MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-07-28 21:20:18+00:00
… if you run a SaaS, generally somewhere from 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 users are using you for real, while the others are mostly not using you.

That is a hilarious and believable stat. Has anyone published such numbers or is it a dirty secret about how many corporate licenses are purchased and never used by the rank and file?

I can personally think of a few internally licensed products, announced with huge fan fare, which never get used beyond the demo to a VP.
by materielle | 2025-07-28 21:20:29+00:00
I think a problem with AI productivity metrics is that a lot of the productivity is made up.

Most enterprise code involves layers of interfaces. So implementing any feature requires updating 5 layers and mocking + unit testing at each layer.

When people say “AI helps me generate tests”, I find that this is what they are usually referring to. Generating hundreds of lines of mock and fake data boilerplate in a few minutes, that would otherwise take an entire day to do manually.

Of course, the AI didn’t make them more productive. The entire point of automated testing is to ensure software correctness without having to test everything manually each time.

The style of unit testing above is basically pointless. Because it doesn’t actually accomplish the goal. All the unit tests could pass and the only thing you’ve tested is that your canned mock responses and asserts are in-sync in the unit testing file.

A problem with how LLMs are used is that they help churn through useless bureaucratic BS faster. But the problem is that there’s no ceiling to bureaucracy. I have strong faith that organizations can generate pointless tasks faster than LLMs can automate them away.

Of course, this isn’t a problem with LLMs themselves, but rather an organization context in which I see them frequently being used.
by pmkary | 2025-07-28 21:20:35+00:00
If someone came, stole your land, raped your women, killed the children, and occupied town after town, and then forced you and rest of the survivors into a town, built walls around you, imprisoned the whole city, didn't let you do anything, brought the most racist thing upon you, silenced your cried for help in the world, payed all media to portray you as animals and dehumanize you, and all of your acts of civil conduct by one of your friends Arafat didn't result in anything, then don't get angry like Hamas and don't play the only cards remaining for you since every thing else literally is taken away. Just stay so that they can kill all of you and erase you from the face of planet. (I'm not supporting Hamas, but do you see how this is made by a world that sees the whole Palestine as something to be removed? erased?)
by dang | 2025-07-28 21:20:54+00:00
> The downvotes and flagged comments in this post are clearly not "organic"

FWIW the downvotes and flags in threads like this, including this thread, do seem largely organic to me, and well within the range of what one expects from a divisive and emotional topic.

People often use words like "clearly" in making such descriptions (I don't mean to pick on you personally! countless users do this, from all sides of all issues), but actually there's nothing so clear. Mostly what happens is that people have perceptions based on their strong feelings and then call those perceptions "clear" because their feelings are strong.

We do occasionally turn off flags in order to allow a discussion to happen because allowing no discussion to happen seems wrong. I've posted lots of explanations of how we approach this in the past (e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
by Towaway69 | 2025-07-28 21:21:16+00:00
I see it like this: with every line of code I write, I make an assumption about the final outcome. Making that assumption means that other possible outcomes aren’t possible.

The more code, the more assumptions.

Until eventually a fixed and very fragile outcome is reached. The so-called first release. Everything is well balanced and based on assumptions I have made based on the information I have been given along the way.

Turns out though my first assumption was wrong.

Now the engineering comes in. Make it look like my first assumption wasn’t wrong, but it was falsely communicated to me. Blame others for my own failings. It called human engineering and it’s great fun.
by scottlamb | 2025-07-28 21:21:18+00:00
How?

I suppose in theory if there's one simple library that differs in ABI, you could have code that tries to dlload() both names and uses the appropriate ABI. But that seems totally impractical for complex ABIs, and forget about it when glibc is one of the ones involved.

There's no ABI breakage anyway if you do static linkage (+ musl), but that's not practical for GUI stuff for example.

