MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why do my posts sometimes become popular and sometimes invisible?
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-09 17:39:31+00:00
I have an account that is 67 days old and has 23 karma, but recently my posts have become invisible, no one sees them and all that, although 1 day ago everything was fine and the posts flew by 34 points.

Please advise what to do (if anyone sees this post), and tell me if this has happened to you?
by indianmouse | 2025-07-09 17:39:45+00:00
This is exactly how bug bounty hunters are being exploited for.

Though it is on the good side about disclosure, calculate how much financial, reputation impact, negative publicity would cost the company and settle for a fair price and not a measly sum of 1k EUR.

It is a huge red flag to keep it under the radar if they think the impact is going to be high. I'm sure it is high and that's the reason they want to keep it undisclosed while they silently patch it.

One question: Was the discovery part of a bug bounty program? Or you stumbled upon it without any actual request? I'm trying to see the legal angle that might get down played there if you do not have the authorization to look at it.

Being ethical is the only advantage I see if that is the case. Else, you should negotiate and demand a fair price and go for a public disclosure which will cause more harm than good for them.

Everything has a price. Nothing in this world is free. Contact some good lawyer.

Don't ever sign an NDA without vetting it out with a good lawyer. Fine prints matter a lot.

As some of the fellow HNs mentioned, they will probably be looking at a huge impact and the reason for the NDA and a low sum as a token appreciation. They think they can buy their way being a corporate, any my advice would be to talk to some lawyers or contact a non-profit to help sort things out.

Probably you could donate a % to them if you get a good amount.

Hope you get what you deserve.
by kragen | 2025-07-09 17:40:00+00:00
This is great, thanks for digging it up!

It does support the thesis that Amazon was attempting to prevent customers from realizing that what they were offering was basically CGI on a big load-balanced server farm, by claiming that it was something radically new that you couldn't get before, but their value proposition is still just the value proposition of shared CGI hosting. On a big load-balanced server farm. Which, to be perfectly fair, probably was bigger than anyone else's.

There is one major difference—the accounting, where you get charged by the megabyte-millisecond or whatever. Service bureaus ("cloud computing vendors") in the 01960s did do such billing, but Linux shared CGI hosts in the 01990s generally didn't; accton(8) doesn't record good enough information for such things. While in some sense that's really the value proposition for Amazon rather than the customer, it gives customers some confidence that their site isn't going to go down because a sysadmin decided they were being a CPU hog.

I agree that there's no evidence that they were talking about "servers" in the sense of processes that listen on a socket, rather than "servers" in the sense of computers that those processes run on.

Just to be clear, I know I'm not going to convince you of anything, but I'm really appreciating how much better informed I'm becoming because of this conversation!
by svnt | 2025-07-09 17:40:01+00:00
In what way would the successful implementation of chip design services overcome (b)?

They would need to make more offering design services, giving away their design secrets in the process, than selling a product protected by a massive moat. This would be slaughtering the goose.

If you can present an example of someone executing this strategy as a pivot from an extremely high margin proprietary product and increasing their market cap as a result I would be very interested to read about it.
by guywithahat | 2025-07-09 17:40:10+00:00
I find this X doomsday talk is pretty isolated to reddit/other minor social media sites. The site itself is doing fine, and maintains a strong investor/startup ecosystem, with a slight fall in usage after the election (which isn't uncommon for Twitter/X). My understanding is that a few advertisers threatened to leave and then returned after a few days/weeks.

It's a private company now so I don't know what their revenue looks like but they certainly don't seem to be low on cash given how much they've invested in AI. You may not use X but it's definitely not "destroyed" lol
by todotask2 | 2025-07-09 17:40:13+00:00
With a PHP project, you have to make all the decisions yourself, which framework (Symfony, Laravel, etc.), how to structure things, whether you can use JSX-like syntax (you can’t, really), how to handle HTML escaping safely, and how to optimise images during build time. You can use Unpic in Laravel (The Unpic creator, also former Netlify employee is now on Astro team).

https://unpic.pics/

I'm aware there's a new PHP web framework that's somewhat similar to Astro, but I can't recall the name.

Astro gives you sensible defaults out of the box. It’s designed for modern web development, so things like partial hydration, automatic image optimisation, and using components from different frameworks just work.
by firefax | 2025-07-09 17:40:42+00:00
None of the meaningful help I've had since my layoff has come from people who are heavy LI users. I could leave the network today, and the same people who offered to put in a reference for my application or do a CV review would still respond to my emails.

The few times I've used the messenger to ask for an email from someone lacking a personal or faculty web page, it hasn't been super fruitful.

Kind of like with dating apps, it feels like a small pool of people are constantly searching -- either because they're very prized, or because they're very flawed, and it can be hard to distinguish between the two in either context "early career".

