MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cnst | 2025-08-03 00:34:23+00:00
I honestly don't understand why companies do this. There's still SO MUCH traffic from Google for these things.

I've routinely went to AnandTech EXCLUSIVELY from Google. This means that their "news" and new content is of little relevance to me, as it's usually something from a few years prior that I'm reading over there. Yet somehow, "have to publish every day"?!

Part of me thinks that this is related to the inefficiencies of all these CMS, where it costs too much to run the site compared to the revenue from the ads.

Or is there another reason?

Frankly, as an nginx "practitioner", all of these sites could basically be cached and served from a single $50/mo server from Hetzner, Online or OVH. Aren't they're getting far more in ad revenue than that? How does it make any sense to close the shop when you've got such a treasure trove that you could continue milking easily for at least like half a decade?
by Terr_ | 2025-08-03 00:34:48+00:00
> a story

Yeah, that framing for LLMs is one of my pet-causes: It's document generation, some documents resemble stories with characters, and everything else (e.g. "chatting" with an LLM) is an illusion, albeit an impressive and sometimes-useful one.

Being able to generate a document where humans perceive plausible statements from Santa Claus does not mean Santa Claus now lives inside the electronic box, that flying sleighs are real, etc. The principle still holds even if the character is described as "an intelligent AI assistant named [Product Name]".
by alephnerd | 2025-08-03 00:36:09+00:00
Except the majority of the Figma IPO was captured by banks due to it's severe pop. So while everyone made a lot of money, the overwhelming majority went to the underwriters [0].

The founding team at Figma would have gotten a similar amount much sooner if the acquisition was let thru OR if the underwriters didn't screw them over by underpricing at $33.

[0] - https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/figma-ipo-pop-spotlight-...
by oooyay | 2025-08-03 00:36:15+00:00
My experience with mergers and acquisitions is that it's akin to keeping a warm body on life support. When I worked at a company that did a lot of M&A I was sitting around like, "Why couldn't you have just built that?" When I worked at a company that was recently acquired and went through the merger process I was like, "wow I see why you bozos would've never built this yourselves." That isn't to say there aren't companies that do them well or there aren't places where it makes sense in an ultra-competitive landscape but I'm curious - when was the last time anyone really considered tech an ultra competitive landscape?

Post-2015 other than large language models this industry has mostly been riding on intellectual property consolidation. That's basically Lina's point; nobody actually benefits from this - not customers, not share holders, not the American people. The over practice of M&A leaves a small pool of winners who are not the kind of people that post on or read this forum.
by seanwilson | 2025-08-03 00:36:47+00:00
> The trap is that both OOP hierarchies and FP "make illegal states unrepresentable" create premature crystallization of domain understanding into rigid technical models. When domains evolve (and they always do), this coupling demands expensive refactoring.

At least when you refactor your types, the compiler is going to pinpoint every line of code where you now have missing pattern checks, unhandled nulls, not enough parameters, type mismatches etc.

I find refactoring in languages like Python/JavaScript/PHP terrifying because of the lack of this and it makes me much less likely to refactor.

Even with a test suite (which you should have even when using types), it's not going to exhaustively catch problems the type system could catch (maybe you can trudge through several null errors your tests triggered but there could be many more lurking), working backwards to figure out what caused each runtime test error is ad-hoc and draining (like tracing back where a variable value came and why it was unexpectedly null), and having to write + refactor extra tests to make up for the lack of types is a maintenance burden.

Also, most test suites I see do not contain type related tests like sending the wrong types to function parameters because it's so tedious and verbose to do this for every function and parameter, which is a massive test coverage hole. This is especially true for nested data structures that contain a mixture of types, arrays, and optional fields.

I feel like I'm never going to understand how some people are happy with a test suite and figuring out runtime errors over a magic tool that says "without even running any parameters through this function, this line can have an unhandled null error you should fix". How could you not want that and the peace of mind that comes with it?
by jakewins | 2025-08-03 00:37:54+00:00
Respectfully, if you don’t know how long a 2x4 is, I think it would be very reasonable to look this up, as it will make you much better equipped to make this argument.

