MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rsnyder1 | 2025-08-05 13:45:54+00:00
lol, I was writing angry at some academic framework, agree ad hominem isn't a good strategy, 100%

the thing about market needs / underserved niches / demand is that they are easy to sorta-define, but hard to actually define in a way that's useful when you are trying find them, when you actually need to understand them

the biggest unlock I've had was, 2+ years into pushing a product I had theoretically validated demand for, realizing that I didn't actually understand demand, and that demand SEEMS like it is "desire for a product" or "willingness to pay for a product" but is actually a product-agnostic thing, and when you see that, you see the world a lot more clearly. This video was super useful - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIZqim8iXU

Anyway thanks for the critique, 100% agree with half of it!
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-05 13:45:57+00:00
I think it's easy enough to design code that is easy to test - simple single-purpose functions/methods that are self-contained and don't change any global state, etc, and obviously you need to document what the input/output guarantees are, and I would normally add assertions at time of coding to enforce those.

Where you are going to run into difficulty in testing is if your APIs are so complex that it's all but impossible to exercise all code paths by testing with different parameters, or if functions have global side effects (bad practice).
360: Do I look like a leader you'd want to work with?
by codeguppy | 2025-08-05 13:45:57+00:00
I’ve spent 20+ years in tech, with 15 of those in software leadership. Recently I decided to look for a new opportunity, and as part of that I’ve been sharing some of my lessons and reflections on LinkedIn (where I have ~7800 followers) and a small about me website.

I’d love a kind of “virtual 360” from this community: based on how I show up, do I sound like the kind of leader you’d want to work with? I consider your feedback a gift. Please let me know your opinion.

# Links mentioned in the post

LinkedIn posts: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mveteanu/recent-activity/all/ Mini personal website: https://mveteanu.me/

# Other links (beyond the post)

My various X posts: https://x.com/mveteanu/
by wowczarek | 2025-08-05 13:47:02+00:00
I remember those horizontal menus; Lotus 1-2-3 really was the pinnacle of productivity. You could also create custom menus, assign shortcut keys to your macros, and of course have your macros call other shortcut keys. I was too young to use it for serious work back then, but the 123 and dBase combo really was a powerhouse.
by throw0101c | 2025-08-05 13:47:16+00:00
> Gar Alperovitz wrote the definitive book on the subject "The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb".

"definitive"? What does that even mean in a field of study like history? You're telling me there has been zero new analysis on the subject since 1995? No new insights?

And even that assumes that Alperovitz's initial premises were valid, that he did not miss any evidence,or exclude or discount any because his own biases and such, and so that is conclusions followed logically from all of that.

How is it "definitive"?
by gus_massa | 2025-08-05 13:47:24+00:00
I guess you got downvoted because the connection is not obvious. The relevant paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague#Implications_... is

> [...] A materials scientist working for Rubycon in Japan left the company, taking the secret water-based electrolyte formula for Rubycon's ZA and ZL series capacitors, and began working for a Chinese company. The scientist then developed a copy of this electrolyte. Then, some staff members who defected from the Chinese company copied an incomplete version of the formula and began to market it to many of the aluminium electrolytic manufacturers in Taiwan [...]
by Aurornis | 2025-08-05 13:48:29+00:00
> animals do frequently get along and cooperate

And humans do, too. So what’s your point? I’m drawing parallels between animals and humans and you are too! You seem to be supporting my point, not refuting it.

Humans get along and cooperate at scales far beyond anything the animal kingdom can do. Capitalism has driven the advancements that enable it.

> will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?

The classic vacuous anti-capitalism rhetoric: Capitalism will destroy the world, but unspecified alternative which doesn’t exist and isn’t described is better. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the non-existent superior non-capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad person, right?
by bronlund | 2025-08-05 13:48:38+00:00
I believe one of the selling points are the shared collections. So you have all the secrets and endpoints and whatever in collections that you share amongst a team. Now, noone has access to any of this and the hassle to set this up locally is way worse than you would think. Specially in large organisations.

So yeah, there are probably several companies looking for alternatives right now :)
by Traster | 2025-08-05 13:48:39+00:00
Perplexity has really convinced me about this. There is a clear difference between automated bots scraping data at bulk for later use, and automated bots working on behalf of users on direct requests. I can see a reasonable argument that some of the first type of automation could be tolerable for websites with strict limits, the second type I think by default should not be tolerated at all.

Perplexity's value proposition appears to be "we're going to take the stuff off your website, and present it to our users. We're not going to show them your ads, we're not going to offer them your premium services or referrals to other products, we're going to strip out the value from your content and take it for our users".