Like, despite reading this site, I'm not a "startup guy" -- my goal was always to find a stable, respectful workplace -- and every crazy side quest on my CV was a result of that quest.

Respect to folks who have a legit product and grow it, but there is a definite "bubble" in Silicon Valley, in the echo chamber sense.

Classic example: bar full of "LI types" demanded the TV be shut off when this scene came up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo. Like, hands slamming on tables level anger about "what is this shit".

Anyways TL;DR I think the best professional network remains email.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-07-09 17:40:53+00:00
>That's a survivor-biased anecdotal example, not a widely-applicable strategy

There's what, half a million or more engineers at these companies? You think there are just as many software consultants or entrepreneurs making it rich? I think both cases are not widely-applicable strategies.

If you can get rich being an entrepreneur, congrats, that's great. Making ~40k a month doing tech consulting is fantastic, good for you.

But saying "you'll never get rich working for someone else" when many of us have half a million to a million unvested shares (or many more, if at Meta or Nvidia) we are waiting on is just false.
by lovehashbrowns | 2025-07-09 17:41:50+00:00
This sort of statement is so wild to me. Exploits are absolutely insanely complex nowadays, for example speculative execution exploits are a thing that feel like magic. This one here is so insane: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43974891

This Supabase attack I would equate to being on the same level as Social Engineering which has been a thing since forever and has always been the most effective form of hacking. It is really funny to give an LLM access to your entire database, though, that's peak comedy.
by bborud | 2025-07-09 17:41:52+00:00
What RPC mechanisms, in your opinion, are the most ergonomic and why?

(I have been offering REST’ish and gRPC in software I write for many years now. With the REST’ish api generated from the gRPC APIs. I’m leaning towards dropping REST and only offering gRPC. Mostly because the generated clients are so ugly)
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-09 17:41:59+00:00
My son and I talk a lot about "How can the game industry get out of its doldrums" and the Persona series is a great example of what's wrong with it when it is at its very best.

For one thing, the game does not make you make any hard choices when it comes to the VN content. It is so freakin' long that playing it on New Game Plus is unthinkable so you feel compelled to max out everyone's social rank in one run, which isn't that hard but makes a long game even longer.

I have the same complaint which I have with most turn-based games (a genre I love because I really enjoy having a big party) in that there are many mechanics, such as status effects, buffs and debuffs, that really don't matter. It doesn't have the feeling that a different resource is scarce (money, SP, items) at different times in the game or that different things make the game hard at different times. There are plenty of turn-based games that do something interesting (where you make a deck and get 3 random action cards, where you have to be careful not to cast healing spells on your enemies or attacks on your friends, where a lot of your scaling comes from customizing combos in Neptunia, where you knockback enemies and they carom like pool balls in DER:Q) but you can make an AAA game that doesn't add anything to FF7 and gamers and game reviewers will accept it.

An answer we've been chewing on is an anti-Persona answer in the sense of a much shorter (30m-12h) game where you really do need to make multiple playthroughs with or without NGP to really experience it all.
by bluGill | 2025-07-09 17:42:56+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

I do not defend conservatives when they don't follow the letter of the law. Except perhaps in cases where the law itself is unjust - however that is not your argument here so we can ignore that. There have also been cases where I didn't understand the full law and so have had to change my mind once I realized what I'm missing - but that doesn't seem to be the case here either.

On topic is a violation of the law. It isn't just a technicality here either, it is a big deal that when there are large effects of a potential rule we ensure we take the time to figure out what the real effects of it are. There are all too often unexpected downsides to some rule/law and when those downsides are bad enough the results can be worse than the problem you are trying to prevent. (it might not be in this case - but time was not given to figure out if that is the case so we don't know)
by scottiebarnes | 2025-07-09 17:43:03+00:00
Yes, that is a limit of the model (PE ratio) that we're using. It requires the holding of all variables to be constant, which is not practical.

We use it as a snapshot in time to check our sanity and to allow us to compare apples to oranges.

That said, you could have made the same statement about AAPL or MSFT 20-30 years ago, and you would have been dead wrong.
by TSiege | 2025-07-09 17:43:24+00:00
This is pseudoscience nonsense spread by some huckster and it's not worth anyones time and is disrespectful to the people of Peru. It's a modern hoax

