MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kuschku | 2025-07-21 02:11:13+00:00
The "tech guys", as you call them, are dogfooding the app and feeling the pain every day. Matthew — the CEO — is the biggest poweruser of them all and feels all the pain points, with his account being the worst-case edge case.

It's just that most of the money comes from consulting, and consulting customers care about new features, not performance or UX.

Which is btw not just a problem for Element — the other companies working on Matrix have the same issues, for the same reasons.

Discord can afford this level of UI polish because they're spending an order of magnitude more on dev salaries than the entire revenue of all companies working on matrix combined.
by ropable | 2025-07-21 02:12:05+00:00
This is a crude strawman argument at best. I don't disagree that compliance/regulation requirements can be overdone, but unfettered progress-at-any-cost has its own downside. History is overloaded with technological innovations followed by regulation efforts to mitigate the the unintended consequences.

Reality, as always, as much more nuanced than this hot take. It's a balancing act.
by est | 2025-07-21 02:12:10+00:00
> In the Bespoke AI Hybrid Refrigerator Samsung launched in 2024, the compressor operates under normal conditions such as routine storage and retrieval, while the Peltier device activates alongside the compressor during high-load situations — like when storing large amounts of groceries or placing hot food inside — thereby enhancing both cooling performance and energy efficiency

I'd choose a fridge with a larger compressor.
by persolb | 2025-07-21 02:12:34+00:00
I wish they’d named FSD as Autopilot. FSD is amazing and I use it door to door wherever I drive. I got a LOT better about a year ago.

But it still makes some dumb mistakes. It is not ‘full self driving.’ It’s 99% percent Autopilot… but I still need to pay attention to the road. (And it enforces this more/better than it used to via the driver camera camera)

I don’t want to guess how long that last 1% will take to be a low enough level of risk. All I can say is that 4 years ago it would do something hazardous every couple minutes. Now I can go hours without disengaging for a safety issue. Most disengages I have now are because it is more cautious than a human driver, or because a scenario is something that I wouldn’t be able to react fast enough to fix IF it did the wrong thing.
by orionblastar | 2025-07-21 02:13:14+00:00
VOC Rehab only supports community colleges, unless you get a scholarship to pay for everything. I went to UM Rolla in 1986-1987 with a student loan, but ran out of money to live on. So I returned home and attended a community college while living with my parents. I started working in the Computer Lab while earning an IT degree and got a couple jobs, but I was too busy working to earn a Bachelor's degree. My Associates was good enough until the 1999 Dotcom bust, where they raised the degree to a bachelors to do my job. I returned for a Bachelor's at the University of Phoenix in 2005. But I became disabled due to a mental illness in 2003 and could not work a job.

I paid off my student loans, but college was expensive. I applied for 100+ scholarships and won none of them. I came from a middle-class family where my father was a phone installer for AT&T/SWB and barely made enough to make ends meet with three children and a wife. I learned BASIC on a Commodore 64 I shared with my two brothers, and got into BBSing with a VICMODEM 300 Baud MODEM.

Now there are Hacker Bootcamps to learn how to code without a STEM degree.
by joshuahedlund | 2025-07-21 02:13:28+00:00
I have stared at a Blue Jay mimicking while Merlin repeatedly labeled it Red-Shouldered Hawk. I’ve seen it pop up a bunch of suspicious one-offs around a mockingbird as well (same with Gray Catbird, another mimic).

But I agree with you that it gets those things correct most of the time and it also seems to be improving over time.
by lightedman | 2025-07-21 02:14:14+00:00
They're already doing great. I have a portable neck AC unit that uses peltiers and it keeps my head and neck cool in otherwise nasty desert conditions when mining. Yes the radiative heating from the sun is still a bitch but a hat basically minimizes that, and also redirects the partially-chilled air more efficiently around my head and face.

The direct-contact neck cooling plates are an absolute lifesaver. Keep the sun off the back of your neck and chill one of the best heat sink locations exposed on your clothed body.
by ta8645 | 2025-07-21 02:14:22+00:00
We see much worse than that all the time. We go to movies that portray horror, torture, murder, depravity, slavery, etc. There are books that contain all those. There are tattoos on people that depict scenes of death and satanism. We put these in their proper place and tolerate them, many people even enjoy them. There are some efforts to keep them out of the public eye and away from children, but it's quite easy to see incidental advertisements, posters, or discussions of all of them.

We should treat social media the same way. There should be a way to filter what you don't want to see, that's your choice. But we shouldn't try to stamp out people saying what they want, or decide what other people should filter for themselves.

Most people who say things like you quoted, aren't killers, i'd guess that most of them aren't even racist. A good fraction of them are just immature, or social outcasts, that are desperate to get a rise out of people. If we could all turn down our reactivity, there'd be less of a draw, for those troublemakers to spew their nonsense.

