MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-08-30 05:08:40+00:00
My current company is in that 5% part right now. Tremendous effort invested into the system, everyone involved was very proud of themselves. Unfortunately the way we actually needed to scale was almost completely untouched by any of this architecture astronomy, so we have both a terrifically complicated system - very difficult to change things without potential breakage or regression - AND it doesn't scale at all.

I don't mind, I don't blame people for not predicting the future - it's a tough game. But god the hubris and attitude we put up with until the crows came home to roost.
by dostick | 2025-08-30 05:10:10+00:00
How ugly customer-hating synology is: Synology DSM os measures free space in percent. So when on your multi terabyte volume 200GB free remaining, you would receive notifications until it’s about 100GB free and then you will not receive notifications even it it runs out of space completely.

You can set the free disk space threshold percentage but it will accept number no lower than 5%. This is obviously a rudiment from old times, 20 years ago when volumes were 1-10GB, not TB.

I asked them to change threshold from percent to GB, over multiple times over few years - not going to.

I asked them to allow change threshold to lower value than 5% - not interested.

Not only you can’t know when disk drive runs out of space, but excessive notifications when there’s still lot of free space desensitises, so when actual disk failure happens you would ignore notification.
by commandersaki | 2025-08-30 05:12:29+00:00
I had thought I did well in all the interviews but was just bested by another candidate.

But the role continued to be advertised as they were hiring multiple headcount, so it seems the recruiter straight up lied and was trying to let me down gently. Reality settled when I saw all the hire/maybe hire/no hire positions of the interviewers.

I don’t disagree with any of the feedback or angry; I’m using all the data gathered to improve myself.

As for the privacy request, usually you agree to a privacy policy with most firms that say you can request a copy of the data anyway, don’t always need to use legislation to order it.
by jdietrich | 2025-08-30 05:13:17+00:00
>I don't understand why the Vatican is considered a country

It isn't a country and nobody says that it is. The Holy See is sovereign entity with unique status under international law; the status of the Vatican City is derived from the status of the Holy See. It enjoys that status because practically all countries believe that it should do so.

All relevant parties believe that the Vatican City should be treated as if it's a state, therefore it enjoys the rights and responsibilities of a state, even though it technically isn't one. That is fundamentally how international law works - it's a system of agreements between countries and practice established by historical precedent. The status of the Holy See and the Vatican City is quirky, but that doesn't make it illegitimate.
by lurking_swe | 2025-08-30 05:13:42+00:00
i’m not judging anyone that’s interested in the tech here. it’s pretty neat.

but do you think we were all born yesterday? Are you suggesting _most_ people using a bittorrent client are downloading public domain movies like sherlock holmes shorts? Or linux ISO’s for fun?

You are technically correct. But it doesn’t take a genius to understand that the disclaimer here is a total joke.
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-08-30 05:13:50+00:00
I really feel for the anticheat devs because it feels like it's an almost unwinnable battle they're fighting. The only thing I've seen truely prevent cheating is social factors, like tight knit communities and competitive frameworks that have admins manually viewing demos to catch subtle cheaters - and even then, there is controversy. I still remember the Flusha drama from CSGO way back in 2014 [0]. It's still unknown if he cheated at the highest level of counterstrike. Professional players were even caught cheating at LAN events.

I understand the privacy and security concerns of kernel level anticheats, but if I already trust Microsoft with my privacy (I don't, but that's another story) I don't see the game dev companies as being worse in that regard. But they're fighting a losing battle on PC and if they don't pull out all the stops, it could ruin gaming.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flusha#Cheating_Allegations
by skissane | 2025-08-30 05:15:50+00:00
I am wondering if the Albanian government’s plan to give independence to the Tirana HQ of the Bektashi Sufi Order is ever actually going to happen. If it does, then they’ll be the world’s second country dedicated to a religion… well, currently Iran is a Twelver Shi’a theocracy, but Iran had a long history before it was theocracy, and maybe one day won’t be one anymore; Vatican City and the proposed “Bektashi Muslim Vatican” are countries whose existence is inseparable from being HQ of a religious group.

