MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pyman | 2025-07-19 09:26:42+00:00
Tim Cook cares more about making money than making customers happy.

For example: Apple Stores often had long lines of people buying cables and adapters until EU regulation forced Apple's iphones, tablets and cameras sold in the EU include USB‑C by end of 2024. Apple initially resisted.

Apple forced new and loyal customers to buy extra adapters just to do basic stuff:

- They removed the headphone jack

- They stuck with Lightning for ages while the rest of the world moved to USB-C.

- MacBooks lost all the ports. At one point they removed HDMI, USB-A, and SD card slots. So you needed a dongle for pretty much everything.

- Apple's dongles are overpriced, they charge a premium for their adapters, even though they're basic accessories. And if you buy them from another company, they sometimes don't work.

- Travel became a pain, I had to carry 3 or 4 dongles.

- Tim Cook pulled Fortnite from the App Store, purely out of corporate greed, with no consideration for the users, who in some cases had to buy a Nintendo Switch just to keep playing.

Tim Cook is the anti–Steve Jobs. All greed, profit, and corporate nonsense. He'd be a better fit as CEO of IBM.

Because he's great at making money, not so great at keeping loyal customers happy. The only reason I’m still using Apple products is because of what Steve Jobs built with the Mac and the iPhone.
by kergonath | 2025-07-19 09:27:34+00:00
> Sexual self-denial always was the driving force behind the western cultural success.

It is a feature of a subset of the culture in some countries. It is far less universal as you say.

> You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.

This really does not follow. How does the existence of laws prevent someone to live a normal life? In a liberal democracy, laws fundamentally guarantee that we can do so, as long as someone’s fundamental individual freedom does not cause unacceptable harm to someone else. In that framework, what we do in private with consenting adults is absolutely nobody’s business. Rule of law does not change this.

> From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line.

What line is this? In which way was Turing’s persecution a requirement for him being a genius? How do we benefit from him killing himself instead of leaving him be and make other contributions to our intellectual development?

> It’s an ugly recipe, but it’s working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves.

It is not. What you are advocating is a theocracy and there are many examples in History and around the world that show that it is a terrible idea.

> A judge doesn't dress like a priest for no reason.

All I can say is LOL. Ceremonial clothing is more nuanced than that.

> Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices.

The fact that you only see these possibilities says a lot more about you than the way human beings work.
by jabroni_salad | 2025-07-19 09:28:00+00:00
Walmart was very supportive of fedNow for the express purpose of removing MasterCard from cashless purchases. And for a long time the only way to pay by phone was to allow them to debit via ACH. out of all of them they get it the most.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36012866

And really, even banking isn't a safe harbor. I am pretty sure they were at the forefront of the rise in neobanks and products like green dot cards.
by Letstalk123 | 2025-07-19 09:28:21+00:00
There’s something strange that happens when you stop chasing dopamine and start focusing on depth: most people slowly disappear. Social media isn’t designed for presence. Messaging apps aren’t built for listening. Everything is built around performance, visibility, and attention loops.

But what about people who are waking up? People who want conversation without audience metrics, silence without awkwardness, connection without content?

We built Mindfuse — a minimal voice-only platform for anonymous one-on-one conversations with strangers around the world. No profiles. No followers. No scrolling. Just talk.

It’s meant for people who are tired of ambient performance and want something that feels human again.

Curious to hear what others here think about using tech to create stillness and presence, not just stimulation.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-19 09:29:38+00:00
Rejecting good papers is different from accepting bad ones. False negatives (the former) don't waste my time as a reader whereas false positives might. From my perspective the goal (which is a means to an end) is to improve the signal to noise ratio.

Not to sound uncaring but I'm not losing sleep if someone got his feelings hurt because his groundbreaking paper was rejected by whatever high profile journal. That used to be potentially damaging but these days we have arxiv so you're still the original researcher to make the discovery. Suck it up and resubmit elsewhere. Rejection is an integral part of the job.

To answer your earlier question I am sometimes a researcher and sometimes a layman. There are many reasons to consult the academic literature after all.

> There's so many venues that except those in your specific domain you're probably not going to know what is a reputable venue from one that isn't. It's also not exactly an easy thing to verify.

You are massively overthinking this. If of the last N nonsense results 5% of them were in a given journal you bet I'm going to remember the name and associate it with bullshit. I don't need to "verify" anything it's nothing more than a personal bias regarding a given publication venue. Nonetheless I find it (and quite a few other metrics) useful in rapidly prioritizing a list of hundreds of potentially relevant results when deciding which threads to start pulling on for my current question.