What we should be the most on guard against, are the unintended consequences of trying to censor this stuff. People shouldn't have their political and social voices limited, just because a relatively few people are disruptive like this.
by lucb1e | 2025-07-21 02:15:02+00:00
I used to think that, and that may be the case where you live (I'd be interested to read more if you have a link), but not in the Netherlands for example

Source: I was recently listening to a podcast about court cases and an extradition case came up. They mentioned that reasons to not be sent are mainly about human rights, like if you need medical treatment that the target country can't (or isn't likely) to give, or if you would have to sit out your punishment under inhumane conditions (oftentimes you can sit out your punishment in the country that extradited you after having stood trial in the other country's legal system), or if the country you're being sent to was involved in your torture (them handing you over to another party that you know does torture would count, even if their own hands are 'clean'; that was the crux in this case, whether the victim aka accused person was handed over by the united states to pakistani intelligence and the usa therefore had forfeited their claim to further try the person for the alleged crime)
by perching_aix | 2025-07-21 02:15:45+00:00
I agree with this. Logging, as well as metrics and tracing, are such hard topics for me to wrap my head around though.

From the log consumer (person) perspective, you'd want logs to provide you with sufficient information when troubleshooting. But since trouble usually happens when things go wrong in unexpected ways, the logging likely won't be well aligned to emit the right info for you to figure out what's going wrong exactly. What then, are you supposed to log the entire application state and every change to it? But then that's way too expensive, and there's a decent chance you might just drown in the noise instead. So you're left with this half artform half science type deal.

One thing I'm grateful for is that over the years most everything now logs in JSON lines at least. I just wish there was a standardized, simple way to access all the possible kinds of JSON objects that might be emitted into the logs. A schema would be a good start, but then I can immediately see ways how that would be quickly rendered lot less useful early on (e.g. "this and that field can contain some other serialized JSON object, good luck!").
by rekabis | 2025-07-21 02:15:53+00:00
All I want is an offline iPhone app that can let me know if I have already purchased a book. Because with a collection as large as mine, it’s a legitimate problem.

I am using BookCrawler, but I exceeded some internal threshold back in 2017 or thereabouts (at about 3,000 entries), and several features - search, stats, etc. - took a permanent dirt nap and refused to function.

And there was a problem with the iPhone 15 camera which prevented correct UPC scanning, for which the author never provided an update or even a response.

Finally, there was this incident earlier this year when the app ceased to be on the App Store, the website itself temporarily vanished, and resetting the app caused you to lose any purchase status. And this, despite reaching out multiple times over the years in an attempt to contribute or take over.

And honestly, aside from being sorted by title, sorted by author, and within an author sorted by series first and then title (if not in a series), I don’t need much more than that. Okay, basic book stats as well, including Dewey decimal entry, so I don’t have to figure that out myself.
by allentown521 | 2025-07-21 02:18:47+00:00
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by aprilthird2021 | 2025-07-21 02:19:06+00:00
> people claimed already a year or two ago that we'd reached peak data and progress would stall

The claim was we've reached peak data (which, yes we did) and that progress would have to come from some new models or changes. Everything you described has made incremental changes, not step changes. Incremental changes are effectively stalled progress. Even this model has no proof and no release behind it
by serbuvlad | 2025-07-21 02:19:06+00:00
From what I was able to tell looking at the code, yes.

The database is embedded in the program. Specifically, it is this file:

https://github.com/h2337/connmap/blob/master/connmap/resourc...

Presumably generated by the author with this Python script

https://github.com/h2337/connmap/blob/master/tools/get-ip-da...
by bane | 2025-07-21 02:20:33+00:00
I remember this time well. For hacker types, Java was...not what we were looking for. But it checked a lot of boxes for the type of bland corporate development that makes up the majority of software development.

What Java really offered was allowing companies where software development is a cost-center minimize costs and reliably automate business processes with lower-skilled (and paid) software developers. Reliability is probably the number of one destroyer of value with software, and requires more development time, better developers, and the worst-case threat of downtime.

It "eliminated" most of the things that make software hard by simply getting rid of memory management as a problem. Doubling down on OOP and services everywhere let's companies divide and conquer software in ways that better align with business units. Many runtimes (VMs) had various types of sandboxing which boosted security in a very immature infosec world. Being slow (at the time) wasn't a problem as companies could just buy more hardware and still get the reliability that they needed.

Java has to be looked at as the entire ecosystem, and the TCO for an all Java world is generally lower than with an all C++ or C world, or an all Perl or Python world. Being the new COBOL is also why Java so rapidly took on "enterprise" cruft as a big part of its identity.

