centralised nature of PKI. I guess I must be working in deep cover for my corporate overlords, cunningly trying to throw you off the scent like that. But you got me!

I'm sorry man, I can't trust anything you say unless you post your full name and address. I can also throw some useless strawman quip to distract the conversation.

No one is forcing you to stay up at night or worry about this, so don't.

> If you want to continue drinking from a stream that's been becoming increasingly polluted since November 2022, you're welcome to do so. Many other people don't consider this an appealing tradeoff and social systems used by those people are likely to adjust accordingly.

Lol. The naivety of people like you and throwing these cute dates to start having a semblance of critical reading is hilarious. Not that it helps you since you immediately want authoritarian solutions and any challenge is met with a strawman.

But hey, give us more "sarcasm".

I'll post your comment because it's worth reading in full and going back to your "are you crazy? No one is saying X" fallback.

> I think that, ultimately, systems that humans use to interact on the internet will have to ditch anonymity. If people can't cheaply and reliably distinguish human output from LLM output, and people care about only talking to humans, we will need to establish authenticity via other mechanisms. In practice that means PKI or web of trust (or variants/combinations), plus reputation systems.

> Nobody wants this, because it's a pain, it hurts privacy (or easily can hurt it) and has other social negatives (cliques forming, people being fake to build their reputation, that episode of Black Mirror, etc.). Anonymity is useful like cash is useful. But if someone invents a machine that can print banknotes that fool 80% of people, eventually cash will go out of circulation.

> I think the big question is: How much do most people actually care about distinguishing real and fake comments? It hurts moderators a lot, but most people (myself included) don't see this pain directly and are highly motivated by convenience.

Lol.
by dfxm12 | 2025-06-01 21:48:30+00:00
In my experience, most of the time when kids say they want to make games, that doesn't mean they want to code them. Making a game is usually not a task done by a lone coder. It is a task done by someone who can manage different technical, creative and business types. I think kids want to have ideas. This creativity can be captured by coding, maybe, but maybe there are better outlets for the individual. The director of street fighter 5, for example, started as a music composer.

I think it's important to really understand our kids. They may not have the experience or vocabulary to have this discussion. Wanting to make a game and coding are different things. You're on the right path in terms of breaking things down into smaller, solvable problems. Coding might be part of it, but translatable skills to making a game might also include leading a band, making a short film, playing team sports, etc.
by const_cast | 2025-06-01 21:48:58+00:00
Paying for streaming services used to result in zero ads too, and now lots of services either don't offer ad-free or charge double for it.

I think ads are extremely valuable to brands, more than we realize. It's basically allowed propaganda for consumerist behavior. I don't think we can set a pricetag on ads, which is why I don't think they'll ever go away. This is just temporary, don't get used to it.
by crazygringo | 2025-06-01 21:49:35+00:00
Perhaps you're confusing planning with execution.

All the things you're describing -- in the spirit of tickets, sprints, etc. -- do happen. They're called pre-production. It takes years (months if you're lucky) to set up how everything will run on set. Producers have a huge list of actionables (tickets), and there is constant iteration (sprints) of parts of the script, of what the film's visual look will be, the tone, figuring out the budget, the crew, etc. And there are huge differences in responsibility between producer and director. A producer doesn't "run around speaking in precise terms" when that would step on the feet of the director, the cinematographer, etc. That would be micromanaging and unprofessional. The producer does very much stick to "user stories". When film crews want to change something, they don't "just do it". They very much do check in with the director or showrunner.

I suspect you're talking about execution, where everyone does "just do" things. When filming, every minute counts and shit needs to get done. Yes, every single person is tremendously empowered to do what's right, within their remit. But that only works because preproduction already worked out most of the kinks, and they should all basically be on the same page. But even then, things constantly go south. Shots take hours to set up and then turn out to be wrong for an infinite number of reasons. There are endless compromises. And during that process, only one person is in charge -- the director -- because they have to make a ton of decisions to compensate for all the things going wrong. So it's teamwork... but it's also a dictatorship and once the director makes a decision after collecting the input they want you do not argue.

You seem to be under the impression that film production is somehow more individually empowering or trusting than software development. It's not.
by tanseydavid | 2025-06-01 21:50:10+00:00
I don’t get the hairsplitting here—it seems obvious to me that if you build the wrong feature, you have to replace it with something else which needs building as well as something akin to demolition of the first feature.

