MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2025-08-03 16:18:09+00:00
My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh with no electricity, no telephones, little modern medicine. He remembers his childhood as a happy one, even though one in every four kids died before age 5. He’s materially better off in every way here in the U.S. But as to the specific point being discussed here, he had a richer social life with more and more frequent contact with friends and family than most americans I know.
by nicoburns | 2025-08-03 16:18:16+00:00
> Does it really matter if Figma was bought vs IPO? No of course not.

I think it matters. Look what happened when Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. The innovative product (Fireworks) that brought many (but not all) many of the innovations that would later come in Sketch and then Figma was left to slowly die because it competed with their flagship product (Photoshop). That delayed innovation in that market segment by around a decade.
by motorest | 2025-08-03 16:18:34+00:00
> Then again Scott Meyers said he's never written a C++ program professionally.

I think you're inadvertently misrepresenting Scott Meyers' claim.

Cited from somewhere else:

> I'll begin with what many of you will find an unredeemably damning confession: I have not written production software in over 20 years, and I have never written production software in C++. Nope, not ever.

He went on to clarify that he made a living out of consultancy, not writing software. He famously retired from C++ in 2015, too.
by simonw | 2025-08-03 16:18:43+00:00
I implemented a similar pattern in my LLM tool and Python library back in February: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/28/llm-schemas/

My version works with Pydantic models or JSON schema in Python code, or with JSON schema or a weird DSL I invented on the command-line:

curl https://news.ycombinator.com/ | \ llm --schema-multi 'headline,url,votes int' \ -m gpt-4.1 --system 'all links'

Result: https://gist.github.com/simonw/f8143836cae0f058f059e1b8fc2d9...
by esafak | 2025-08-03 16:19:20+00:00
This is wrong. People are not dropping old models when new ones come out. I'm always on the lookout for cost effective models. The logical thing is to use the cheapest model that gets the job done, and you get a sense for that once you the model for a while.

It is standard practice with some coding agents to have different models for different tasks, like building and planning.
by kqr | 2025-08-03 16:19:41+00:00
For anyone curious: an average of 1.2 instances per month the first year and a half. During the worst season, it can be twice in a month, sure. https://entropicthoughts.com/how-often-does-a-child-get-sick

(Child spent 16 % of the year sick. Across two parents, that is nearly a month of absence in a year.)
by hvam | 2025-08-03 16:19:54+00:00
In todays world, with AI helping in ABAP development, its important for #ABAP developers to remember the statement syntax, so I thought I'd help by creating a simple cheatsheet for ABAP statement syntax.

Its somewhat correct and contains the syntax for statements only. No information what the statements do or how to format the nested expressions.

It is provided as PDF in A0 format, so it continently can be printed and displayed in the office for easy counsel.
by kstrauser | 2025-08-03 16:19:57+00:00
There are dozens of us. Dozens!

Some of this may be because a lot of my formative year travels were when I was in the military. In practice, no one’s likely to send you to Leavenworth just because you missed a flight and got back late, but it’d certainly give your boss an opportunity to yell about it if they wanted to. Consequences today are more about expense and inconvenience than trouble, but a little core bit of me still recoils in horror at the idea of not making my plane.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-03 16:20:06+00:00
> Algebra concepts are taught starting around 6th grade (for most students)

That's way too late, BTW. In most of the developed world, loosely "algebraic" thinking is introduced starting from the earliest grades, generally phrased as "here's how you should reason to solve these complex, 'multiple step' word problems". "Single-step" word problems (as we'd call them in the U.S.) are effectively unknown, since they're pointless (except as a curiosity); the whole point of word problems is to introduce complex reasoning about mathematical operations, which then seamlessly motivates formal algebraic reasoning.

