MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-27 15:28:31+00:00
I've had some experience with Google here.

The short answer is: no, they don't. Google Cloud relied upon some Googlers happening to be Firefox users. We definitely didn't have a "machine farm" of computers running relevant OS and browser versions to test the UI against (that exists in Google for some teams and some projects, but it's not an "every project must have one" kind of resource). When a major performance regression was introduced (in Firefox only) in a UI my team was responsible for once, we had a ticket filed that was about as low-priority as you can file a ticket. The solution? Mozilla patched their rendering engine two minor versions later and the problem went away.

I put more than zero effort into fixing it, but tl;dr I had to chase the problem all the way to debugging the browser rendering engine itself via a build-from-source, and since nobody had set one of those up for the team and it was the first time I was doing it myself, I didn't get very far; Google's own in-house security got in the way of installing the relevant components to make it happen, I had to understand how to build Firefox from source in the first place, my personal machine was slow for the task (most of Google's builds are farm-based; compilation happens on servers and is cached, not on local machines).

I simply ran out of time; Mozilla fixed the issue before I could. And, absolutely, I don't expect it would have been promotion-notable that I'd pursued the issue (especially since the solution of "procrastinating until the other company fixes it" would have cost the company 0 eng-hours).

I can't speak for GitHub / Microsoft, but Google nominally supports the N (I think N=2) most recent browser versions for Safari, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, but "supports" can, indeed, mean "if Firefox pushes a change that breaks our UI... Well, you've got three other browsers you could use instead. At least." And of course, yes, issues with Chrome performance end up high priority because they interfere with the average in-house developer experience.
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-27 15:28:41+00:00
I can't imagine wanting to go to even a local conference unless it's a paid alternative to doing real work in a shitty office. Like sure, it's better than that. But certainly not wanting to travel for it. Like if it's just "getting me out of" WFH, lol, no, I'll pass.

I like social events well enough, but Christ, I'd rather go to some other profession's conference than a tech conference. If I started showing up at them it'd be a sign of distress, that I was desperate for a job and my existing network had failed me.
by ilovetux | 2025-08-27 15:29:12+00:00
Granted, all of that is true, but GP specifically differentiated between ASCII and ASCII Extended, then GP went on to say that after choosing the ASCII option and pasting the text in a text editor on Mac it was reported as UTF-8, which I was pointing out would be true because if the ASCII option is chosen as opposed to the ASCII Extended option then what he ends up with (ASCII) is valid UTF-8 as reported by the text editor.
by prasadjoglekar | 2025-08-27 15:29:28+00:00
Almost no one in my field goes to conferences to "learn" anything. Panels don't say anything controversial it's all a giant marketing presentation. Two or three years in you hear the same shit again and again and zone out.

What people do go to conferences for is networking and meeting people. It's often the only time some folks are in the same spot for a face to face dialog. That is 100% not replicable online.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-27 15:29:39+00:00
COVID was a tipping point, but the decline was many years in the making. Meetups and conferences in my area were becoming less enjoyable year over year for several reasons:

- They became targets for networking and resume building. Meetups that were previously small groups of highly engaged people were now full of attendees who were looking for job opportunities because LinkedIn told them that was how to do it.

- Selecting good presentations became harder. Once speaking at a meetup or conference became a resume badge of honor, it became a competition to secure the speaking slot at all costs. The previously interesting local talks were getting replaced with entertainment spots, where presenters spent more time showing funny video clips, memes, or even performing live musical pieces to entertain the audience. Discussing the subject matter wasn't a priority.

- Conferences started catering to lowest common denominator attendees to broaden their appeal. Interesting deep dives into highly technical topics started disappearing. They were replaced with basic topics that have been covered to death, such as "How to supercharge your development process with continuous deployment"

- The people I most want to meet up with started transitioning to other activities. Instead of spending my evening on a meetup where the speaker isn't interested in anything other than adding a line to their resume, we now meet up for big group lunches or do outdoor activities together.