Repeat this cycle more than once for the same feature and it clearly accrues to real impact…

the 100x may be exaggerated but that’s beside the point to me — I think even 2x or 3x on a feature is regrettable and oftentimes avoidable
by kartoffelsaft | 2025-06-01 21:50:51+00:00
It "must" be done in the sense that `dyn Error`, anyhow, and (if we include zig's equivalent) inferred error sets mean something different than setting up an error enum. Using an error enum makes the failures explicit, which (most) other options choose to discard because they're designed to handle any error.

Your options effectively become either writing that enum, or using a macro that reduces to that enum. Unless, of course, you're willing to have the function signature say "eh, this function just breaks sometimes. Could be anything really."
by ruined | 2025-06-01 21:51:59+00:00
you might have misconfigured HDR in your viewing setup, even if you don't have an HDR display.

a lot of video players don't get it right consistently codec-to-codec, even the gold standard FOSS classics (VLC, MPV) and wrappers like iina on mac.

i typically use iina and vlc as fallback, but wasn't able to get either to play correctly, even though they're fine players for some other examples. i wound up subbing to disney plus for a month to watch it properly.

if you're viewing MKVs of unknown provenance, use an HDR version to ensure it's not a bad encode. if you're not viewing on an HDR display, double-check that tone mapping is enabled and configured correctly.
by lilcrise | 2025-06-01 21:52:13+00:00
Summary of Alex West - Book One: Year 1

In his first year after finishing A-levels (at age 18), Alex West felt lost and unenthusiastic about the traditional university path. A pivotal moment came when he read "Rich Dad Poor Dad," which ignited his desire for financial independence and entrepreneurship.

He began his entrepreneurial journey with eBay arbitrage.

Initially, he sold personal belongings. He then discovered the concept of buying items cheaply and reselling them for a profit. His first successful arbitrage venture involved PS3 controllers, buying them in bulk or from less optimized listings and reselling them individually. This process taught him the fundamentals of e-commerce: sourcing products, creating listings, photography, packaging, shipping, customer service, and dealing with issues like returns and scams. He reinvested his profits, expanding his product range to include items like GoPro accessories. By the end of this first year, he had managed to make approximately £10,000 in profit. Key takeaways from Year 1 for Alex were the importance of taking action, learning by doing, gaining practical business skills (even on a small scale), and the empowering realization that he could forge his own path outside of conventional routes. This foundational year built his confidence and provided him with tangible business experience.
by tobyjsullivan | 2025-06-01 21:52:21+00:00
> I don't think any good engineer ever claimed the title

I don’t claim to be a good engineer but I have made the claim in the title many times. Though it’s usually in the form of a more nuanced statement.

It’s about time, rather than money. If you can change a line of code to fix a bug before making your commit, that’s a lot faster than all the rigmarole of shipping the same fix later (new PR, code review, wait for CI, merge, deploy, etc.). Not to mention troubleshooting and debugging effort.

The multiplier depends on your context but the bar isn’t high. 100x a 30-second fix is about an hour of effort. I’ve worked in several teams where the average effort to change a line on prod approached that (with honest measurement, including context switching costs)
by kenhwang | 2025-06-01 21:52:32+00:00
I had the opposite opinion of Andor's cinematography. On a nice OLED, everything looked so gray and flat because most scenes were devoid of true dark blacks or bright whites or vivid colors; like every detail on every scene had to be softly uniformly lit so it could be seen. All the beautiful shot composition was defeated by the color grading and lighting that just screamed that it was targeted towards lower common denominator streaming quality screens and not theaters.

Whole time I thought there was really no point watching on an OLED or in HDR cause it's not taking advantage of either.

You can even see it on the photos in the article. The BTS photographs have contrast and blacks while the stills from the show are muted and gray.

The whole series basically looked like it was trying to recreate the "Shot on Google Pixel" look and completely opposite of HBO's black on black on black.
by isaacremuant | 2025-06-01 21:53:38+00:00
I think it's important to do so people, maybe the ones that reply to you, can pretend there's a particular importance to it and not focus on the surveillance technique itself. It's a "no bad tactics, only bad targets" situation for many partisan people.