I generally agree with what you are saying, and frequently haul 2x4s without my truck - but the solution to that is a long flatbed trailer, not a Thule hitch attachment.
by rfw300 | 2025-08-03 00:37:59+00:00
It has nothing to do with Meta's social media business. Zuckerberg, like many other top tech executives, has concluded AGI/ASI is in striking distance. If he could somehow win the race, he becomes god (or so he thinks, anyway). And from the perspective of a man whose idol is Julius Caesar, what wouldn't you spend for that chance?
by waynesonfire | 2025-08-03 00:39:59+00:00
When an ISP assigns an IPv6 prefix, home networks / homelabs can use that prefix for internal addressing. But if the ISP later changes the prefix, all internal devices using the old addresses break. This makes the concept of globally unique IPv6 addresses seem problematic for end-users. Is there something I’m misunderstanding about how this is supposed to work?
by pkaye | 2025-08-03 00:40:19+00:00
The bigger restriction is number of residency positions which has been limited by government funding constraints. Also you need sufficient skilled doctors to train these residents. There is also the issue of physician burnout and preferences of doctors to be specialist vs being in primary care. So what often happens is foreign medical grads apply for these kind of roles. Also foreign medical doctors have a couple of requirements to work in the US. Get their foreign degree reviews to meet requirements, pass the US medical exams and finally they have to redo their residency even if they have significant experience. Some of this is largely controlled at the state level. Some states are considering loosening the residency part to a shorter period for primary care position for foreign doctors that are willing to work in underserved areas. I know California is also reducing restrictions on foreign dentists.
by transcriptase | 2025-08-03 00:40:20+00:00
So on March 29th 2021, when the Director of the CDC Rochelle Walensky said:

“Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick, and that it’s not just in the clinical trials but it’s also in real world data.”

Or on May 16, 2021 when Anthony Fauci said:

“When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community… In other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere.”

Or on July 21st 2021 when Joe Biden said:

“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

Tell me, exactly what was I supposed to take away from that messaging, if indeed I’m apparently lying?

I suppose Rachel Maddow didn’t say the following on March 29th 2021, while her show was routinely hosting government officials and health experts to talk about COVID:

“Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person. A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else. It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people.”

Imagine if Pfizer’s CEO tweeted the following on April 1st 2021:

“Excited to share that updated analysis from our Phase 3 study with BioNTech also showed that our COVID-19 vaccine was 100% effective in preventing #COVID19 cases in South Africa. 100%!”

I must have quite the active imagination to hallucinate these things and arrive at a bizarre conclusion that differs so much from what you recall.
by llamavore | 2025-08-03 00:40:22+00:00
Great article. Lots of similarities to other terms floating around like forward deployed engineer and full stack builder. This is obvious if you ask ChatGPT to list all the professions over the years which have been combined and subsumed during technical innovation.

I think the most obvious recent event would have been the personal computer. How many office jobs that existed pre-computer were combined once they became software?

Filing clerks, switchboard operators, darkroom technicians etc.
by everforward | 2025-08-03 00:40:27+00:00
I might have to try this. Without having tried it, it feels like the context I think I lack is more nitty gritty than would be exposed like this. It's not like I'm unsure of how a request ends up in a database transaction, but more "do we need or already have an abstraction over paging in database queries?". It doesn't feel like mermaid diagrams or design documents would include that, but I'm open to being wrong there.
by c-smile | 2025-08-03 00:40:59+00:00
From the very beginning in Sciter an Image can be constructed in two ways at runtime ( other than just getting loaded image reference):

1. By painting on it using Canvas/Graphics API:

new Graphics.Image(width, height, painter(graphics) [,initColor]);

Where _painter_ is a function used for paining on the image surface using Canvas/Graphics reference.