- Conference costs kept rising. Organizers realized attendees were expensing the tickets, so they tried to set prices based on what they thought they could get away with charging companies. It became a machine for extracting those personal development budget dollars, not for getting people together efficiently.

- Conference drama. Maybe this is local to me. Every conference seemed to attract a lot of drama: Someone's talk didn't get accepted and they turned it into accusations of bias or favoritism. Conference organizers would have a falling out and try to split into two conferences with a lot of finger-pointing to make people pick a side. Someone was bad with money and ran out of cash, so a conference would be cancelled at the last minute with drama around getting refunds. Someone would try to stir up drama with their presentation or an attendee would accuse someone of a code of conduct violation, turning in months of debate. It all gets so exhausting that I just don't want to be anywhere near it.
by saberience | 2025-08-27 15:29:45+00:00
I would say this is a feature, not a bug.

Terminal and Bash or any shell can do this, if the user sucks. I want Claude Code to be able to do anything and everything, that's why it's so powerful. Sure, I can also make it do bad stuff, but that's like any tool. We don't ban knives because sometimes they kill people, because they're useful.
by benoau | 2025-08-27 15:30:39+00:00
Banning apps like Kindle and Patreon from linking to their own payments should never have happened. Especially Patreon - Apple wrote a rule commandeering 30% of a then-five-year old app's revenue and coerced them into using IAP to get it, nobody should be supportive of this whatever Sweeney's shortcomings or motivations.
by vdupras | 2025-08-27 15:30:43+00:00
The amount of offline documentation required to do so is gargantuan. Try any kind of "repurposing" of any phone -- go for something trivial, not as hard as controlling an automated greenhouse circuit -- and try to do so without the internet -- or let's take the difficulty down a notch, without AI or search engines, wikipedia allowed. The operating system on that phone is likely way too complicated for you to succeed. It's also likely to be locked.
by milen | 2025-08-27 15:31:01+00:00
At least back in the day, it used to be common to "buy a license" or "buy a serial key". I didn't really put too much thought into the phrasing, as I haven't received any feedback.

Regardless, when you buy it, it's yours forever - no activation, no DRM, no subscription, no fine print.

(Monodraw developer here).
by floatrock | 2025-08-27 15:31:23+00:00
There's a story of a famous observatory that, iirc, kept on seeing really powerful intermittent signals that they couldn't quite hone in on. It seemed everytime they tried to zoom in on the source they couldn't find it again. Signal was quite elusive.

They finally traced it to people using the microwave in the break room in a very specific way. Some people liked to open the microwave door before the timer went off. The microwave stopped, of course, but there was a split second where it was still emitting while the protective cage was opened, and the energy that leaked out during those couple of ms were enough to screw with the observatory equipment.

Aliens? Nope, just some tired grad student reheating their coffee.
by jplusequalt | 2025-08-27 15:31:32+00:00
>Not even remotely since the 5% that I need to write is usually quite complex.

Not sure I believe this. If you suddenly automate away 95% of any task, how could it be the case you retain 100% of your prior abilities?

>However my debugging and problem solving skills should increase

By "my", I assume you mean "my LLM"?

>I do think my writing proficiency will decrease though.

This alone is cause for concern. The ability for a human being to communicate without assistance is extremely important in an age where AI is outputting a significant fraction of all new content.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-08-27 15:31:37+00:00
> I spent 10h straight playing GTA because I can do so much stuff in the game

Think bigger. Any single player game is not what I am talking about. You can only feel superior to others, etc, in multi-player competitive games like Counter Strike (where, I'm sure, lots of people spend a lot of money on in-game items already). I think that real life is the ultimate game of this kind, but it is not always fun because you only have one life you can receive punishment like going to jail, etc, so there is a limit to what you can realistically do and what you can experience. I think of real life as a sort of a lobby between computer games.
by dagmx | 2025-08-27 15:31:37+00:00
Imho the reason is that the value of the events has reduced.

Attendance costs keep rising (including commute and stay).

The content will be on YouTube within a few weeks.