The odd thing about giving the Bektashis a “Muslim Vatican”, is they are a tiny minuscule sect within Islam, and many conservative Muslims will say “they aren’t Muslims at all”
by motorest | 2025-08-30 05:20:07+00:00
> The "serious problem" is that they've known about bugs for 20 years and not committed resources to fix it. The problem is the money.

Who is "they"? Project maintainers? Project users? You?

> The problem is the money.

So this is a project that didn't require any funding for decades in order to exist. Explain exactly why you believe money is an issue.
by MrJohz | 2025-08-30 05:20:35+00:00
I've never really found this to be the case in practice. When I look at well-written unit tests and well-written integration tests, they're usually doing exactly the same sort of thing and have very similar concerns in terms of code organisation and test structure.

For example, in both cases, the tests work best if I test the subject under test as a black box (i.e. interact only with its public interface) but use my knowledge of its internals to identify the weaknesses that will most require testing. In both cases, I want to structure the code so that the subject under test is as isolated as possible - i.e. no complex interactions with global state, no mocking of unrelated modules, and no complex mechanism to reset anything after the test is done. In both cases, I want the test to run fast, ideally instantaneously, so I get immediate results.

The biggest difference is that it's usually harder to write good integration tests because they're interacting with external systems that are generally slower and stateful, so I've got to put extra work into getting the tests themselves to be fast and stateless. But when that works, there's really not much difference at all between a test that tests a single function, and a test that tests a service class with a database dependency.
by ehnto | 2025-08-30 05:23:50+00:00
Unity is used by so many studios, it's a great signal if you're joining one of those and probably a good signal for Unreal shops as well. I think knowing C++ is a more robust signal for senior technical roles but I don't think it's a silver bullet for every role.

I would prefer engine experience over language experience if wanting someone to join and get to work quickly.
by skissane | 2025-08-30 05:24:37+00:00
> It isn't a country and nobody says that it is.

Well, the CIA says it is: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/holy-see-va...

> The Holy See is sovereign entity with unique status under international law; the status of the Vatican City is derived from the status of the Holy See. It enjoys that status because practically all countries believe that it should do so.

I am only an amateur international lawyer, ask a real one for a more confident answer: but my own understanding is this-the subjects of international law are (1) sovereign states, (2) international organisations established by treaty, (3) sui generis entities; Vatican City is technically an instance of (1) and the Holy See is an instance of (3), and they are technically two distinct subjects of international law, despite having a common sovereign - at least, that’s what I’m pretty sure the Vatican’s own international lawyers will argue… as subjects of international law, both are capable of being parties to treaties, but (generally speaking) the Holy See joins treaties of global interest, Vatican City joins treaties regarding matters of local concern to its own territory. As to where they get this status from, the answer is-customary international law
by Jensson | 2025-08-30 05:25:01+00:00
Its basically making a stone soup, people wont believe it can be done, but then put a stone in water and boil it, and tell people if you aren't getting a nice soup you aren't doing it right, just put in all these other ingredients that aren't required but really helps and you get this awesome soup!

Then someone say that isn't stone soup, they just did all the work without the stone! But that is just a stone hater, how can you not see this awesome soup made by the stone?
by huhkerrf | 2025-08-30 05:25:21+00:00
I hear this about lawsuits a lot, but it doesn't really track for me. If a hiring manager says, "we decided to pass on you because you didn't go in depth as much as we hoped on how you would handle latency," why does that open the company up to a lawsuit anymore than no answer?

I could see if the feedback was "we wanted someone who better fit the culture," but giving a specific answer on a core hiring criteria doesn't seem like it would cause a problem.