You can argue all you want about whether that's 5k impressions a day or 1m impressions a day. It should be 0 impressions a day. It is literally just free-riding.

Also, they're meant to be a professional company taking VC money to build a business, why are writing whiny posts like a teenager? The impression I get with a lot of these companies is that their business is losing money hand over fist, they have no idea how they're going to make it work and they look absolutely panicked as a result. They come across like a company I would want to be nowhere near.
by toss1 | 2025-08-05 13:48:51+00:00
>>Why would they call it "mostly" if the idea has always been that it'd be "full" when it's done and out of beta?

Because "Mostly..." is the truth, and then when it is actually "Full..." they can come out and announce that fact with great fanfare. and they would have been honest.

Hell, if they simply called it "Supervised Self Driving", it would be honest, and actually match even your glowing description.

But they do not. Your and Tesla's idea that using the added tagline "(Supervised)" as a legal weasel-word does not work either. "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" is literally an oxymoron. A thing either drives itself fully, or it requires supervision. One contradicts the other.

IIRC, the "(Supervised)" bit was added well after the first fanfare with only "Full Self Driving" alone, when problems started to appear. And the common initials are "FSD".

Even if the reality of the feature set meets your glowing description, the problem is the small percentage of cases where it fails. I'm sure the guy in Florida who was decapitated when his Tesla failed to notice a semi-trailer turning across in front of him was similarly confident, and the same for the guy in California who was impaled on a construction traffic barrier. The problem is that it is NOT FULL, it is only full self driving until it fails.

>>And as robotaxi shows, it's literally almost there.

NO, it shows the exact opposite.

Nearly two months after the much-heralded rollout of (fully) self-driving taxis, Tesla still cannot put a single car on the road for a single meter without a supervising safety driver. Moreover, there have been numerous reported instances of the cars making dangerous errors such as left turns into traffic, etc.

>>basically every single result is "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)", with very few exceptions.

Again, that wording is a literally meaningless oxymoron, containing two mutually contradictory statements ("Full" vs "Supervised"), thus open to whatever interpretation the listener latches onto. Moreover, the emphasis is on the first word — "Full" — which is the lie.
by coldtea | 2025-08-05 13:48:51+00:00
>What do you mean? We are living in a golden age of unprecedented prosperity

Hahaha, that's next level cope. Compared to what, the 1910s?

Because compared to just a few decades ago we live in an era of diminishing middle class, less affordable rent and housing, worse job prospects, crap politics, worsening climate crisis, failing infrastructure, inflation, and more widespread depression...

>Well, if someone in fifty years is willing to pay for the tree (even if she's not born yet), markets will do the rest to come up with a positive price for the tree today.

Markets don't even solve today's problems anymore, they'd rather enshittify and seek short term profit
by sneak | 2025-08-05 13:49:03+00:00
It is insanely valuable, both commercially and strategically.

If it weren’t that hard to replicate, several countries (and Bezos/Blue Origin) would have replicated it by now.

I think you vastly underestimate how difficult rocketry is. There’s a reason “rocket science” is colloquially a metaphor for an extremely difficult and technical task.
by coffeecoders | 2025-08-05 13:49:10+00:00
Search is bad everywhere these days.

Honestly, even Google search with "terms reddit" is better than Reddit's own built-in search. That says a lot.

Same deal on may mac. Unless I know the exact file name, Finder search is useless. Spotlight will happily surface a PDF from 2017 before showing the text file you saved yesterday.

Which brings me to the question: why is search so hard?
by cptskippy | 2025-08-05 13:49:46+00:00
> The search in Google Messages on Android is completely useless too.

It's literally all Google products. They've just simplified and contextualized and added other things over the years such that if you're not searching for something already above the fold then it won't show up.

When I was using Gmail I had an email with important information that I needed about once a year. I knew the exact subject and who it was from but it would never show up in search. It was my only starred email so I could find it on demand.
by physicsguy | 2025-08-05 13:50:01+00:00
I think the biggest difference though is that launching a B2B business is much harder to start with than a B2C one.

If you're a B2C one, you launch an app/website, you get small but basically instant feedback by signups/usage. Reward is potentially low per user however.

With B2B, even if you get in conversation with customers quickly, you still might be talking about a 6-12 months cycle to even get them signed up to a free trial. For large companies they want SSO, RBAC, etc. out of the door, plus RFC on security questionaires, data governance, ISO27001, etc. etc. etc.
by shubb | 2025-08-05 13:50:45+00:00
When I read this suggestion it sticks out that un-spoonfed, people with deficits in thier study skills, executive function, and institutional literacy would be most disadvantaged.