With the popularity of zoom, discourse, discord, slack, I’m socializing with the community more regularly. Also where you’d see a lot of content early.

If I need to network, I can organize a much cheaper dinner and drinks instead of paying for larger events.

International conferences make more sense from a business ROI to intermingle , but local ones are a losing battle of value.
by Zigurd | 2025-08-27 15:31:48+00:00
Too many things don't add up, for example: SpaceX, and friendly commentators, have framed this as a highly experimental test flight. The most visible aspect of that are the heatshield test tiles on various parts of the upper stage.

That kind of testing is understandable to a certain extent. But it doesn't make sense to ditch the rocket in the Indian Ocean once you've run those experiments, instead of catching it, and having all the parts available to study.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-08-27 15:31:56+00:00
I pretty frequently have conversations with other engineers where I point out that a piece of code makes an assumption that mostly holds true, but doesn't always hold true. Hence, a user visible bug.

The usual response is something like "if you're correct, wouldn't that mean there are hundreds of cases where this needs to be fixed to resolve this bug?". The answer obviously being yes. Incoming 100+ file PR to resolve this issue. I have no other ideas for how someone is supposed to resolve an issue in this scenario
by quest88 | 2025-08-27 15:32:22+00:00
How’s Phil going to see someone’s arm at night?

Just to clarify to unfamiliar readers: class deltas exist with ground and tower, and after hours pilot controlled lighting. Untowered class echoes are everywhere, with pilot controlled lighting.

Yes, many untowered airports have pilot controlled lighting via ctaf, as stated in the airport facilities directory. This is very common at class E airports. For example, look at Plattsmouth in Nebraska.

It sounds like your core argument is “some private strips don’t have full infrastructure”. Phil’s private strip does not appear in the AFD, so you as the pilot your flight planning needs to include looking up Phil’s number and calling him to get permission to land and to let him know you’ll need the lights.

If it’s not that then I don’t know what your point is.
by vel0city | 2025-08-27 15:32:30+00:00
You can have two homes and split your time in both but in the end if you want these kinds of finance benefits you can only claim one home as your primary and actually live there most of the time otherwise you are committing fraud. The lender's risk models and expected loan lifetimes are probably radically different if a property is going to be used as someone's primary residence versus an often-vacant vacation home versus a rental property. They'll have offered a different rate and qualification requirements if she said it was going to be a rental apartment.

It is still a pretty massive pot meet kettle argument though. Trump's a convicted fraudster. Let's remove everyone who has committed fraud from office. Can we add Ken Paxton to the list with Trump as well? Oh wait, not my guys...

I was talking with a neighbor raging about how corrupt Lisa Cook is and how these people just think they should get away with anything and how these people need to be put in prison for a long time. After pointing out Ken Paxton (someone they hope runs for Congress) claimed three houses as primary residences, well, that's different see...
by JustARandomGuy | 2025-08-27 15:32:47+00:00
Cost. I run a small Chicago area “private” meetup (in the sense that one needs to be invited, it’s not publicly advertised) for small business owners. We do workshops on how to advertise using Google ads, do basic web analytics, etc. The skyrocketing cost of meeting rooms and basic catering have gone through the roof. I’m not talking about catering as in lobster and steak; even just getting Panera Bread level food has been ridiculously expensive.
by tetraodonpuffer | 2025-08-27 15:32:49+00:00
I think what would help is that any F2P game was mandated to never cost more than $x/year to be listed in the app store, and possibly have different tiers that a game could decide to be in ($10/$100/$1000) based on the maximum yearly spend. The game also should prominently display the total spend per year, and lifetime, every time it is launched.

Although I do not like F2P for all the dark patterns (which have infiltrated non-F2P as well unfortunately) if it was capped to a reasonable maximum amount a year, with no player to player trading at all, and no multiple accounts for the same store account, it might could be made to not be as predatory while still keeping it financially sustainable for the companies that produce the games.
by warrenm | 2025-08-27 15:32:51+00:00
Tragic stories like these underscore how absolutely vital it is that parents be involved in their kids' lives - offline and online!