That's a more important question than you might think (at least in my experience) since you generally don't have time to pull on all the threads and ask all the new questions that come up in doing so. It's a multi headed search that generally prioritizes depth so the quality of the commentary and references in the papers that you spend significant time on is of the utmost importance to the end result.
by letria | 2025-07-19 09:30:43+00:00
After a few years of hiatus, the Libre Space Foundation is organising the Open-Source CubeSat Workshop on October 25-26 in Athens, Greece. The event will be hybrid, with presentations taking place in person (and everyone who wishes to join us in Athens is welcome), while it will also be streamed for those who want to follow online. You are welcome to join OSCW and possibly submit an abstract too (if that sounds interesting to you). The event is not just about CubeSats. It is all about open-source software and hardware. So you are more than welcome to submit an abstract.

The deadline for abstract submissions is the end of July.
by timeon | 2025-07-19 09:32:58+00:00
Sure there are more resource-heavy places but I think the problem is general approach. Neglecting of performance and overall approach to resources brought us to these resource-heavy tools. It seems just dismissive when people pointing to places where there could be made more cuts and call it a day.

If we want to really fix places with bigger impact we need to change this approach in a first place.
by austin-cheney | 2025-07-19 09:33:01+00:00
> that must be known

That sounds rather foolish. That must have knowledge often becomes a layer of vanity concerns to cloak the ignorance lying beneath as defined by comfort and not utility.

For example if developers are formally educated in the style of OOP with classes for inheritance then for most of those people all programming must resemble that style even when it does not apply and costs more to use. Any attempt to deviate from such familiarity often results in purely emotional responses. This such nonsense becomes frustrating when it unnecessarily limits work progression.

> a bridge built by a structural engineer

Civil engineers are qualified by license while software developers are not. That distinction is monumental.
by cromka | 2025-07-19 09:34:08+00:00
I seriously don’t understand why would people choose this over not exposing anything at all, except for Wireguard port. I have my client to automatically connect my home LAN when I’m not on WiFi and get access to all my self-hosted services without risking anything. You rely on third party solution which may or may not be made to government agencies. You also need to trust they Cloudflare doesn’t make mistakes, either.

Also, how do you configure Cloudflare for a road warrior setup? How do you track ever changing dynamic IPs? As mentioned, all I need is a Wireguard client and I’m golden.
by kergonath | 2025-07-19 09:34:31+00:00
When I buy an iPhone I am dealing with Apple. I know what I am buying and what I can or cannot do with the device. And if I am not happy there are alternatives.

When I buy stuff on Steam I am in no way making a contract with Visa. When Visa strong arms Valve to delist games I lose even if I never had any relation with Visa ever.

It really is not comparable.
by Melonololoti | 2025-07-19 09:34:33+00:00
You still need to learn the names of models, understand their use cases, concepts like MoE, then you have different architectures like diffusion vs transformers, agents etc.

And then you have GenAI like flux and all the open source projects.

I think it's beneficial to get all of that and then keeping an eye on it to catch the moment when it becomes relevant for you and not being surprised and too late.
by firecall | 2025-07-19 09:34:35+00:00
Damn... I'm at 17.2KB for my home page! (not including dependencies)

FWIW I optimised the heck out of my personal homepage and got 100/100 for all Lighthouse scores. Which I had not previously thought possible LOL

Built in Rails too!

It's absolutely worth optimising your site though. It just is such a pleasing experience when a page loads without any perceptible lag!
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-19 09:35:21+00:00
I wouldn't be surprised if many '3rd world' countries have better average internet speeds than some developed countries by leapfrogging older 'good enough' tech that's still dominating in the developed countries, e.g. I've been on a 16 MBit connection in Germany for a long time simply because it was mostly good enough for my internet consumption. One day my internet provider 'forcefully' upgraded me to 50 MBit because they didn't support 16 MBit anymore ;)
by dwattttt | 2025-07-19 09:37:10+00:00
Implication sounds right. With no further analysis, running each line in order is correct (for whatever "order" is defined by a language, let's assume imperative).

A compiler could recognise that e.g. L_2 doesn't depend on L_1, and would be free to reorder them. And compilers do recognise this in terms of data dependence of operations.
by kergonath | 2025-07-19 09:37:15+00:00
> Thats not exactly a credit card at that point. And with a credit card, you're explicitly not spending your money.

That point is not the problem though. They could just pressure Valve to refuse credit cards for all or some games. The financial aspect simply does not make sense, regardless of how you look at it (and many people had different takes in this thread).

The only angles that make sense are an ideological crusade and the risk of being sued. The first is unacceptable and the second is an utter failure on the part of the legal system.
by sshine | 2025-07-19 09:37:16+00:00
Nix function call syntax is completely standard for ML-style functional languages and allows for effortless partial application. The main downside is that error messages can get cryptic, especially so when Nix is untyped.