I suppose you could have bundle wrapper .so for each that essentially converts one ABI to the other and include it in your rpath. But again doesn't seem easy for the number/complexity of libraries affected.
by jchw | 2025-07-28 21:21:43+00:00
Speaking of Go, if you want compile-time type checking like what SQLx offers, the Go ecosystem has an option that is arguably even better at it:

https://sqlc.dev/

It has the advantage that it implements the parsing and type checking logic in pure Go, allowing it to import your migrations and infer the schema for type checking. With SQLx you need to have your database engine running at compile time during the proc macro execution with the schema already available. This makes SQLx kind of a non-starter for me, though I understand why nobody wants to do what sqlc does (it involves a lot of duplication that essentially reimplements database features.) (Somewhat ironically it's less useful for sqlc to do this since it runs as code generation outside the normal compilation and thus even if it did need a live database connection to do the code generation it would be less of an impact... But it's still nice for simplicity.)
by crazygringo | 2025-07-28 21:22:04+00:00
Fascinating! But...

> The go-to solution here is GPU accelerated video compression

Isn't the solution usually hardware encoding?

> I think this is an order of magnitude faster than even dedicated hardware codecs on GPUs.

Is there an actual benchmark though?

I would have assumed that built-in hardware encoding would always be faster. Plus, I'd assume your game is already saturating your GPU, so the last thing you want to do is use it for simultaneous video encoding. But I'm not an expert in either of these, so curious to know if/how I'm wrong here? Like if hardware encoders are designed to be real-time, but intentionally trade off latency for higher compression? And is the proposed video encoding really is so lightweight it can easily share the GPU without affecting game performance?
by fn-mote | 2025-07-28 21:22:04+00:00
That is very charitable to the manager but incredibly insulting to the direct reports.

Leadership comes from the top. That’s what they’re paid for.

If there’s a culture of speaking up and nobody does, sure blame the underlings. But CREATING that culture is the responsibility of management.

Managers needs training, too, and I’m willing to give it if they’re willing to listen. I stick my neck out for really important or really offensive items, but it’s awkward when the culture isn’t there.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-28 21:22:06+00:00
That's generally all true. My family's monthly healthcare premiums are about $6000 per month for a family of 6, for a "platinum plan" paid for by my employer. I had my gallbladder out earlier this month, and my out-of-pocket cost (i.e. what I had to pay myself after insurance paid its part) was about $2500 for the same-day surgery without complications where I went home an hour after it was over.

Yes, after paying approximately $70,000 per year in premiums, I still have to pay a couple thousand dollars for routine, non-emergency, common healthcare procedures.

Technology wise, I think we have the greatest healthcare system in the world. Finance wise, it feels like the worst parts of Cyberpunk 2077.
by uticus | 2025-07-28 21:22:40+00:00
> The author is right that the planet itself will be fine without us.

Who would have thought geology would cause people to think they should just go kill themselves to make the world a better place. I mean, I know people are messed up (including first person pronoun) - but we are seriously far gone if we can't imagine people somehow, some way making the world a better place.

Great identification of a problem, big miss on identification of a solution.
by quickthrowman | 2025-07-28 21:23:00+00:00
Field corn can also be made into cornmeal, which we can eat. Which is exactly why we subsidize corn growers.

We don’t grow corn specifically to make ethanol, we grow corn because we can eat it if we lose all food imports. I’d much rather eat cornmeal for years than sugar beets.

Turning excess corn into ethanol happens to be better than burying it or throwing it away.
by peblos | 2025-07-28 21:23:10+00:00
I left in 2010 and the consensus is very much the same among my friends, or at least some of them anyway.

I’m no longer eligible to have an opinion UK or local conversations. “how would you know”, “the city’s changed a lot since you left”, “why are people who chose to leave so interested in X”, statements specific to ex-pats.

For those from outside the UK, ex-pat (expatriate) as a singular term is almost always derogatory regardless of context or publisher.
by codedokode | 2025-07-28 21:23:13+00:00
That Google popups are so annoying, they often cover the content, I wonder does Google pay websites for this or they annoy users for free?

Also I don't understand who registers Google Accounts these days because every time I try to do this, they show a QR code and require to scan it with a mobile device, and I don't have time now to set up a virtual machine and research what it does to a mobile device and how one can bypass the check.