If you can get past all of that and are just looking for a nice, batteries included, language to work in, with a great cross-platformm highly performant, VM, Java is a great language. Its added a lot of nicer things in the last few years as its starting to shed a lot of dead weight that accumulated during the worst of the enterprise software ClassFactoryFactory years.

There are reasons it took off so well, and designing around the intended user community is one of them.
by BalinKing | 2025-07-21 02:20:36+00:00
To name a few off the top of my head (although it might be cheating, because they’re much more famous for movie scores):

- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the original) was by Lorne Balfe and Hans Zimmer (personally, I think the end of Contingency sounds a lot like The Dark Knight)

- Wikipedia says that both of them also helped with Crysis 2

- Lorne Balfe did Assassin’s Creed 3

EDIT: Spotify reminds me that Harry Gregson-Williams did some of the Metal Gear Solids.
by sethammons | 2025-07-21 02:20:51+00:00
Aggregation by time and count together is a normal batching technique and I have used it a lot to scale out multiple parts of many systems.

In this particular example, I agree with others: this is a case for metrics. "Log errors, metric successes[0]."

0: success events (a bit more than a log typically) may be important, especially if tied to something you charge for.
by kuschku | 2025-07-21 02:20:56+00:00
> The web client doesn't load any images/media anymore for me in new sessions. I log in, I cross authenticate with another client, no images load. At work I've a very old browser session going and everything works.

That sounds like something with authenticated media has gone really wrong.

Do the fetch requests for the media fail, or does it not even attempt to make the requests? Is there an error message in the logs?

Regarding the invite issue, could you please clarify in which versions of element (web/desktop, android, iOS, elementX) you've seen the issue, and in which dialogs (search for user, create new room, invite users to existing room)?
by BoorishBears | 2025-07-21 02:21:42+00:00
I mean if this works, it usually means you're not using either LLM to the best of its ability to start.

If they actually inspected where the performance mismatch is between the two models individually, they'd probably find certain classes of mistakes each is making that can be fixed with a better prompt/CoT/workflow with the individual model.

For a given prompt, different families of models almost always have idiosyncratic gaps that need to be fixed because of the differences in post-training for instruction following.

That's also why LLM routers feel kind of silly: the right prompt for one model on a complex task is almost never the optimal prompt for the next model.
by refulgentis | 2025-07-21 02:22:31+00:00
Its a godforsaken nightmare.

There's a lotta potemkin villages, particularly in Google land. Gemini needed highly specific handholding. It's mostly cleared up now.

In all seriousness, more or less miraculously, the final Gemini stable release went from like 20%-30% success at JSON edits to 80%-90%, so you could stop doing the parsing Aider edits out of prose.
by technothrasher | 2025-07-21 02:23:00+00:00
Huh. That's a shame. I never met him, but I started my undergrad education at the University of Rochester the year after he graduated, and followed a very similar educational path to him. So I used to hear a lot about him, and pretty much everybody was using Jove (though I never liked it, honestly, and slowly converted a lot of folks over to Joe instead).
by asadotzler | 2025-07-21 02:23:16+00:00
If memory serves, the system style stuff was a bolt on that Dave Hyatt did a bit later than the core work, and mostly for Windows.

The one theme for all platforms that was initially envisioned by Netscape kinda sucked ("Blue" for anyone that might remember.) And when Ben Goodger began his native-looking theme for Windows (pretty sure he started with preferences, maybe even before he got hired,) Dave got to work on Windows OS style queries and hooking OS style into XUL so the Mozilla suite's emerging new default theme could reflect those in its widgets. That work was ongoing even after most of the rest of XUL had been settled and I think Dave was still working on that even at Apple, right up until Mozilla decided Firefox would also ship on Mac and Linux and not just Windows* (as the several of us working on it has envisioned.) Once Firefox was running on Mac, Dave was precluded from continuing because of his Safari work. (He'd gotten permission to keep at when it was not directly competing with his Apple work.)