> "They're not extraterrestrials. They're dolls made from animal bones from this planet joined together with modern synthetic glue," said Flavio Estrada, an archeologist with Peru's Institute for Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences. "It's totally a made-up story," Estrada added.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/scientists-assert-ali...
by mixedbit | 2025-07-09 17:43:31+00:00
Most web apps today use APIs that return JSON and are called by JavaScript. Can you use REST for such services or does REST require a switch to HTML representation rendered by the server where each interaction returns new HTML page? How such HTML representation can even use PUT and DELETE verbs, as these are available only to JavaScript code? What If I design a system where API calls can be made both from the web and from a command line client or a library? Should I use two different architecture to cover both use cases?
by vjk800 | 2025-07-09 17:43:41+00:00
Steam sales are an important piece of this. I always buy a bunch of games from Steam sales, knowing full well that I'm not going to play all of them. The things is, I don't know which games I might feel like playing in the future, so I get several. I don't buy them when I actually want to play them, because then they won't be on sale.
by alok-g | 2025-07-09 17:44:03+00:00
A next development would be people developing and using citation checkers. That would fix just that problem. The deeper underlying quality problem with statements in the text often remaining unverified/incorrect would remain unfixed.

If the authors are to manually and genuinely put some citations, chances would be higher that they are familiar with the cited work and the statement for which the work is cited is actually corroborated by the citation.
by Apreche | 2025-07-09 17:44:47+00:00
I used to do this in the early days, then I learned my lesson. I have an ironclad policy that has saved me so much.

Do not buy a game, (unless it is literally $0) unless you are going to install it and seriously play it at that exact instant. No FOMO about deep discounts is allowed. If a game is $1 today, it will be $1 again in the future.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-09 17:44:52+00:00
I remember when the "threat" was out-of-control overpopulation. Most developed countries have finally solved that, and now the "threat" is underpopulation? It sounds like we're just justifying everything as a threat. In any well-run society that isn't a ponzi scheme that relies on ever-increasing labor, population decline is what you want, given the extreme environmental footprint of every single person. The Earth has fixed and limited resources, so the fewer people competing for them, the better.
by smaudet | 2025-07-09 17:45:32+00:00
It was buried towards the bottom of the article, but the reason, to me:

Clients can be almost automatic with a HATEOS implementation, because it is a self describing protocol.

Of course, Open API (and perhaps to some extent now AI) also mean that clients don't need to be written they are just generated.

However it is important perhaps to remember the context here: SOAP is and was terrible, but for enterprise that needed a complex and robust RPC system, it was beginning to gain traction. HATEOS is a much more general yet simple and comprehensive system in comparison.

Of course, you don't need any of this. So people built APIs they did need that were not restfull but had an acronym that their bosses thought sounded better than SOAP, and the rest is History.
by blacksmith_tb | 2025-07-09 17:45:32+00:00
Luckily not all 33M of those businesses are wringing subscriptions out of their customers (yet), so it might be fairer if we could narrow it down to the subset who do?

What's more interesting to me is the court is basically admitting that doing the right thing for customers will cost unscrupulous businesses more than $100M they're currently fleecing those customers for, so they won't let this go ahead.
by kristianbrigman | 2025-07-09 17:45:38+00:00
Why does it matter? As far as I can tell () the law asks the FTC to do an estimate, they did, and now the argument was ‘some one else thinks it’s wrong’. But does the law require an actual estimate?

If they are worried about this… either mandate some third party do the estimate, or mandate the study. This is just confusing.

() - of course I haven’t read the actual law or ruling yet…
by hamilyon2 | 2025-07-09 17:45:48+00:00
In general the better experience will command higher price, right. That is true, and by forcing same lowest level on everyone we are constructing artificial floor on how bad an experience can be.

Or at least ensuring that bad experience is so profitable that the competitor is ready to even pay the fee for violations.

Illegal markets operate in this territory. No consumer protection there, sorry.

I started to understand the question more, thank you for your comment
by leoqa | 2025-07-09 17:45:53+00:00
Aside: I learned the Sep Axis Theorem in school and often use it for interviews when asked about interesting algorithms. It's simple enough that you can explain it to non-technical folks. "If I have a flashlight and two objects, I can tell you if they're intersected by shining the light on it". Then you can explain the dot product of the faces, early-exit behavior and MTV.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-09 17:45:58+00:00
Yes but opportunities are random.

I recently read in the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44495428 (it is absolutely good article) and the first comment there which I wanted to paste here is:-

It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)

-Bruce_511 (HN)

So sure preparation meets opportunity but don't be stubborn just cause you feel like you are prepared.

Work hard but honestly, if you walk the line like bruce said (then persistence will result in you doing the hard work too tbh that's my philosophy right now)

So Everybody just need to figure out this line b/w stubborness and persistance especially in the startup world. But I think we need a book written on this topic tbh, any suggestions anybody?
by homebrewer | 2025-07-09 17:46:05+00:00
I have no dog in this fight, but 90% of technical people around me keep calling authentication authorization no matter how many times I explain the difference to those who even care to listen. It's misused in almost every application developed in this country.