I can not begin to imagine how devastated his family is over all of this - how many ways and times they will ask themselves, "what could we have done differently?"

LLM-based tools like ChatGPT and Grok etc can be fantastic - when used well

And absolutely horrible if used badly

As they statistically respond to prompts and responses, spitting out text from their vast libraries, negative prompting will - inevitably - lead to negative text generation

You have probably heard of the 7-38-55 Rule [0] (some round and call it the 60-35-5 rule) which observes well under 10% of communication is via the words used - body language, the biggest component, is completely absent in a tool like a chatbot. Tone is [nearly] undeterminable in pure text - take, for example, Harrison Ford reading the opening words to "The Cat in the Hat" in Patriot Games while his daughter is in the hospital after the car crash: that is a "fun" book, yet the way the opening is read is very ominous.

Chatbots, like text messages, IMs, email, etc, have tone assumed by the other party: if the person interacting is in a good mood, even if talking about sad/negative things, the inferred tone in the bot's responses are going to be very different than if the person interacting is in a foul mood of some kind.

Combine that with how relatively easy it is to manipulate the prompts to get different results (even when "asking the same thing" (eg "how many b's are in blueberry" vs "how many letters b are in the word blueberry" [1])), and these generative engines - while, again, amazing tools - are triggered through their algorithmic matrices to produce whatever they have been 'trained' to produce.

-------

[0] https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-use-the-7-38-55-...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44888359
by Aurornis | 2025-08-27 15:32:53+00:00
Opinions are split on this take because people attend conferences for different reasons.

The group who attend conferences to view the talks and absorb material can mostly accomplish the same thing remotely without dealing with travel, hotels, and being away from family. Remote conferences are great for them.

Another group doesn't really care about the content all that much. They went to conferences to walk around, see things, bump into people, go to parties, and have an excuse to travel. This group feels a big loss because the parts they enjoyed the most have been taken away.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-27 15:33:00+00:00
That's probably the first step on the path to stagnation.

There's a lot more eyes on them now a days, and Musk is much more well known, so it creates a lot more drama - but they've done the exact same process with everything. They even published a montage of failures [1] on the way to their first successful landing 'back in the day.' It was fiery, but mostly peaceful. They didn't even hit a shark!

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
by the_snooze | 2025-08-27 15:33:03+00:00
Ever since Musk took over Twitter, the replies have been useless. It used to be that you can follow replies as a discussion. Now, the replies are a mix of unmarked ads, bots, and weird call-outs to Grok, and maybe all at the same time.

All the automation and algorithmic garbage crowd out actual human discussion. It's a big reason why I stopped using Twitter myself. If they want to optimize for bots and weirdos driving up engagement numbers, go for it. But that's not a service that brings me value.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-27 15:33:22+00:00
Company in question:

> One of the nation’s leading operators of automated license-plate reading systems announced Monday it has paused its operations with federal agencies because of confusion and concern — including in Illinois — about the purpose of their investigations.

> Flock Safety, whose cameras are mounted in more than 4,000 communities nationwide, put a hold last week on pilot programs with the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection and its law enforcement arm, Homeland Security Investigations, according to a statement by its founder and CEO, Garrett Langley.

* https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/license-plate-camera-com...
by dismalaf | 2025-08-27 15:33:24+00:00
No because it's still very bad at it.

What I've observed the benefits to be: AI chat apps are great at internet searches that can filter out all the nonsense. They are good at transferring algorithms between languages. They're great at knowing common patterns.

I still write all my own code 100%, AI has simply replaced my Google research (ironically using Gemini).
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-27 15:33:34+00:00
Yep. First party and well behaved third party Mac apps have been doing so since… jeez, 10.7 Lion (released in 2011) I think?

The way it works there is that documents are auto-saved to a non-volatile app-specific temp directory until they’re explicitly saved, at which point they’re moved to the specified location and continue to be auto-saved there. Anybody who uses TextEdit as a temp text stash is familiar with this with the hoard of unsaved documents that comes back even after a cold boot.