* Firefox was, for about its first year, meant to be Windows only. Ben Goodger had recently built a .Net wrapper for Gecko called Manticore, and there was Hyatt's Chimera for Mac, and Marco's Galeon for Linux, so the thinking was the major platforms would be covered with great standalone Gecko based browsers (no mail, HTML authoring, chat, etc.) But then Ben abandoned Manticore. Dave was convinced that XUL could actually kick ass on Windows (though also certain it could not on Mac) and so Ben started mozilla/browser to be the standalone Gecko browser for Windows. Ben also quickly abandoned that project and Blake Ross, an intern I'd recruited to Mozilla the year before, picked it up. He and I conspired on it with several others joining the effort during the end times at Netscape. Bryan Ryner stepped up to make it work on Linux, for example. staff@mozilla.org, well 5 of us I think, were sitting at a picnic table outside of Netscape's Bldg 21 when we decided that after Netscape wound down, we'd transition from the Suite to standalone browser and email (then called Phoenix and Minotaur). Cross platform would thus become a requirement. We weren't going to drop Seamonkey without replacements for it on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It took a while to get the Mac version up and running and as soon as that happened, Hyatt had to bail. About a year later, we released Firefox 1.0.
by lxgr | 2025-07-21 02:23:19+00:00
Ah, cool, this should incorporate location data at least as good as what the networks self-report! (I suspect that these databases, on top of ingesting all geofeed data, do something similar to Wi-Fi positioning, i.e. correlate the IP address of various GPS-enabled devices with their physical location to try and deduce undocumented/non-public allocation patterns.)
by Marsymars | 2025-07-21 02:23:33+00:00
Yeah, but Google Docs and Sheets are really worse than Word/Excel for many uses/users. I’d be pretty peeved if my employer decided to save figurative pennies by making me use Google Docs/Sheets.

And Google Docs/Sheets isn’t really free once you need business functionality. Depends what exactly what your feature requirements are, but Google Workspace pricing has about the same range as Office 365 Enterprise. ($10-$50/user/month)
by stingraycharles | 2025-07-21 02:25:11+00:00
What would be the result if the task was given to multiple models? Instead of alloying them together and switching between models in the same chat, just let the models try to complete the task in their own isolated context, and use the result that completed it successfully?

I would say that that’s at least something the alloying should be benchmarked against, which I didn’t find in the article.
by Joker_vD | 2025-07-21 02:25:12+00:00
> What then, are you supposed to log the entire application state and every change to it?

For replayability/state reconstruction, usually it's enough to log the input data and the decisions made upon them i.e. which branches of the if/switch (and things morally equivalent to them e.g. virtual functions and short-circuiting Boolean operators) you've actually taken.

> But then that's way too expensive,

Yes, it's usually still way too expensive. But when it's not, it does give you information about at what code point exactly the "wrong" decision was made, and from there you can at least start thinking about how the system could get into the state where it would start making "wrong" decisions at this precise point of code — and that usually cuts down the number of possible reasons tremendously.
by mindslight | 2025-07-21 02:25:59+00:00
Sorry, I agree that is the analysis of the current system. I don't think we're disagreeing on facts here. What I was characterizing as backwards was that being considered a good public policy goal, as elaborated on in the rest of the paragraph.

And sure, there are many metrics by which to evaluate a health care system. It feels like the US system is somewhere from poor to mediocre on most of them, and only excels in outcomes for the extremely rich (enough money to stomach paying for your own concierge doctor to diligently follow your case and make up for the system's failings). Which is why your succinct description of the government-induced supply shortage resonated with me, and why I keep coming back to the general condemnation of "the worst of both worlds". But it seems like you aren't spending enough effort reading my comments to get my substantive points.
by userbinator | 2025-07-21 02:28:41+00:00
That would've been easily invalidated by prior art from nearly a century ago; as I mentioned in a sibling comment, this was a common arrangement in the early days of domestic refrigeration.

Here's a video from someone who managed to salvage some of the components of such a system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1tXIYl20jA
by bbkane | 2025-07-21 02:29:01+00:00
I'm definitely not an expert, but I configure zsh manually with those fzf and "ghost text". I took some notes in my repo, just copy the relevant portions if you actually want to try this: https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/zsh

I tweak it occasionally, but for the most part I set it and forget it.
by idkwhattocallme | 2025-07-21 02:29:08+00:00
A couple of years ago, some smart kids created fractal. Every week (or maybe 2) you got matched with another exec. It was super high quality and I got a lot of value from it. I met someone I hired, someone who eventually hired me and another I still trade texts with. My impression was others felt strongly about it as well. But they abandoned the project as there was no viable monetization model. That and Founders are a terrible demographic to build for. 99% don't stay founders for long.
by northhnbesthn | 2025-07-21 02:31:49+00:00
Sadly HN has never been of much value to me despite my first account being almost of drinking age. Yes, having people like Nagle (animats) and other hardcore experts who know what they’re talking about is great. But they’re an extreme rarity in a sea of absolute shit. You want to talk about enshittification? Just take a look at the nosedive of HN. So yeah, for me it’s usually more insightful to do a deep dive with an LLM. Before that, of course, the Wikipedia rabbit holes were I think a staple of the internet.

LLMs for me to a large degree satisfy the “hacker curiosity” that HN guidelines wank over but betray with every bullshit upvoted and gamed clickbait post. It’s a search engine that flattens rabbit holes for me and makes traversing the corpus of information out there very enjoyable.

People complaining about a LLMs being scrapers is to me just amusing to the point of nonsensical. The entire point is to use it as a discovery engine that brought the most common and the most obscure on the same level of accessibility.