Also if you buy a Google Account it eventually requires linking a phone number, and doesn't accept most of the Russian numbers I buy.

So I don't understand how do other people sign up when there are so many obstacles. It is easier just to register email account elsewhere.
by CharlesW | 2025-07-28 21:23:56+00:00
> Given how niche and esoteric this codec is, it’s hard to find any actual competing codecs to compare against.

It'd be interesting to see benchmarks against H.264/AVC (see example "zero‑latency" ffmpeg settings below) and JPEG XS.

-c:v libx264 -preset ultrafast -tune zerolatency \ -x264-params "keyint=1:min-keyint=1:scenecut=0:rc-lookahead=0" \ -bf 0 -b:v 8M -maxrate 8M -bufsize 1M
by bamboozled | 2025-07-28 21:24:22+00:00
What I find interesting is that through all this suffering, Hamas hasn't surrendered and returned the hostages in return for it's own peoples peace. They should renounce everything they have done in my opinion and give themselves and the hostages back in return for and end to the conflict.

People will argue with me and say Hamas is some type of resistance movement against oppressors so they should "fight on", expel or Jews or whatever and that October 7 was fine, but Hamas don't even wear a uniform so the IDF has no idea who they even are, for all they know there actually is Hamas in those camps. This is already a violation of the Geneva convention:

The Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law dictate that combatants must distinguish themselves from civilians during armed conflict

The entire situation there is just a tragedy for the actual innocents wrapped up in it and it's a shame bigger men cannot seem to find their balls and do the right thing.

I don't see how this war is going to end by providing Hamas with more aid but it looks like they've set it up so the world needs to give them aid so their own children don't die.
by speff | 2025-07-28 21:24:31+00:00
Mouthwashing was delisted for reasons unrelated to the Visa/MC kerfuffle [0]

> This game hasn’t been indexed since October 2024 since it doesn’t meet our indexing criteria: https://itch.io/docs/creators/getting-indexed#why-isnt-my-pr...

> The developers are using a “Download” button as a link to Steam. The developer took down any playable files form this page in 2024.

[0]: https://itch.io/post/13496611
by bamboozled | 2025-07-28 21:24:57+00:00
This happened to a lot of people in WW2, basically no one who lost their land responded with something like October 7.

This is happening now to Ukraine and the way the respond is the correct way to respond, it's not blowing up schools, or music festivals or raping young women and parading their dead bodies around town on the bonnets of cars so people can spit on them.

The fact that people put all the blame on Israel for the situation is why this war will continue for a long time.

Source, decadent of people who's land was stolen first by Nazi's then by Soviets.
by KronisLV | 2025-07-28 21:25:41+00:00
I mostly use RooCode nowadays, which works well enough with both Claude and Gemini and other models, even locally hosted ones. Decoupling the LLM vendor from the tools might miss out on some finer features, but also gives me a little bit more freedom, much like how you can also do with the Copilot plugins and Continue.dev and a few others.

Note: all of them sometimes screw up applying diffs, but in general are good enough.
by eightysixfour | 2025-07-28 21:25:58+00:00
Maybe I have different priors than the author but I never saw the $500b Stargate as anything "real" in the first place. It seemed pretty obvious this was a way to give an authoritarian president with a love for big numbers and a vindictive streak a win while OpenAI was taking away attention from him.

Same as Foxconn's LCD factory.

I don't like it, I don't respect the companies that do it, but I also understand it.
by promiseofbeans | 2025-07-28 21:25:58+00:00
I think this is referring to the FedCM api [1]

It works with providers other than Google, just no one else has implemented it yet. Google's One Tap library tries to use the new api, and falls back to the classic One Tap popup when using a browser that doesn't yet implement FedCM (notice how the chrome built-in one says "sign in with google.com" rather than "sign in with Google" like One Tap normally shows)

Mozilla are working on implementing it, but it's a pretty complex system so it'll take time. I presume Safari will as well if it gets popular enough

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FedCM_API
by salawat | 2025-07-28 21:26:06+00:00
Roger that. By the way, we factored that tax burden into the license fee so you can utilize the covered device/process, so in actuality, we the patent holder, aren't paying the tax, you the licensee are. Our accountants, if they were yours, would advise you to pass the cost onto your customers.