So, you have 2 kids who are equally bright, and you tell one "you don't have to do these assignments but there is a test at the end" and the other "you have an 80% chance if failing if you don't do these assignments. Analyse each assignments and feedback for shiboleths like the way they ask you to structure your introduction and optimize for demonstrating you know these shiboleths over everything else"

University is a wonderful petri dish for growing into who you want to be. You have access to expertise and resources abs a certain kind of institutional credibility. Few students actually use these fully and the ones who do were told to. You need some idea who you want to be and why, and this is developed in you by other people. Children don't just know stuff.

I think these are positive changes if and only if we accompany them with systematic study skills and self management courses and bridge this gap.
by gorhill | 2025-08-05 13:51:25+00:00
Those webpages used to "test" blockers are frowned upon, see: https://x.com/gorhill/status/1583581072197312512

There are many reasons that sort of online tools are not able to reliably test a content blocker:

- Many content blockers are designed to fool pages to think no content blocker is installed

- Content blockers filter according to real, actual cases, not synthetic cases used in their tests
by colechristensen | 2025-08-05 13:51:32+00:00
Lots of space technology is classified as weapons subject to export control. ITAR has plenty of rules about who can see information. US immigration status generally has to be green card or citizen, and country of origin and any second citizenships are considered.

("export control" in this sense really doesn't have to do with moving a physical object out of the country but sharing information, to the extent that a conversation in an elevator could be an export violation. most export violations amount to emails being sent to the wrong person)

When I worked briefly in defense, for example, there would be regular random searches of my stuff as I exited the building and security would wander the building and look at what you left out on your desk while you went to lunch. Entirely seriously they told us not to wear our badge in public if we left the building and not to leave our laptops in our cars because someone might follow us and steal it. Had colleagues who were visiting a foreign country for work have their hotel rooms obviously thoroughly and messily searched while they were out.

They also do national security missions so there are folks there with high clearances.

Thing is that even if you did steal a bunch of information, that doesn't mean you could just copy and be successful. Any one of a million things can go wrong with a self-landing rocket that will cause it to explode, you can't just steal the whole system of operation that keeps these things from happening.

You couldn't steal all of the secrets of a circus performer and suddenly be able to juggle chainsaws while riding a unicycle.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-08-05 13:52:11+00:00
Pain scales of 1-10 are a classic example especially the way clincians interpret them. People have wildly different experiences of pain and their 10 is another persons 4. Yet the clinical guidance is usually only treat above a 6 and if the patient isn't scream and wreathing around its not an 8 or more. So if your calm and in control the only acceptable answer is 6 or 7. The clinical interpretation ignores the scoping and they can provide no levelling understanding of pain its not related to certain events.

In my experience if they see someone struggling to move around and follow instructions in the hospital then they will just pump some morphine in so the patient can comply and they can quickly get on with things but its not driven by the level of pain the person is actually in when left alone in their hospital bed or at home.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-05 13:53:19+00:00
In a free market system people can transact as they wish, including giving away something for free if they want.

There is nothing at odds at all. If you don’t see it, you might have a rather cartoonish, villainy view of a capitalism that gets promulgated by people who refuse to allow anything good or nice to be ascribed to capitalism.

If you can’t understand why capitalists can also like open source, have you considered that maybe it’s your understanding of the system that is flawed, not theirs?
by account42 | 2025-08-05 13:53:47+00:00
I agree but that cancer isn't limited to the internet or even originated from it. An until society as a whole is ready to deal with it the only thing we can do is form our own subculture that rejects this new normal. Instead of caring about what gets scraped or otherwise used by mega corporations for profit, care about finding more exchanges with real humans. Or in other words: be part creating the world you want to see and ignore those that choose not to participate.
by Etheryte | 2025-08-05 13:55:00+00:00
No, it isn't backwards when you consider the perspective of the bank. They give you 300k now, if you only paid them back 300k in total they would be incredibly deep in the red. Interest is there to offset that fact and then some. Even if the bank ended up at net zero after inflation, they would still be deep in the red because of the opportunity cost. In other words, inflation means what you're paying back to the bank is worth less and less as the time goes on. Banks are not in the business of charity, so the debtors have to cover the gap, plus profit.
by vindin | 2025-08-05 13:55:02+00:00
I really recommend you do more reading on DDD. This codebase is looking like a ticking time bomb. Biggest red flag I’m seeing right now is your supabase/functions/create/index.js. You have 2000 lines of code that contain what I see is your domain logic mixed with database queries and http concerns. In some places there are 8+ levels of conditionals, promises, and error handling. For an ERP system, this is not good. Ideally the domain logic (accounting, rules, core erp stuff) should be isolated by itself, with solid test coverage, free of any external communications/concerns, etc. The reason being that this is not something you want to fuck up. Business rules are tough as I’m sure you know, and this is going to be a pain to maintain in its current state
by nancyminusone | 2025-08-05 13:55:52+00:00
>My students call it “Chat,” a cute nickname they all seem to have agreed on at some point.