2. By making snapshot of the existing DOM element:

new Graphics.Image(width, height, element [,initColor])

Such images can be used in DOM, rendered by other Canvas/Graphics as also in WebGL as textures.

See: https://docs.sciter.com/docs/Graphics/Image#constructor
by yongjik | 2025-08-03 00:41:04+00:00
I find that story really hard to believe. In a company the size of Amazon, I can't imagine a rogue employee running a tool that can willy-nilly wipe out customers' data without several levels of manager approval.

Besides, what would be the potential benefit of such a hypothetical script? The author mentions "a bill under $200," so that's the upper limit on how much it costs AWS to keep the author's whole data. If I was working there and a coworker said "Hey I created a script that can save the company $200 by finding a defunct (but paying) customer and wiping out their data!", I'd have replied "What the fuck is wrong with you."
by rawgabbit | 2025-08-03 00:41:06+00:00
I don't know about LTC insurance. I can tell you though; how it works in Texas where I live. If you want to go into a reputable facility, meaning one that is actually staffed and pays their staff a livable wage, it is very expensive; you pay out of your own pocket and after you had exhausted your savings etc. then they will apply for Medicaid on your behalf and use those government funds to continue your care.

As for me, when it is my turn, I plan to do "home attendant services". My understanding is that Medicare will pay, after a doctor has declared I am home bound, medical services at my home. I will have to arrange for meals, bathing, etc. out of my own pocket. When that time comes, I hope to find people at my church who are willing to do this. When it comes close to my time, I would need the doctor to say I need "at home hospice". Then an attendant will stay with me 24 hours a day and give me painkillers etc. until I pass in my own home.
by potatolicious | 2025-08-03 00:41:29+00:00
Sure, go try it and evaluate it rigorously end-to-end, over a sufficient number and variety of tools.

For the purposes of the exercise, let's conservatively say, maybe ~2000 tools covering ~100 major verticals of use cases. Even that may be too narrow for a true general purpose assistant, but it's at least a good start. You can slice the sub-agents however you'd like.

If you can get recall, for real user utterances (not contrived eval utterances authored by your devs and MLEs), over 70% across all the verticals/use cases/tool uses, I'd be extremely impressed. Heck, my thoughts on this won't matter - if you can get the recall for such a system over the bar you'd have cracked something nobody else has and should actively try to sell it to Google for nine figures.
by maysunyoung | 2025-08-03 00:42:07+00:00
Hey HN,

I recently created https://growagarden-calculator.io, a free tool for players of the Roblox game Grow a Garden. The game involves farming, fruit mutations, and pet growth—and the values can get confusing fast, especially with all the multipliers and trading mechanics.

My calculator lets you:

Estimate fruit value based on weight, mutations, and quantity

Compare trade values and check if a deal is Win/Fair/Lose

Calculate XP gain for pets and track level progress

Use reverse-calculation if you only know the final price

It’s not officially affiliated with the game, but I’ve reverse-engineered most formulas through testing. Feedback and feature suggestions are very welcome!

→ https://growagarden-calculator.io
by bell-cot | 2025-08-03 00:42:12+00:00
This problem is far broader than health care. Doesn't matter whether your actual "product" is hospital wards, sheet steel, romance novels, or mowed lawns - if your sector of the economy is not structured to have draconian penalties for bloated management/bureaucracy/overhead, then it will quickly develop ever-worsening bloat. Because it's always quicker & easier to scale up the desks & paperwork. And guess who makes the decisions about where to allocate resources?
by waaaaaaaaahhhh | 2025-08-03 00:42:28+00:00
nah...nah... At the consume, out for shopping, i had seen a not fifty years, nor old, no - a young one at the checkout, standing in front of me...i've seen the shaking-sickness, very susceptible, telling the cashier "Everything going worser, brakes."

For example, told the cashier "Having to wait for the new 'contract-cell-phone' because the older one broke too..."