They don't really care about massive surveillance or extremely concentrated power as long as it serves their interest. When it doesn't, the complain but rarely want to focus on the core of the problem.
by dralley | 2025-06-01 21:53:48+00:00
>When it comes to drones, yes, UA is way ahead of the Westerners

This happens to have been a drone operation.

>But this wouldn’t have been possible without top-notch reconnaissance and especially communication

Ukrainian intelligence has been focused near-exclusively on Russia for more than a decade, and they likely have more human intelligence assets in Russia right now than the US has ever had.

>you need satellite communications for that (or somehow UA infiltrating RU’s network and using it at will, undetected).

another way of writing that would be "acquiring a couple dozen Russian SIM cards and pairing them with the kind of cellular radios half the planet has in their pocket right now".

No aspects of this operation require any particularly advanced technology or intelligence.
by michaelmrose | 2025-06-01 21:53:57+00:00
Fixing it in production means it could have effected your production users who in turn couldn't do whatever it is that they do to actually make or give you money with an unknown but potentially significant effect on your bottom line.

It also involves more and oft more senior people who are paid more as it must be triaged, assigned, and managed.

Whilst it is unlikely that this falls exactly neatly on different orders of magnitude eg exactly 10 and 100x more if its taken to mean that its substantially and very substantially more expensive this seems fine.
by baduiux | 2025-06-01 21:54:37+00:00
I stared on building my first macOS (SwiftUI) window-based sticky notes app. It’s a combination of the default Sticky Notes app and the Notes app, making it possible to stick notes to a specific window or file. Attaching a note to a window shows the note when this specific application window is started/active, e.g. an IDE window with your repository selected. I’m also planning on extending this by adding browser tab notes as well as email (document) notes.

I always felt like collecting all my todos / notes in a single notes app is not enough. Sometimes you want to remember something just for the next time you open this app/window. Attaching the note directly onto the window makes sure you won’t forget on it.
by Aldipower | 2025-06-01 21:54:47+00:00
Agreed. It is of-course not impossible, but it is almost impossible out-of-the-box (literally ;-)) I have a USAMO (Universal Sample-Accurate MIDI Output) device, but do not use it, because as I said, Atari is king here. :-) Not sure how the Midronome can solve the problem of midi notes coming inaccurate from a modern DAW? But maybe I do not understand it completly. Need to have a deeper look. Since some years I am using Linux with a Focusrite for mastering and audio tracking. Midi was bad with Linux and Windows since I got my first USB interface and went away from PCI interfaces. But this shouldn't matter too much. :-)
by firstplacelast | 2025-06-01 21:54:59+00:00
Maybe the reality is most jobs aren't that hard once you have some baseline skills? While I don't love this interview process, I'm certain there are plenty of great people filtered out of the standard interview process in big tech.

If everyone is using the same criteria, they are all competing for the same group of candidates. Using other processes, no matter how whack-a-doodle, will give you a completely different pool to select from.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-06-01 21:55:36+00:00
> It is very difficult to take the political opinions of people who talk like this seriously.

This tells me you haven't read the literature.

I've probably seen 150 versions of the comment you made, but almost everyone tries to explain why the violence is justified.

People rarely try to deny that revolutionary socialism is a violent ideology since every major writer from Marat to Marx to Lenin to Mao has explicitly advocated violence against civilian non-combatants. Some, like Marx, even explicitly call it terror (as in terrorism).
by sherdil2022 | 2025-06-01 21:57:16+00:00
This is more or less the same issue we have faced and facing with social media. Engagement, stickiness, monetization - whatever it is these companies are looking for, they are not looking for is best for all of us.

Same thing with chatbots, LLMs, genai, xyzai etc. They even call a setting ‘syncophancy’ - https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/ - that should tell us where these companies priorities lie.
by ndriscoll | 2025-06-01 21:57:41+00:00
> In the US there is a strong trend to equate wealth with visible wealth

That doesn't sound right to me. Visible wealth has always been something I've equated with "came into some unexpected money (probably not even that much) and immediately blew it" even when my family was not exactly wealthy. As I once saw it put on reddit, things like Gucci are what poor people think rich people buy. My impression has always been that rich people generally don't want to draw attention to themselves in the US either.