In reality, I think the most likely reason is what others have mentioned, that candidates would argue the point.
by raggi | 2025-08-30 05:25:32+00:00
By forced I guess you’re referring to the room full of leads who all said yes, but then reported otherwise back down to their ics to avoid retribution. I caught early wind of this from folks being super rude in early on the ground discussions and tried to raise it with Linus. One of the directors got his kickers in a twist and accused me of making a mountain out of a molehill. I guess clearly not, as the sentiment and division still stands.
by Towaway69 | 2025-08-30 05:26:08+00:00
Is it tricky? If you have a trademark, you can have a gTLD - simple as that.

Because the problem is how can apple have a trademark on the word “apple”?

For me, the same rules should be enforced for trademarks because an apple orchard might also like to have a trademark but that’s difficult because “apple” is already a trademark.

Edit: as pointed out in the comments, this position doesn't take into account that trademarks are very much national and cultural.

Perhaps one day gTLDs will become free (once the gold rush is over) just as SSL/TLS certificates did with the arrival of Lets Encrypt.
by evanelias | 2025-08-30 05:26:45+00:00
It's not just the dash, it's the specific construct that's an AI smell, as directly mentioned upthread in the comment I was responding to:

> em dash in the middle of a "it's not just x, it's y" phrasing

Literally all of the sibling comments in this subthread are about this specific phrasing, which AI overuses to an absurd degree, especially when combined with hyperbole.
by xscott | 2025-08-30 05:26:56+00:00
> It seems like you're suggesting that mathematicians replace the reals with the computables.

No, not any more. :-)

I liked the idea a year or two ago, but I've come to believe that even the Integers are too bizarre to worry about. For now, I'm content just playing with fixed and floating point, maybe with arbitrary precision. Stuff I can reason about.

I just think people are a little too casual thinking they are really using the Reals. It might be like Feynman's quote about saying you understand QM.
by calmbonsai | 2025-08-30 05:27:07+00:00
I lived and breathed XSLT back in the day for 3 projects over 2 years. Hell, I was the company's "XML evangelist" and spoke at XMLConf in San Diego.

I would never go back.

XSLT's "coding UX" is atrocious. Simple things "look complex" and complex things "look obfuscated".

As mentioned in the parent post, there's also this consistent "low leverage" to the code so you feel as if you're typing a lot for little impact.
by Lockal | 2025-08-30 05:29:52+00:00
So... The answer is to use during the real-time access the same headless browser as they used during the training? Which they already do, unless you ask specifically to write and run a python script that uses simple requests?

It is like generating static webpages just for SEO: obsolete since 2012[1], and few years later for other major websites.

[1] https://www.i-programmer.info/news/81-web-general/4248-googl...
by machinate | 2025-08-30 05:30:20+00:00
Easy is almost an understatement; it's Alt+Hyphen. [Edit: My bad that's en-dash, can't tell the difference in this monospaced text field. Em-dash you have to hold shift.]

I guess on Windows it's Alt+0,1,5,1 on a numpad. Or you copy+paste from Character Map.
by aldousd666 | 2025-08-30 05:31:00+00:00
This is great! I love projects like this! I have a hobby of making toy programming languages. (Not arguing that's what yours is.) I once made a compiler, but lately I'm satisfied with making interpreters. Executable asts with moderate rearranging capabilities. It is an addictive thing. It started when I wrote a query language for my graph database server back in 2006. I didn't know about property graphs when I started, but that's what it ended up being, and I had to make a query language for it. (I wanted to call it AQL for "associative query language" but turns out that acronym was already taken. I can't remember by what.) I learned how to do it from the dragon book -- cuz I'm old. Anyway, you struck a chord with me. Making a syntax highlighter that's able to resume on errors is an interesting challenge that teaches you a lot about both sides, the front end and the back end.
by hmcq6 | 2025-08-30 05:31:01+00:00
I don't think this correlation implies a causation, same with alzheimer's.

I think you're incorrectly attributing to viral/bacterial infection what can more likely be explained by a difference in lifestyles. Nearly 80% of people who die from Leukemia are over the age of 65. People who die in airplane accidents are usually flying private and that is not a lifestyle all of us can afford.