Whitespace add list delimiter is not very common, but I have to admit I really like it.

I was hoping for some “this doesn’t work” kind of things, not “this doesn’t feel familiar”.

Not sure how Nix doesn’t win the readability contest: literally a config file with function calls, and as little superfluous syntax as possible. I’d say the real criticism is: Nix is hard to write, and nixpkgs idioms (nested, undocumentedabstractions scattered throughout the code) are hard to read.
by atoav | 2025-07-19 09:37:41+00:00
Yeah, sure I mean in embedded-land any async snippet could perform any number of things, like firing a delay command that puts the whole processor to sleep.

This could potentially be avoided by clever enough compilers or runtimes, but I am not sure whether that would really be benefitial.

I am a fan of making things explicit, so the closer peoples idea of what aync is and what it isn't matches reality the better. Alternatively we should get the definition of what async should be clear first and then make the adjustment to the abstractions so they give us the guarantees people would natuarally assume come with that.
by 9dev | 2025-07-19 09:39:18+00:00
Maybe. But what about the Audi vs. Volkswagen? A Ninja blender vs. a KitchenAid? A memory card from SanDisk vs. a no-name brand? A shirt from Fred Perry vs. H&M? And these were brands you probably know. What about the products in niches, where you don’t have experience, or products are sufficiently similar? Do you always know whether a product is more expensive because of the brand, or because it’s objectively better?
by bluescrn | 2025-07-19 09:39:30+00:00
I don't know how bad these specific games were, but meanwhile, OnlyFans pornographers continue to use sites like Twitch to advertise their work to teens, and Pornhub continues to operate, despite claims that they profit from sex trafficking amongst other things (https://traffickinghubpetition.com/)

Seems strange to go after obscure videogames (which presumably don't feature real human beings) in this way. Unless they really are unusually extreme?
by perching_aix | 2025-07-19 09:39:47+00:00
One sentence that stood out to me from there was this:

> The bottom line is that there are thousands of developer years of work that went into the current versions of Word and Excel, and if you really want to clone those applications completely, you’re going to have to do thousands of years of work.

This is blatantly not true. Only a small portion of all those "thousands of developer-years" is going to be actively present in these products at whatever point in time, as a lot of those developer-years are spent on replacing the output of other developer-years.

It's the difference between 117 billion humans ever having lived, and 8 billion humans currently living (and just some number of millions at any point in time before the industrial revolution - we've been around for a while, supposedly).

And this is still ignoring that someone looking to reimplement Office would be racing towards something pre-existing, rather than trying to come up with it in the first place. A lot of those developer-hours were spent on design and research, rather than rote implementation.
by t43562 | 2025-07-19 09:39:54+00:00
I think it's a great idea to not have to have two libraries - so its a "tick" from me for any idea that permits it.

The thing that bothers me in general about asynchronous code is how you test it so that you know with some confidence that if it passes the tests today you have replicated all the scenarios/orderings that might happen in production.

You have this same problem with threads of course and I've always found multithreaded programs to be much harder to write and debug....such that I personally use threading only when I feel I have to.

The actual problem with it is that caution is communicating it to developers. I recently had to work on a python system where the developers were obviously doing Javascript half the time. So ... hooray.... they put out a huge changeset to make the thing async....and threaded. Oddly enough none of them had ever heard of the GIL and I got the feeling of being seen as an irritating old bastard as I explained it to their blank stares. Didn't matter. Threading is good. Then I pointed out that their tests were now always passing no matter if they broke the code. Blank stares. They didn't realise that mangum forced all background tasks and async things to finish at the end of an HTTP request so their efforts to shift processing to speed up the response were for nothing.

Knowing things doesn't always matter if you cannot get other people to see them.
by austin-cheney | 2025-07-19 09:41:15+00:00
The article says this is not a TCP layer technology, but something employed by servers as a bandwidth estimating algorithm.

You are correct in that TCP packets are processed within the kernel of modern operating systems.

Edit for clarity:

This is a web server only algorithm. It is not associated with any other kind of TCP traffic. It seems from the down votes that some people found this challenging.
Coworker Refuses to Change Code He Didnt Write Himself
by kvajsvem333 | 2025-07-19 09:41:20+00:00
My Coworker refuses to touch code (no matter how trivial) that was written by people who are no longer at the company. His argument is that the context of the code was lost when the people who wrote it left the company. I find this argument absurd and never heard it before in my career. Sometimes its about trivial changes eg. requesting that the api returns 200 when the /enable endpoint is called twice instead of returning error 412 the second time. There is this service that he owns that is an absolute mess and the customer is pissed off and wants it to behave differently ie. more than the rest of our system. He refuses to do that and we need to have a lot of back and forths with the customer until they create enough pressure on our higher ups so that they have to order him to change that code. I truly want to hear your opinion about this.
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-19 09:42:26+00:00
I don't even think it's intentional, they had to come up with a file format which supports all the weird historical artefacts in the various Office tools. They didn't have the luxury to first come up with a clean file format and then write the tools around it.