This instantly paints the author as someone out of touch with their students. For the record, it comes from streamers/Twitch a la "Chat, is this real?"

I'm not saying everyone needs to know every meme, but starting off with this does taint the rest of the piece a little.
by sofixa | 2025-08-05 13:56:49+00:00
> Its disscussed here, still nobody is acting

No, it's discussed everywhere, at the EU and the local level. There has been plenty of action at various levels (like in France, under Macron first as minister of the economy and later president; and he's been decried and criticised a lot, but has also gotten a ton of reforms through).

> This sentence is fundamentally wrong, no one is dying. And for me, it perfectly sums up the issues we're discussing.

That's the point though. Literally the main thing the law does is that if the AI can make decision that can result in deaths, there should be a human escalation and its decision making should be explainable. That's it. If that's too much burden, something is wrong.

> Or even worse, deciding when the problem does not yet exist. Or the technology is still in its early stages. Like AI

But the problem already exists, again, cf. United Healthcare Group in the US. We know they're killing people and hiding behind a well known faulty "AI". We don't want that shit in the EU.

> I don't know if you are for or against nuclear power. I am quite pro nuclear power. But everyone knows about the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) project, it is a failure in terms of costs and bureaucracy

If you're pro nuclear, you should know what the real problems with EPR are. The main are failures at EDF with the quality of their work, due to lack of qualified personnel, like welders. This has been well documented for Flamanville and Hinkley Point, and EDF has even written extensively about all the lessons learned from those disasters that have been incorporated. They even flat out say that Flamanville has allowed them to build industrial capacity and human know how to be able to build the next ones.

Do you have anything to back your claim that somehow bureaucracy is to blame? EDF are a state owned company, but I'm pretty sure that the British wouldn't stop yapping around if EDF were bungling Hinkley Point because of French/EU bureaucracy. There should be at least as much material on it as there are about the quality control issues, right?

> The same EPR reactors built in China have low costs and short construction times (I am referring to the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant). The problem is exclusively European.

Yes, because we stopped building reactors for decades, and nobody is around that knows the intricacies of that. Hence the investment in EPR, to improve on the failures at Flamanville, Hinkley Point, Olkiluoto, and be able to reliably deliver EPR reactors with predictable costs.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-08-05 13:56:49+00:00
The problem goes quite a bit deeper than that in medicine. Most descriptions of diseases have been reduced to a primary set of symptoms and presentations. Just this week we had a study showing MS patients start turning up in doctors offices 15 years before the accepted MS symptom set appears and its taken this long to notice. Worse is the set of symptoms that are part of the disease is badly truncated.

This happens in every single disease, ME/CFS is 280 symptoms yet its defined by 4 despite the fact that only seems to match about 90% of the patients but they have other combinations. We are dealing with both the imprecise nature of language and a lack of common experience with which to convey understanding but also a medical system that has drastically simplified diseases to the point where its descriptions and diagnostics are incomplete. Its going to take a very long time to correct it all assuming we can get medicine to once again follow the scientific findings, which remains a big if at this point.
by virtual_rf | 2025-08-05 13:56:51+00:00
Good question. It's worth a test.

Have you run the study in the real world? If you have, we also have the technology to be able to ingest studies and calibrate audiences so you get a benchmark and % lift.

If not, maybe there are some proxy data sets we can lean on to assess if the simulates responses are in the right ball park.
by adbachman | 2025-08-05 13:57:04+00:00
I had the same thought, "oh damn, I haven't heard about 'the c10k problem' in ages" :D (it was "solved", right?)

Given the author, his history in the field, and the project, though, I'm confident the repetition is intentional.

Like a contemporary rapper dropping Doom bars on a track, I read it as an homage / callback / shout-out, even if the meaning is changed.
by simmonmt | 2025-08-05 13:57:13+00:00
The Children's Television Act didn't have anything to do with it? My understanding is that that's what brought in the E/I programming that fills (filled? it's been a few years since I looked) the space Saturday morning cartoons used to occupy on the broadcast networks. I've no doubt the other things the author lists contributed too, but it's surprising to either see E/I omitted or to learn that it had no noticeable causal effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_te...