(A good review article on this approach: Persson, Ulf and Toom, André: Word Problems in Russian Mathematical Education, available at: https://cs-web.bu.edu/faculty/gacs/toomandre-com-backup/my-a... )
What fact do you wish everyone understood?
by iambateman | 2025-08-03 16:20:30+00:00
For me, I wish everyone knew that a 2-lane road with a center turn lane has the same carrying capacity as a 4-lane road. There’s a lot of 4-lane road that could be a lot safer with no tradeoff.

What fact would you like to share with everyone to make the world a better place?
by lbrito | 2025-08-03 16:20:35+00:00
The answer can and certainly will fill many books, dissertations, PhD thesis etc.

Without going too philosophical, although one is not unjustified in going there, and just focusing on my own small professional corner (software engineering): these llm developments mostly kill an important part of thinking and might ultimately make me dumber. For example, I know what a B tree is and can (could) painstakingly implement one when and if I needed to, the process of which would be long, full of mistakes and learning. Now, just having a rough idea will be enough, and most people will never get the chance to do it themselves. Now B-tree is an intentionally artificial example, but you can extrapolate that to more practical or realistic examples. On a more immediate front, there's also the matter of threat to my livelihood. I have significant expenses for the foreseeable future, and if my line of work gets a 100 or even 10x average productivity boost, there just might be less jobs going around. Farm ox watching the first internal combustion tractors.

I can think of many other reasons, but those are the most pressing and personal to me.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-03 16:21:06+00:00
That’s ok if you have showers at work. I’ve never worked anywhere that had that. And now you’re taking multiple showers a day, and washing sweat-soaked clothes more often, using more water. If you are a person who doesn’t tend to sweat a lot it might work out. For me, I sweat profusely and would literally be dripping on the floor and my saturated clothing clinging to me after a bike ride on a hot day.
by specialist | 2025-08-03 16:21:50+00:00
> I don't think AI will be a winner-take-all scenario.

AI? Do you mean LLMs, GPTs, both, or other?

Why won't AI follow the technology life cycle?

It'll always be stuck in the R&D phase, never reach maturity?

It's on a different life cycle?

Once AI matures, something prevents consolidation? (eg every nation protects its champions)
by TimTheTinker | 2025-08-03 16:21:56+00:00
That's the remote equivalent of banning informal conversations in the hall and saying "save it for the daily team meeting".

It feels good as a manager to formalize things, but the best collaboration and ideas happen organically at less formal times and places - and those times are worth at least as much, if not more to the company than anything formal.

You might as well say "no thinking about work in the shower."
by oefrha | 2025-08-03 16:21:57+00:00
Yeah, maybe I’m small-minded, but if someone I’m not familiar with, say a new hire asks a question way beneath their presumed experience level I’m absolutely gonna judge, judgement free be damned; and if they’re my report I’m gonna question the hiring (in my mind). There’s no shortage of imposters in the industry, most of them who’re capable of landing jobs above them are probably also smart enough to scoff at pure fantasy like “judgement free zone”.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-03 16:22:14+00:00
They were already bought out. By Purch in 2014, and then Future [0] in 2018.

This reads like some shit-for-brains VP at the acquirer couldn’t figure out how to make it work, so they’re putting it on ice.

The most destructive part of acquisitions seems to be the acquirer assigning a low-talent leader to the new acquisition, who then by virtue of no experience runs it into the ground, then blames its failure on the company itself.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_plc
by EGreg | 2025-08-03 16:23:14+00:00
You asked why everything decentralized is about blockchain. Then you proceed to say Autonomi says “NOT blockchain” and still that triggers you? I think the problem may be on HN for being triggered by certain words.

Here is why. True anonymity and freedom requires not trusting a centralized party. So you’re going to need a way to achieve some sort of consensus and durability. Also if you are anonymous, how do you pay for storage? You can’t have accounts! Answer: you need utility tokens, a form of cryptocurrency that needs to solve the double-spend problem.