I think it's more likely that doctors die of specific causes because they have more money than the average person, the knowledge to do their best to avoid heart disease and smoking (and other hazardous activities except apparently for flying private), or perhaps because they're exposed to chemicals through their work environment
by raggi | 2025-08-30 05:32:14+00:00
For this use case a major one would be better models for carved up shared memory with safe/secure mappings in and out of specialized hardware like the gpu. Android uses binder for this and there are a good number of practical pains with it being shoved into that shape. Some other teams at Google doing similar stuff at least briefly had a path with another kernel module to expose a lot more and it apparently enabled them to fix a lot of problems with contention and so on. So it’s possible to solve this kind of stuff, just painful to be missing the primitives.
by 3036e4 | 2025-08-30 05:32:29+00:00
I remember reading blogs (and Testing on the Toilet) around 2010 about how Google divided tests into Small/Medium/Large, with specific definitions, rather than trying to use more vague and overloaded terminology that no one ever agreed on. Seems like they are no longer doing that? Too bad, since I think it was a clever trick to avoid having to get into pointless discussions about things like "what is a unit?". Having experienced more than one project where a unit test was uselessly defined to "have to only run a single method, everything else must be mocked" I like the idea of not having any level of tests below "small" (that is still above a level most would call "unit").

Found this long 2011 post now that goes into some detail on the background and the reasons for introducing that ("The Testing Grouplet"?): https://mike-bland.com/2011/11/01/small-medium-large.html

But I am not sure even after reading all that if the SML terminology was still used in 2011 or if they had moved on already? Can't really find any newer sources that mention it.
by ehnto | 2025-08-30 05:32:37+00:00
The interviewer wants to know you can make them. They can quickly figure that out in the interview.

Actually doing them teaches you how to make them, which will give you foundational knowledge you'll take with you into more complex endeavours. And it will show, I can tell if you actually understand why you built the more complex thing the way you did. If you just cargo-culted a bunch of patterns together in an effort to seem more competent than you are, a lack of fundamentals will show during interviewing.

I don't mean university course fundamentals, I mean pragmatic software fundamentals you get from building stuff.
Show HN: I built the 'mouse' for a personal, always-on AI on your phone
by Iger | 2025-08-30 05:35:47+00:00
i HN, I'm the creator of Sein.

I believe the "Hey Siri" or "OK Google" model is fundamentally broken. We're forced into a 'summoning' ritual that erects a wall between us and our AI. Meanwhile, our data is sent to cloud "mainframes," where privacy is often the price of admission.

The "PC revolution" for AI is here, but we're missing the 'mouse'. The "Personal Computer" is already in our pockets—our phones have powerful neural engines. What's missing is the right input device to seamlessly connect our thoughts to our own private AI.

That's why I built the Sein Clip. It's not another computer; it's the 'mouse' for the Personal AI era. It’s a small wearable obsessed with one thing: capturing your voice with far greater clarity than a phone in your pocket ever could.

The Clip securely sends this audio to the Sein App, where your phone becomes your private AI server. But the revolutionary part isn't just the hardware, it's the new paradigm of interaction it enables:

1. 100% Private by Default. We bring cloud-level voice and intent recognition to run entirely on your local device. Your data belongs to you, and only you. This isn't for our convenience; it’s for your protection.

2. Truly 'Always-On', No Wake Word. We tore down the wall. Our AI is designed as an "always-on" companion that uses contextual awareness to know when you're talking to it. Your thoughts are captured frictionlessly, making interaction as natural as talking to a friend.

3. Emotional Intelligence. Having solved the 'when' of interaction, we focus on the 'how'. Our AI perceives your "emotional map," understanding when to be proactive and when to be silent. It becomes a companion that assists you, not just a tool that executes commands.

4. Our Vision: Built on MCP. This is just the beginning. Our system is built on a foundational protocol (MCP) designed for an open, interconnected ecosystem of future collaborative AI experiences. The best is yet to come.