So unable to type, no cell phone, paying using cash or a phone ? Maybe sparsely out to drink or party... but as someone wrote, people you know and to whom you had good connections being replaced by a "feed" of people, no? Sounding too offensive... ?

Recursion

zzz...
by xrd | 2025-08-03 00:43:13+00:00
I stopped reading when they defended Albertsons and Kroger merger. Can anyone defend the consolidation of grocery stores with a straight face? Walmart has obliterated any competition and it has destroyed local food sources everywhere. They can do it at scale that no one can compete with. If the only solution is to further consolidate then we might as well just hand over the government to Walmart.
by xorcist | 2025-08-03 00:44:05+00:00
Not really the same, is it? Actors are hired to act. Athletes get paid to improve the sport. It's not like nerds are poached to do academic research or nerd out at their hearts desire. This is a business transaction that Zuck intends to make money from.

Locking up more of the world's information behind their login wall, or increase their ad sales slightly is not enough to make that kind of money. We can only speculate, of course, but at the same time I think the general idea is pretty clear: AI will soon have a lot of power, and control over that power is thought to be valuable.

The bit about "building great things" certainly rings true. Just not in the same way artists or scientists do.
by nyrikki | 2025-08-03 00:44:19+00:00
I usually ignore ad hominem attacks but I am trying to convey a kindness here.

Who do you think is going to be successful, those who realize the limitations and strength of a system and leverage them, or those who are complacent, with a unwarranted self-satisfaction accompanied by unawareness of actual risks or deficiencies of a particular system?

IMHO they are always going to be too complex to know everything about a models of this size, but there are areas we do know their limits or the limits of computation in general.

But feel free to stay on your high horse and call people names and see how well that works out for you.
by mlhpdx | 2025-08-03 00:44:51+00:00
This. I learned as much when I was clobbered by a distracted teen and my SUV ended up in the shop. I use it a lot for moving people, things and towing (like daily). Nobody would rent me a SUV and allow me to tow with it, only commercial truck rentals at ridiculous rates.

And for the truck driver haters three things:

- Are you speaking from experience or projection? Stereotyping doesn’t work. After owning a large SUV for 25 years I can say with conviction that the price is worth the utility to me. No question. - I would LOVE to also own a small electric scooter for small trips. The cost and poor quality have put me off for years but it’s inevitable I’ll end up with one soon. - Our next sedan will be electric as well, and probably weigh more than the SUV.

Truck owners aren’t idiots or evil.
by parpfish | 2025-08-03 00:45:33+00:00
for software design, i'd expect that launching the app store played a big role.

the app store ceded a lot of the experience to other developers that apple couldn't control or hold to their standards, so it's not a surprise that they responded by just kind of giving up and chasing flashy aesthetics in order to compete.

it's one thing to belabor every little design detail when you know that you are shaping a holistic experience, but if you know that the user is going to spend half their time using some janky app that you didn't make, it's hard to convince yourself to spend a ton of time making your half better.
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-03 00:46:12+00:00
canvas first sites suck. They can't use any system services as it would all be a privacy issue. They can't use the system dictionary for correction since to do so they'd need the contents of the dictionary or at least a way to query user customized corrections. Similarly they can't offer the system level accessibility but end up having to roll their own in which case, every app that uses canvas has a completely different UI.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-03 00:47:01+00:00
Could not replicate.

I tried searching Google with "site:https://chatgpt.com/share " assuming that's what the article meant by "A basic Google site search using part of the link created when someone proactively clicks “Share” on ChatGPT"

Maybe I did not click it proactively enough.

The article is a few days old and one would think these share pages should be marked noindex or whatever. Sure URL security is only security by obscurity but... couldn't get it to replicate.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-08-03 00:47:23+00:00
The title at hacker News is not the title of the article.