So any project that is serious about solutions arrives at these elements every time. Perhaps the only exception is early BitTorrent where everyone sharing had to be seeding too. But that only works for popular movies and such!
by jeffvroom | 2025-08-03 16:23:35+00:00
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. It's not an easy message to convey or understand that's for sure. I'll take this feedback and try to improve on how this comes across. But how do you think all of the dark matter got removed from space after the big bang? Just because the math works, does warped space time and all that really make more sense? A fluid universe works with the same math, the same equations. Once you see that angular momentum from dark orbital systems have subtle effects at the boundary layers, it changes how things work. Hopefully I can find a way to show other people.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-03 16:23:51+00:00
Your opinion is based on the constitutional republic of the past. In the authoritarian dictatorship that Trump is building, there's no difference between a right and a privilege because rights don't exist, only privilege for those who have the approval of the dictator, which may be revoked at any time. This whole "rule of law" idea you're professing is antiquated and a relic. The new world order is: might makes right.
by aruki | 2025-08-03 16:23:55+00:00
Location: Croatia (UTC +1/+2), EU citizen

Remote: full remote

Willing to relocate: no Technologies: Python, FastAPI, AWS, Postgresql, GitHub Actions, Docker

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LXQud278roWx0pGefBCIJ1s9OT8...

Email: ante.rukavina87@gmail.com

Hi! I'm a software engineer specialized in back-end technologies, cloud infrastructures, and CI/CD pipelines. Experienced in data engineering, backend development and multitude of AWS services.
by Apreche | 2025-08-03 16:24:06+00:00
They put the manufacturing and supply chain expert in charge, and that’s what they excel at now. But they lost Jobs and Ive, so now they don’t have the imagination, vision, and design expertise anymore.

They did make an attempt with the vision glasses, but it obviously flopped.

They succeeded for so long with top-down direction because the top had ideas. I think the best move would be to allow for more bottom-up direction. Give the engineers and designers license to run wild a bit.
by majewsky | 2025-08-03 16:24:17+00:00
> I enjoy games too, I just don’t think preserving most of them is a big deal

Games are undoubtedly one of the most significant forms of cultural artifacts of our time. (For example, contemporary games arguably inform youth culture significantly more than contemporary literature does.)

If your emphasis is on "most", then this is a pretty silly argument: By this logic, we also ought not preserve any movies in our national libraries because most movies are cheap entertainment or outright slop. Same for any other form of media really. Sturgeon's Law and all.
by kmarc | 2025-08-03 16:24:45+00:00
I cannot say all of them were performing bad

But yeah, some of them... Definitely.

Someone said in another thread, it's none of my business. Indeed. Especially as an external. I also would never report any of my suspicion. Sometimes,however, I'm blocked by this (waiting on others, etc.) so not entirely unaffected, tho
by motorest | 2025-08-03 16:24:57+00:00
> Yes, hiring a finops person is a sound advice once your cloud bill gets big enough.

Is it, though? At best someone wearing that hat will explain the bill you're getting. What value do you get from that?

To cut costs, either you microoptimize things, of you redesign systems to shed expenses. The former gets you nothing, the latter is not something a "finops" (whatever that is supposed to mean) brings to the table.
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-03 16:25:22+00:00
Yes, it is in effect a gamble. The issue is that this strategy doesn't really prove profitable for the majority of VCs. Less than 30% of VCs get to a unicorn or IPO deal. 46% of VCs don't profit at all. This is as per the recent post "(Only) half of senior VCs make at least one successful deal.". I am even ignoring the ones who drop out and don't contribute to the active statistics.

The strategy is about as silly as having ten babies and expecting that one of them will make it. It is what you would expect out of the worst poverty-ridden parts of Africa.