That money never comes out of the top level legal fictions. It's always the consumer.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-28 21:26:42+00:00
ChatGPT pointed them at an authority figure who informed them of the situation from their point of view. Some folks don’t handle being corrected or being told that they are wrong or mistaken very well. I’m willing to let ChatGPT share some of the blame, but the human in the loop is determined to shirk all responsibility rightfully borne by them, so I’m less willing to give them any benefit of the doubt. I don’t doubt that they are being entirely unreasonable, so I don’t think their interpretation of events is relevant to how ChatGPT operates generally.

Unreasonable people are wrong to be unreasonable. This is not new. Technological solutions don’t map to problems of interpersonal relations neatly, as this example shows.
by mooreds | 2025-07-28 21:27:29+00:00
The Chrome experience is actually part of a new standard, Federated Credential Management (or FedCM for short).

The idea is to create a browser mediated login experience that gives the identity provider and web app what they need without being able to correlate requests across the Internet.

I am working on an article on this topic. If you are interested in learning more, here's a video from a recent auth focused conference (full disclosure: my company put it on and I emceed): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FBAD4x7MWdI

They are actively working on the standard and Firefox has committed to it. Edge already supports it. They are looking for identity provider feedback.

More here: https://github.com/w3c-fedid/FedCM (we meet weekly on Tuesdays).
by zeta0134 | 2025-07-28 21:27:58+00:00
An argument I tend to hear is risk management, since the adult industries deal with a higher level of fraud. (And shameful refunds, perhaps somewhat understandably.) I think what we are likely reacting to is a legitimate desire to curb this sort of fraud that has evolved, over time, into a moral panic because inconveniently legal vices correlate strongly with that fraud.

The solution cannot be to turn Visa/Mastercard into the morality police. Or any payment processor, really. That is not their job, and they are ill equipped to perform it. Hard agree that access to payment processing should be based on legality of the sale and nothing else. If Visa/Mastercard want to then *measure* a business's overall fraud level as it happens in reality, and then adjust their rates accordingly, they can still do that in a fair manner. In other words, the riskier businesses deal with higher fees or something, but we aren't trying to define whether furry art is somehow porn or some other nonsense in the crossfire. Separate the streams please.
by sa46 | 2025-07-28 21:28:28+00:00
> Veterans is just another word for retired military personnel.

A sergeant who leaves after a three-year enlistment is a veteran, but not a retiree.

The distinction matters because military retirees retain some privileges from their service, most importantly, a pension. Those privileges mean retirees fall under the emoluments clause.

However, a veteran not receiving retired pay is not subject to the emoluments clause as they have no relationship with the federal government. The Congressional Research Service states:

> Former servicemembers with no military status and not entitled to military retired pay can perform [foreign military service] on the same basis as a U.S. national who never served in the armed services. [1]

Interestingly, this implies a retiree could forfeit their retired pay to avoid being subject to the emoluments clause.

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12068
by varenc | 2025-07-28 21:28:28+00:00
In my working life I've literally never had the chance to program in a functional language...it's been 90% Python for me. And I mostly love it. Though I do remember when first learning Python I was bummed out how limited the Python `lambda` is.

Gosh, I even got to work with the Python BDFL for a couple years. I'm no Scheme zealot!
by holmesworcester | 2025-07-28 21:28:29+00:00
If any attempt is being made here to justify those horrible acts, the attempt is being made by the Israeli state, its army, and (since it's a democracy) its electorate.

Some believe the current attempt is unnecessary because attempts prior to October 7th had already succeeded. The evidence for this belief includes hard-to-fake numbers like both sides' cumulative death tolls.

Many more serious or cautious voices believe that nothing Israel could do after October 7th could retroactively justify it. But still an attempt is being made.
by XorNot | 2025-07-28 21:28:50+00:00
Moreover they generally make the argument, have marginal tax rates explained and then rapidly go off looking for some specific welfare policy where this is sort of true.