Sometimes it really is bad and "everybody" can be very wrong, yes. None of us are native English speakers (most don't speak English at all), so these foreign sounding words all look the same, it's a forgivable "offence".
by mardifoufs | 2025-07-09 17:46:07+00:00
I'm not super familiar with SOAP and CORBA, but how is SOAP any more coherent than a "RESTful" API? It's basically just a bag of messages. I guess it involves a schema, but that's not more coherent imo, since you just end up with specifics for every endpoint anyways.

CORBA is less "incoherent", but I'm not sure that's actually helpful, since it's still a huge mess. You can most likely become a lot more proficient with RESTful APIs and be more productive with them, much faster than you could with CORBA. Even if CORBA is extremely well specified, and "RESTful" is based more on vibes than anything specific.

Though to be clear I'm talking about the current definition of REST APIs, not the original, which I think wasn't super useful.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-07-09 17:46:16+00:00
TSMC isn't 'that much' competition? Good luck beating them at it. They're essentially the only game in town for top-end silicon.

AMD tried, realized it was completely pointless and split off into Global Foundries. The giant Intel struggled incredibly hard with the 10nm node and has now lost significant ground because of it.

Leading edge silicon is ruthless. You can burn hundreds of billions of dollars a year trying to catch up and if your product is even slightly worse it may as well be worthless - all the cost with none of the demand.

Going into older nodes is far more forgiving, but you can't make GPUs with that.
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-09 17:47:15+00:00
It is building a system that amplifies the strengths of the LLM by feeding it the right knowledge in the right format at inference time. Context design is both a search (as a generic term for everything retrieval) and a representation problem.

Just dumping raw reams of text into the 'prompt' isn't the best way to great results. Now I am fully aware that anything I can do on my side of the API, the LLM provider can and eventually will do as well. After all, Search also evolved beyond 'pagerank' to thousands of specialized heuristic subsystems.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-09 17:47:59+00:00
> It doesn't really attract or foster intellectuals like some radical political movements do

It definitely attracts people who are competent in technology and propaganda is sufficient numbers for the task being discussed, especially when as a mass movement it has (or is perceived to have) a position of power that advantage-seeking people want to exploit. If anything, the common perception that fascists are "astonishingly, astonishingly stupid" makes this more attractive for people who are both competent and also amoral opportunists (which do occur together, competence and moral virtue aren't particularly correlated.)
by bluecalm | 2025-07-09 17:48:06+00:00
One thing that can hurt them is a shift from current neural networks to something that is more sequential in nature and thus better suited for a CPU.

One scenario is that maybe a smaller NN is enough for most tasks but you have to train it in a smart way (search, creating feedback, reasoning).

It's a long shot but maybe GPUs won't be the best hardware for the job. It's a pure speculation though.
by slg | 2025-07-09 17:49:15+00:00
>$100 million or more rule seems silly when that's the cost of ~10 stoplights and there are like 33 million businesses in the US.

A minute of internet research suggests that specific $100m figure is from a 45-year-old law[1]. I don't know why every government law and regulation that references specific monetary values like this aren't pegged to inflation. That equivalent value today is almost $400m.

EDIT: Actually the number might come from a 29-year-old amendment[2]. It is disappointing how hard it is to track these things down.

[1] - https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/rulemaking/flexibil...

[2] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/senate-bill/942
by nobody9999 | 2025-07-09 17:49:21+00:00
>Calling for the replacement of a branch of government without understanding any of this would be avoidable with a better educational system.

I could be wrong, but IIUC, what GP meant by "If congress is unfit for purpose they should be replaced."

Is that we should vote the current congress-critters out of office and replace them with different ones -- who might actually do their job.
by brulard | 2025-07-09 17:49:22+00:00
I'm not sure what I am missing, but isn't it completely possible to connect any kind of smart button to control a light bulb? Isn't this exactly what home assistant is being used for? I only tried it, but was able to add a generic smart button to HA and let it control a USB switch with some led lights. How is your use case different?

UPDATE: Ok, is this about the state of Matter implementation? I think I misunderstood that.
by bongodongobob | 2025-07-09 17:49:23+00:00
Even a company of 100 people should have a change process. I work in infra mostly and to even shut down a VM that has already been decommissioned I have to go through a change process. You can't have a dozen IT/dev cowboys just doing things they think are fine on a whim because you have to take into account what all the other teams in the company are doing. We've got 30 people in our IT dept and change processes are absolutely crucial to not fucking things up on a regular basis.
by TheCoelacanth | 2025-07-09 17:49:36+00:00
Trying to extrapolate the behavior of people with $100 billion from the behavior of people with $5 million is clearly nonsense. That's as big of a difference as between someone who makes $20 million per year and someone at the global extreme poverty line of $2.66 per day.

Of the five richest people in the world, 80% were personally sitting right behind Trump at his inauguration.