An alternative is to select and nurture your investments really well, so the rate of success is much higher. I'd like to see the script be flipped, whereby 90% of investments go on to becoming profit making, secondarily with their stable cash income being preferred to big exits.
by margalabargala | 2025-08-03 16:25:23+00:00
There's a lot of reasons the cybertruck is a failure, but I think a lot of it does come down to Musk; not just the cancelled orders because of his politics, but because purportedly he inserted himself into the engineering and development at a far stronger level for this vehicle than the other Tesla vehicles, and a lot of the issues stem from fulfilling his design demands.

At the time the CT was announced there were no other EV pickups remotely close to buyable. If he had stepped back, and let the people who designed the X, Y, and 3 do their thing, it would have been released in 2020, and even with its unique shape would have sold great, and probably would not have developed the reputation for poor quality that the current one has.
by amelius | 2025-08-03 16:25:56+00:00
It makes a lot of strategic sense but if you have so much money on the bank, then who wouldn't buy a silicon design firm to design your CPUs in house? I bet everyone here on HN would have suggested to do that if asked in a board meeting. The big surprise was how long it took Apple to bite the bullet.

Anyway, despite this, Apple still has their castle built in someone else's kingdom, namely TSMC.
by BoxFour | 2025-08-03 16:25:59+00:00
This strikes me as a somewhat unfair characterization of many of these communities. In my experience, a much more common issue is that the people who do have answers end up ignoring the group and it becomes pointless. It rarely becomes a source of career hindrance or long-lasting judgement, it just ends up being useless because there's not a lot of incentive for the expert side of the equation.

People who are likely to judge people for dumb questions are rarely involved in those groups in the first place, for exactly all the obvious reasons.

The more realistic outcome isn’t that your boss ends up a drunk puking slob (and for what it’s worth most of these groups don’t include leadership anyway, so not sure why anyone's boss would be involved) but that an intern floats a terrible idea ("I'm thinking of taking these 10 shots of 151"), nobody responds, they take silence as approval, and they end up causing a mess and then being judged for the mess they caused.

A quick gut check from them with a healthy group might get a few eye rolls and a "here's why that's a bad idea", but not any lasting judgement unless they completely ignored the advice.

The only case I can think of where that might happen is if they already did something which has policy or legal implications ("hey i accidentally dumped the whole user base including PII to my phone"), in which case - good? There should be a review mechanism, including consequences if they ignored a bunch of roadblocks.
by davidgay | 2025-08-03 16:26:31+00:00
> Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing?

The French "dictée" is similar, but has you write down a spoken (coherent text). One that usually gets weekly practiced (and graded...) in primary school, but there's also spelling-bee-like events, e.g., https://dicteepourtous.fr/

French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least), but there's several complications:

- multiple ways to spell the same sound (so you just need to know for that word)

- often silent terminal consonants (but they must be present, because they are pronounced in some contexts)

- the pronounced syllables don't always match word boundaries ("liaison")

The last two points also explain why a coherent text is a more useful test than just single complex words.
by kstrauser | 2025-08-03 16:26:34+00:00
The last thing I want is to start thinking of the worst that could happen. I am very creative and my brain won’t shut up once started. I’ll get stuck in a strange airport for 12 hours, and have to sleep in a chair which will hurt my back and I’ll have to get a refill of muscle relaxants, which will probably get me addicted and homeless. My cat will miss her meal and starve to death. My bank will see that I’m outside the travel window I’d told them about, see strange changes from Tampa, and cancel my debit card. Or if I’m heading to a business trip, it’ll leave such a bad impression on my boss that I’ll have to get a new job.

I could go on like this for an hour.

I’m not really that anxious 99.9% of the time, but add in the inherent stress of travel, especially if it’s for business, and we’re off to the races.

Orrrr, I could get there early since I’m awake and moving anyway, find a lounge, and have a leisurely breakfast and beverage before settling in with my Switch or an ereader. That’s my choice by a wide margin.
by gregjor | 2025-08-03 16:26:51+00:00
I don't have any insight into the future. Anything might happen, including AGI. I doubt I will live to see it. I doubt my children or grandchildren will either. But I only have my own opinions informed by experience and what I read.