Celebrities may flaunt their wealth (and may distort people's perception of what wealthy people are like), but their whole deal is drawing attention to themselves so that makes sense.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-06-01 21:57:57+00:00
It is often the case that a machine in poor repair is already difficult to play, almost without intending it. And from 1999-present, I have found plenty of machines in poor repair, in a convenience store just designed to eat a few quarters. But I have also found them with oversensitive TILT, laterally unbalanced, or the steep incline you describe. I mean, the feet are adjustable!

Sometimes even more egregious are the custom settings on classic video games. You can walk up to a Ms. Pac-Man or a Galaga and find all the action is sped up 1.5x, or just the ghosts/bombs/adversaries are always overtaking you. I think that a few decades of evolution in the ROMs either gave way to crooked ones that could be set to "impossible" levels, or the settings were always there and waiting to be discovered.

So a well-tuned pinball machine was a joy and a pleasure. I played mostly from 1992-1998. I did not enter any tournaments or play competitively. But I had a habit of entering the initials of my current "crush" when I achieved high scores. Sometimes, in a lonely place, I could aim to fill a top 10 board and attribute it all to the object of my affections. Good times!
by jsnell | 2025-06-01 21:58:54+00:00
Oh, the "$1M" title is obviously totally detached from the contents of the post (I mean, I assume it is totally detached from the contents, it's not like this was even worth skimming through). Given it covers 2018-2020, I wouldn't want to say for certain they didn't make $1M in aggregate over the next 5 years though.

But no, I don't think the point stands, because they are not selling an ebook or anything else. The pattern you identified exists, but I don't think this matches the pattern.
by ryan_glass | 2025-06-01 21:59:37+00:00
No hard numbers I'm afraid in that I don't monitor the power draw. But the machine uses a standard ATX power supply: a Corsair RM750e 750W PSU and the default TDP of the CPU is 280W - I have my TDP set at 300W. It is basically built like a desktop - ATX form factor, fans spin down at idle etc.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-01 22:00:00+00:00
I'm quite sure that, over the years, I've seen this claim presented many times with a citation or at least reference pointing at a study somewhere; can't find any particular example right now, unfortunately.

(This claim sits in my memory adjacent to things like "fixed number of bugs per 1000 lines of code", in a bucket labeled "seen multiple times, supposedly came out of some study on software engineering, something IBM or ACM or such".)
by eGQjxkKF6fif | 2025-06-01 22:00:12+00:00
there should be a word for 'has helped humanity in this way.' like a benefit that something has to the world.

But, there isn't. It's all to siphon off time and energy from people for whatever reason so that it can be used to peddle bullshit to investors.

It's just how it is.
by echelon | 2025-06-01 22:01:14+00:00
Yeah! It held at that revenue for over a year, but that was several years ago. Then the market filled out. I stopped working on it (and listening to customers) to pursue other things.

I'm about to open source our desktop AI VFX compositing and animation tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U

https://getartcraft.com/ (github and download links are not live yet)

I'm an engineer and a filmmaker. I'm really into video generation, but controllability and consistency are critical. I've been working on staging, blocking, and animation tools to control how various commercial and open source models behave.

I just didn't have a passion for TTS and voice conversion.

The Uberduck folks were my closest competitors for a while and they were YC funded. I think Suno and Udio sunk their product roadmap for music tools and they pivoted to something else. Maybe voice agents? They're cool folks.

Now Weights.gg is leading the "TTS for teens / consumers" space. There are dozens of startups in the voice conversion for music production space. This used to be an easy ramp to revenue, but the market is saturated.
by beyonddream | 2025-06-01 22:02:20+00:00
My original question is to understand why it is considered as huge tolerance and what should be considered low tolerance. I am suspecting the paper’s intention is not to compare apples and oranges. They are trying to optimize fp32 baseline by sometime resorting using fp16 as long as the resultant solution’s numerical accuracy is within thr tolerance level. They are going for the “low hanging fruits” type of optimization.
by nradov | 2025-06-01 22:02:20+00:00
Much of the old USSR heavy aircraft industry supply chain was in Ukraine. Now Russia has minimal capacity to build new strategic aircraft: those few that they managed to put into service since 1991 largely still relied on stockpiled old parts. Even for tactical aircraft they only manage to deliver a few per year. And with their shattered educational system and declining working-age population this trend won't reverse any time soon.