The answer to the "when" question is of course when they gave up the curved iPhone 3s design for the iPhone 4 which felt like a sharp brick and had antenna problems but only if you held it in an unapproved way. Oh, and God, now I'm hahaving traumatic flashbacks to the bad camera on the iPhone 4. I gave up after my third one and the Apple employee told me I was just thinking about it wrong.
by el_nahual | 2025-08-03 00:47:28+00:00
The IPO "pop" is not captured by banks: it's captured by the banks customers that pre-buy at the IPO price.

Basically, before an IPO, the underwriters take the company on a "roadshow" in which they pitch the IPO to potential buyers.

There's a hierarchy of these: the best are very large buyers that place large orders and trade seldom. Pensions, sovereign wealth funds, etc.

Those buyers then make offers ("I'll buy 50MM at $100"), which the bank uses to set the IPO price. The bank then gives them an allocation.

If you're a high (10MM+) net worth individual that banks with one of the underwriters, you can often get an allocation in an IPO. The richer you are, the more of an allocation you can get.

When an IPO pops, it's these people that get the benefit.

The benefit for the company is that the stock is owned by prime people the bank selected: you crucially _don't_ want to just sell to the highest bidder if they are going to dump the stock immediately after the pop (or that's the theory, at least). They have stable shareholders with a vision aligned with management.

The benefit to the bank is that they get to reward their customers with access to profitable trades--but the bank itself does not profit.
by tptacek | 2025-08-03 00:48:55+00:00
Just me and MD Anderson, I guess.

https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/should-you-get-a-full-...

And the University of Michigan:

https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/whole-body-mris-...

And Lisa Doggett for NPR:

https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/06/18/nx...

And the Canadian Medical Association:

https://choosingwiselycanada.org/should-you-get-a-full-body-...

And Dana Farber:

https://blog.dana-farber.org/insight/2023/08/full-body-mri-s...

I'm stopping before clicking onto the 2nd Google search page.

So, like, two things here.

First: all that happened here is: I read a lot of stuff about this, and "don't get a full body scan" is a super common message actual experts deliver. I remembered, and repeated it on a thread.

Second: how weird is it that you somehow remembered some otherwise-long-forgotten slapfight thread and brought it up unbidden like this? You should charge me rent if I'm going to live in your brain like this.
by shakna | 2025-08-03 00:48:59+00:00
They often only have a binary that you would have to reverse engineer. Source code gets lost.

To step outside just utility programs, the reason why Command & Conquer didn't have a remaster was:

> I'm not going to get into this conversation, but I feel this needs to be answered. During this project of getting the games on Steam, no source code from any legacy games showed up in the archives.
by faster | 2025-08-03 00:49:17+00:00
My daughter learned to read english before her 3rd birthday and French before her 5th. We started with sounds but not the phonics instruction that I got as a kid, just matching letters and letter combinations to sounds, and vice versa. But the way I read to her was far closer to whole-word instruction, and her friends who only learned via phonics can't spell to save their lives while she makes very few spelling mistakes. Because as you noted, english spelling is a mess.

When I was in elementary school, every kid who didn't form sounds like "normal" went to speech therapy until they did. By 6th grade none of my friends lisped or stuttered or spoke with excessive sibilance. S-backing was not a thing then (it seems half cultural/regional now and half unconscious/untrained/lazy but I have nothing but my experiences to base that on; it is not a conscious choice for anyone I've asked) but today, I hear all of those things so I have to assume that there is not very much speech therapy any more.
by badsectoracula | 2025-08-03 00:49:39+00:00
No, it implements its own functionality. As an example consider one of the most basic controls which is available pretty much everywhere (i.e. no need for polyfill), the push button: the source code[0] for QPushButton clearly implements the behavior itself, it does not rely on any native button.

Compare with wxWidgets' equivalent to QPushButton, wxButton, where there is a backend-specific header[1] and implementation[2] where 99% of the wxButton functionality is there (there is a `btncmn.cpp` under `common` that is shared across backends but that has very little code itself).

[0] https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/src/widgets/widgets/qp...

[1] https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/blob/master/include/w...

[2] https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/blob/master/src/msw/b...