I have worked in software development since the mid-1970s. I have see more fads and hype than I can list. I have seen advances in tech that have obvious and immediate value -- the internet, relational databases, personal computers, cloud computing. And I have seen plenty of other things that looked cool and got a lot of buzz but didn't work out (the dot-com bust, for example, or the numerous claims of "end user programming" aka no-code/low-code and now vibe-code). I try not to get too cynical but the hype around AI, with the blatant inflating of stock prices and crazy levels of infrastructure investment just looks too much like a scheme to fleece credulous and hopeful investors.

One thing about working in tech that can turn out good or bad: we programmers frequently report to and get paid by people who not only can't do our jobs, they can't even begin to understand it. Our work looks like magic, or 10X intelligence. I get that from my parents every time I fix their router or get their PC to work again. Every once in a while the hucksters and parasites who see the tech industry as a gold mine get to cash in from investors and CEOs who don't understand the technology, and just gamble. Elon Musk's companies demonstrate how far someone can lie and make crazy promises for profit. I think the AI bubble will cost a lot more, and deliver a lot less.

I tell myself I'll know AGI when I see it. I expect it might creep up on us rather than emerge fully-formed one day, if it happens at all. I like to keep an open mind about the possibility, but although I don't believe in souls or the supernatural I do think human intelligence and consciousness come from more than brain matter. I don't think human brains work like computers, even if we call some arrangement of tokens a "neural network." I think people can easily fall prey to scammers, and can delude themselves.

Machines that can give a good imitation of humans might prove useful -- already have in some limited domains. I expect those domains to expand, just as automation has in the past. Some days I feel relieved that I likely won't live long enough to see AGI, and on other days I just want to stop hearing about it.
by alphazard | 2025-08-03 16:27:09+00:00
Both of these products could be expected from any well run company. They are both very polished versions of something that already existed. The direction to optimize in was already clear. No one wants to compare Apple to a generic well run company, they want to compare Apple to itself a decade or two ago.

Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish pair of Apple glasses. I think that is exactly right.

Instead there is an incredibly expensive VR scuba mask, with relatively little adoption. It's certainly not changing the way we use physical spaces and transforming society, which is something a previous Apple could have pulled off. Users and developers need to be shown how to get value from something radically new, and Apple hasn't done that recently.
by jeffvroom | 2025-08-03 16:27:09+00:00
Can you say more about what you mean? We always see light moving through specific dark matter fluid flow patterns. How could you tell the difference? Do you have an explanation for how Maisie's galaxy is redshifted so far away from what should be it's real age? Couldn't it be because we're seeing it through a faster moving stream of dark matter fluid? Is there an experiment I missed that would prove this theory wrong?
by benreesman | 2025-08-03 16:27:37+00:00
That's funny in a dark way, especially it being Thiel given that this entire movement/era traces a clear intellectual and emotional lineage to his activism all the way back at least as far as his writing in the student libertarian rag at Stanford in like 94 (and apparently a childhood fixation with Quenta Silmarillien exceeding even my own).

Trapped in his own Intellectual Dark Web one might say.

Yeah, Greta Thurnburg is making the frogs "low-T". What a bunch of fucking losers.
by a_t48 | 2025-08-03 16:27:44+00:00
It would have been, but it looks like the difficulty there is that the type of `sizes` must be compile time known, but `std::transform` and friends don't really know about fixed sizes. Depending on the context, one can do `auto sizes = types | std::views::transform(std::meta::size_of);`, the difficulty comes in materializing at the end.
by nottorp | 2025-08-03 16:27:46+00:00
> focussing on making the best consumer hardware of all time

Yes, but what use is the best consumer hardware when the software is degrading?

Considering the liquid glass thing, there's no one at Apple left who understands and cares about usability, for example.

Plus the iOSification of Mac OS for no good reason... maybe to make it less attractive to developers?