And I bet they didn't switch to XML because it was superior to their old file formats, but simply because of the unbelievable XML hype that existed for a short time in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
by xg15 | 2025-07-19 09:42:50+00:00
Interesting point.

Yeah, maybe that instinct is so old, it dates back to human ancestors that still had fur...

Of course, this could also support OP's hypothesis: Maybe there was another set of visual receptors (triggering on cat ears, muzzles or stripes?) that evolved specifically to detect big cats, because they were dangerous predators to us - and we're "mis"using those visual receptors as well now.

I'm not completely convinced: There are other examples of evolved visual receptors against predators that are well-known I think - like spiders. And they do cause a response, but that response is overwhelmingly negative, sometimes so intensely so that it can drive people into a phobia. So it doesn't seem like a negative trigger can flip into a positive one so easily.

Then again, some people have pet spiders and think they are cute, so - who knows...

Edit: Also, maybe the scale plays a role? Spiders are tiny, even the dangerous ones - so a "detector" would have to be highly sensitive, triggering strong responses even for very small stimuli.

In contrast, big cats are big. The detector could afford to be a lot less sensitive, because the scale itself is a feature - so when watching a small housecat, the detector's response could be subdued enough to be "pleasant" in a "spicy food" or "horror movie" sense, especially if you combine it with the already positive response from the "cuteness" detector.

Not sure if this makes any sense, so sorry for rambling...
by Yoric | 2025-07-19 09:43:53+00:00
Well, one of the ways we "sold" async/await it to Google was by showing how we could improve Promise-based tests.

I recall that one of our test suites was tens of thousands of lines of code using `then()`. The code was complicated enough that these lines were by and large considered write-only, partly because async loops were really annoying to write, partly because error-handling was non-trivial.

I rewrote that test suite using `Task.spawn` (our prototype for async/await). I don't have the exact numbers in mind, but this decreased the number of LoC by a factor of 2-3 and suddenly people could see the familiar uses of loops and `try`/`catch`.
by Tanjim | 2025-07-19 09:44:44+00:00
That resonates. Testing asynchronous and multithreaded code for all possible interleavings is notoriously difficult. Even with advanced fuzzers or concurrency testing frameworks, you rarely gain full confidence without painful production learnings.

In distributed systems, it gets worse. For example, when designing webhook delivery infrastructure, you’re not just dealing with async code within your service but also network retries, timeouts, and partial failures across systems. We ran into this when building reliable webhook pipelines; ensuring retries, deduplication, and idempotency under high concurrency became a full engineering problem in itself.

That’s why many teams now offload this to specialized services like Vartiq.com (I’m working here), which handles guaranteed webhook delivery with automatic retries and observability out of the box. It doesn’t eliminate the async testing problem within your own code, but it reduces the blast radius by abstracting away a chunk of operational concurrency complexity.

Totally agree though – async, threading, and distributed concurrency all amplify each other’s risks. Communication and system design caution matter more than any syntax or library choice.
by Winsaucerer | 2025-07-19 09:44:53+00:00
I'm one of those people who thinks simultaneously that (a) current AI cannot replace developers, it just isn't good enough (and I don't think it's good for it to write much code), and (b) AI is simply an incredible invention and will go down as one of the top 5 or 10 in history.

I've said the same thing as you, that there is a LOT left to be done with current AI capabilities, and we've barely scratched the surface.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-19 09:45:50+00:00
Think what you want, but I really do feel that once computers completely conquer something with ruthless efficiency, it becomes less interesting. I felt the same way after watching computers beat humans in chess definitively, and I think a lot of people feel the same way.

It's no doubt a rather impressive achievement for AI, but I wonder if what we're doing really makes sense? Yes, I know coding is for its utility, but along the way, we shouldn't forget that part of the reason we have a healthy society is because we have a large array of stuff we can do where we can engage in intellectual tasks in domains that still have some mystery.

I guess most people here will disagree, but I find the recent emphasis on AI coding and AI-this-and-that to take some of the magic out of what was once a purely human domain. Maybe no one will notice or care much, especially because we're still in the age of novelty....but since computers took over chess, I've become less interested in human-vs-human chess because they have access to computers to study.

To me, it really does seem that beyond a certain level, the mechanical and methodical approach takes the spirit out of things.