Because if they knew about the welfare policy before they started typing, they would've actually mentioned it then - it's a specific problem, with several obvious solutions (i.e. don't means test at all or taper off more gently) unrelated to the concept of tax brackets (and potentially not related to the actual bracket index values themselves.
Show HN: Talanoa – An email client that thinks like you (now with multi-account)
by bettercalljohn | 2025-07-28 21:29:20+00:00
Hi HN,

A few months ago, I shared Talanoa here — my attempt to rethink the inbox around people, not threads or timelines. The feedback was amazing and really helped shape the next steps.

Today, I’m back with a big update: multi-account support is now live. You can now connect multiple Gmail and Outlook inboxes in one interface — no more switching tabs or losing context across accounts.

For those who missed the first post: I’m a fullstack indie dev who was frustrated with the traditional inbox. I didn’t want another "Inbox Zero" tool — I wanted something more human. Conversations, not chaos. Threads grouped by people, not time. A clear view of who I need to respond to, and nothing more.

Since launch, I’ve onboarded early users one by one, watched how they use it, and kept improving. Multi-account was the most requested feature — and honestly, something I needed for myself too.

Talanoa is still a lightweight, local-first desktop app (Electron + Vue). No servers, no backend, just your data and your inbox. It works offline, boots fast, and doesn’t try to be clever with AI (yet). Privacy and simplicity first.

This journey’s been incredibly fun and humbling. If you use multiple inboxes and want to try a different way of working through email, give it a spin. I’d love your thoughts and feedback.

Thanks again, John
by rstuart4133 | 2025-07-28 21:29:49+00:00
> But more importantly, by dismissing the comment that way, you’ve made an implicit claim. You are claiming to be able to judge a persons capability or the challenges they are working on off of a couple hn comments. Thats bad engineering and anti-social behavior.

Somewhat true. But it did make me smile, because it reads very much like the pot telling kettle he's black.

But only somewhat. @tptacek also said this:

> Bloggers have been kidding themselves for decades about how invigorating programming is, how intellectually demanding it is, how high the IQ demands are, like they're Max von Sydow playing chess with Death on the beach every time they write another fucking unit test. Guess what: a lot of the work programmers do, maybe even most of it, is rote. It should be automated. Doing it all by hand is part of why software is so unreliable.

Seriously?

As I said, I've been programmer for decades now. He's coming from the perspective that the code dribbling off my fingertips without too much thought is "programming". It is, of course, in the same sense that the brush strokes of Van Gogh are what constitutes "painting". But the painting created by Van Gogh consisted of thousands if not millions brush strokes, all placed with precision, purpose and a great deal of thought. If placing the loaded brush on canvas is all there was to painting, all our houses would be adorned with Van Gogh's. He says we should all be using LLM's, but the idea that brush strokes placed by an LLM would produce same outcome is laughable. You might well use a painting LLM to paint 1000's of houses, but never a single Van Gogh.

To the people who delight in creating new and unique computer systems from code, the puzzle to be solved is arranging the code in just the right way to create their personal Van Gogh's. An immutable object here, a touch of recursion there, combined with an atomic compare and swap and in some truly heroic cases an FPGA thrown into the mix to get some extreme parallelism - crafting these in just the right mix is the challenge of programming. Overcoming that challenge is what makes it invigorating. Not writing the "fucking unit tests" as tptacek puts it, which is almost universally disliked. Although now I look back on it, it is almost therapeutic - it's like going for a jog; it's downtime, when you get review what you've done, and ponder your next moves while pounding the keyboard.

It's a shame, and somewhat insulting to see tptacek treat these efforts many find enjoyable with so much derision. But I've spared with tptacek here, when said similar things before. Again, he confidently said something completely wrong headed, and I could not let it go. Some things don't change I guess. As a fellow at a Linux meetup said to me a long time ago, "you wrote all those words because someone was wrong on the internet???".