The Business Model: It's simple. You buy the hardware (the "mouse"), and the companion app with all its local AI software is yours forever. An optional subscription will be for power users who choose to leverage the "mainframe" (cloud models) for specific tasks.

I'm launching on Kickstarter soon and would love the HN community's feedback on this approach—that our phones are the new PCs of the AI era, and what we need now are the right peripherals to unlock their true potential.

Pre-launch page:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sein/sein-the-first-wea...
by com2kid | 2025-08-30 05:35:57+00:00
> Do people really not understand that companies don't care one whit about your personality?

When I worked at the original incarnation of HBO Max our #1 hiring criteria was "not an asshole".

When I joined MSFT out of college, they were big on hiring for future potential.

In any large company you're going to be reorged to a brand new project within a couple years of joining, so being flexible and capable of learning quickly is of paramount importance.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-08-30 05:40:10+00:00
Oh no, he didn't push that. He just tried to command all US employers to require vaccination as a condition of employment. That is severely oppressive. I've seen many cases of people being forced to take the vaccine for stupid reasons, despite known risks, and suffering severe consequences such as organ failure or permanent disability. That is what a mandate does. It eliminates any discretion of the individual. If you had covid once then you don't need a vaccine. Natural immunity is better than a vaccine. Vaccines can harm your immune system, especially in excess. You should only get important ones, not every single one out of the hundreds or thousands out there on the market. Your immune system is finite and can be exhausted.

By the way, if the vaccine worked, then the people who got it wouldn't have to worry about the people who didn't, right? In fact it is completely opposite. The unvaccinated could get the virus from the vaccinated, who were told (at first) that they were immunized and did not have to take precautions anymore. The whole situation was insulting to our intelligence and a severe attack on our basic human rights. Don't give me some bullshit convoluted argument about potentially improved outcomes for people getting the vaccine. That never was good enough reason to force anyone to get a vaccine, especially under threat of being denied healthcare or employment.

I must give the establishment credit. They indoctrinated everyone very well, to the point that even 5 years later many still haven't recognized how badly covid was handled. They even got the ignorant feeling uppity about thinking everyone who is against the way it was handled is anti-vax. I got the stupid vaccine. I stopped getting boosters (like most normal people) when it became clear that the vaccine wasn't working and the virus had mutated to be more harmless than ever. I never got the virus even once but everyone I know who got double boosted and so on did get it, even multiple times (unless they were skipping work).
by dang | 2025-08-30 05:40:41+00:00
Please don't do this here.

Edit: we asked you to stop posting unsubstantive comments quite recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44832751) and have done so many times before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33700337).

If you continue doing this, we'll end up banning you. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this, that would be good.
by dns_snek | 2025-08-30 05:41:32+00:00
Not sure where you're getting that from. Firstly Apple App Store is a VLOP, not Apple as a whole. Apple shouldn't even be in the loop as a digital service to third party app stores but even if they are, it's not covered by the DSA as their notarization service doesn't constitute a "Very Large Online Platform".

Secondly, articles 34-35 say no such thing. Article 34 only calls out "the dissemination of illegal content through their services" as a systemic risk. A torrent client is not illegal content.

Article 35 lists "illegal hate speech" and "cyber violence" as pointed examples of illegal content.

> c) adapting content moderation processes, including the speed and quality of processing notices related to specific types of illegal content and, where appropriate, the expeditious removal of, or the disabling of access to, the content notified, in particular in respect of illegal hate speech or cyber violence, as well as adapting any relevant decision-making processes and dedicated resources for content moderation;
by drdeca | 2025-08-30 05:42:24+00:00
The Planck length is at least around the right order of magnitude for things to get weird. If you have the position uncertainty of something be less that ~ a Planck length, and it’s expected momentum equal to zero, by Heisenberg position momentum uncertainty, the expectation of the square of the momentum is big enough that the (relativistic) kinetic energy is big enough that the Schwartzchild radius is also around the Planck length iirc?