Microsoft is just motivated to push cloud storage onto usage.
by izabera | 2025-08-27 15:33:38+00:00
tested it on this https://github.com/izabera/cube.bash/tree/timep

i ran `source /path/to/timep.bash; timep ./cube.bash "R U R' U' R' F R2 U' R' U' R U R' F'"`

without profiling https://i.imgur.com/JE93ony.png

with profiling there's a bunch of errors but overall it's ~300x slower https://i.imgur.com/qif7Qp3.png so i'm sceptical on all the efficiency claims
by mythrwy | 2025-08-27 15:34:45+00:00
It's hard to get in the zone with an LLM doing crazy stuff.

For instance this week when setting up a Django/Wagtail project GPT helpfully went ahead and created migration files in text instead of "makemigrations". Otherwise it did a bang up job and saved me a couple of hours.

Just no way I can get in the zone wrangling that kind of thing all day.

But I'm not sure getting in the coding zone frequently was all that mentally healthy so oh well.
by mothballed | 2025-08-27 15:35:16+00:00
Sure, and if you ignore the number, which is quite convenient for you after you oh so lamentedly "wasted" a few sentences of your guarded time, you can rightly surmise that Jones lied and was made to pay injuries for it. Once you look and see the number is the size of the GDP of Granada at the time, then you realize it was about more than telling lies that some entirely different people used for purposes of harassments.

The fact that Jones did do something wrong after all are what opened him to being the nearest proximal vile guy with deep pockets to go after and take the brunt of what was dished out. The interesting piece here isn't that the victims got a check from Jones, it's that they got a blank check.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-27 15:36:16+00:00
Note that you only need to cast for an upcast. To access the first member, you wouldn't need to cast.

It would be nice though, if syntax like the following would be supported:

struct A { int a; }; struct B { int b; struct A a; }; void foo (struct A * a) { struct B * b; &b->a = pa; } struct B b; foo (&b.a);
by jmyeet | 2025-08-27 15:36:47+00:00
Comparing Falcon 9 to Starship is a dangerous mistake.

First, the time frames are way off. Development of the Falcon 9 took ~5 years (2005 to 2010). The first reused booster came much later (2017?).

Second, Starship is much more expensive for each launch attempt than Falcon 9 ever was.

Third, Starship is significantly more complicated technology-wise, being methane based. There are reasons to do this but it then requires cooling both propellants (instead of just liquid oxygen and RP-1 ie kerosene with the Falcon 9(.

Fourth, Starship has to compete with somethingg Falcon 9 never did: Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is now the most succcessful and cheapest launch platform in history. It is the reliable workhorse of the industry and relatively cheap to launch. Its reuse is proven.

Fifth, the market for Starship is unproven. We can compare it to other launch systems for heavy payloads, most notably the Falcon Heavy, which I believe has only had ~12 launches in almost a decade (compared to the 100+ Falcon 9 launches every year).

You could argue SpaceX will steer customers to Starship but there'll be other competitors (to the Falcon 9) by then.

Lastly, Starship is still so far from being human-rated. So much of the needed tech (eg refuelling in orbit) hasn't even begun testing yet. I can easily see this taking another decade at least.
by quesera | 2025-08-27 15:36:56+00:00
Maybe just semantics? I think "license" is more technically correct. Even in the best consumer case, you are only "buying" a perpetual right to use a software product. Optionally, you might also get updates.

In the US, the First-Sale Doctrine won't apply to software (unlike tangible books and records) so you probably do not have the right to sell your copy of this software to another person.

Since that's not true ownership, I think it can only be described as a license.

But I'll agree that all sorts of shenanigans can, and often do, hide under that generic term. However, "buy" could suggest many substantial rights that are not on offer (most importantly distribution), so it's a bit of a quandary.

The phrase "Buy Now - $9.99, yours forever" might thread the needle. The sale page would still need to include all the legal terms, of course. I think "license" is a necessary word there.