MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1659447091 | 2025-09-03 05:13:27+00:00
> Anyway you are somehow still implying that the majority of all European towns and cities that had ancient buildings were destroyed during WW2? Which is rather silly.

I absolutely did not imply that, maybe try re-reading while assuming good faith. Just as I will assume in good faith you are in no way implying that nothing important was destroyed unless it was in Germany. (do correct me if I'm am wrong, and that you are implying that)

Besides, what of the things we don't know that we don't know got destroyed? how many of the people that did know were also lost? To think simply because it's not there now or may have been forgotten or could have yet to been discovered does not mean it wasn't ever there even if it is not now - and thats my point. How much was lost? We can't know, but to think very little was is, as you may say, silly.

> Had you ever been to Spain, France, Italy, or even England?

...Yes, and I generally travel solo which absolutely does not involve shopping beyond food. It is focused on experiences, cultures, customs, and really really old things; I have not a single selfie at any of these places and have been doing it for over a decade now

Roman architecture and sites being some of my favorite. The Abraham religions' related historical places (particularly all variety of churches and grounds) and mountains/historic trails tied for a close second. In another life, maybe I'd be a sociocultural anthropologist with a focus in the Roman Republic. For now being a hobby will have to do, but it does share time with my interest in many other threads of history. I know it's probably not what you were expecting given my previous post. There was and still is too much friction with how China keeps such a tight control on both its current desired perception and how it wants its history told. That doesn't make it any less interesting, besides I find it personally amusing that my interest are connected by the silk road.

> Roman wall of Lugo

As said, that I am aware of. Thank you for that link, TIL, and I have a new place to visit. I have a thing for old walls if you couldn't tell. On a slight pedantic note, the Xi'an wall is almost 9 miles (14 km) vs Lugo at little over a mile (2km)
by vova_hn | 2025-09-03 05:14:43+00:00
> On planes, the captain will often invite you to, “sit back and enjoy the ride”. This is confusing. Enjoy the ride? Enjoy being trapped in a pressurized tube and jostled by all the passengers lining up to relieve themselves because your company decided to cram in a few more seats instead of having an adequate number of toilets? Aren’t flights supposed to be endured?

Wait, is liking to fly actually that unusual?
by erosenbe0 | 2025-09-03 05:17:14+00:00
Primary source of exposure in Chicago is from household dust contaminated by old paint. Water is secondary or tertiary issue, but can be bad. The article is a bit off the mark as they did not interview the Chicago DPH inspectors who respond to high serum reports.

Also, the average lead level of urban or suburban toddlers in the 1970s was 10-15 µg/dL, due mostly to vapors from leaded gasoline. Gen X had eye-popping lead exposures as kids.

So 6-8 µg/dL doesn't guarantee cognitive disability, but it is still bad.

[Edit: also want to add that quality monitoring doesn't necessarily fully solve the water situation either. For example, it is known that a chunk of leaded detritus or solder can drop into rice or pasta water from stream or aerator and raise serum precipitously, but won't be seen in a test as it is intermittent. The problem of lead is ubiquitous and not entirely tractable, but a lot of progress is possible over time.]
by alexsmirnov | 2025-09-03 05:18:44+00:00
TDD is exactly that I unable to get from AI tools. Probably, because training sets always have both code and tests. I tried multiply models from all major providers, and all failed to create tests without seen the code. One workflow that helps is to create dirty implementation and generate tests for it. Then throw away the first code and use different model for final implementation.

The best way is to create tests yourself, and block any attempts to modify them
by insane_dreamer | 2025-09-03 05:19:40+00:00
> The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west.

At a very superficial level, sure -- people get up, go to work, go out to eat, go to the movies, fall in love, get married, pay their bills, get sick, die, etc. -- like humans in the West. But this is all within the bounds of what the government decided you should adhere to. If you step outside of those bounds the consequences can be severe and without any legal recourse.

Because authoritarian regimes are a law to themselves, rather than applying the law, they're highly susceptible to corruption. Whether you get in trouble or not depends on who you know (in China it's called guanxi). I lived in China for 6 years, ran a business there; I can tell you the system runs on guanxi.

Access to information is highly restricted. All public media and social networks are censored and/or self-censored. There is no freedom of expression on anything that is "sensitive". This is _not_ limited to "minorities, politically active or those in legal trouble". Yes, people have learned to walk the line carefully.

It is more relaxed than the Mao days or the USSR (I lived there too) where you literally had someone on every floor of a building whose job was to report on what everyone else was doing. But it _looks_ more relaxed than it is. If you've visited China, or even stayed there a few months, or studied there for a year as an exchange student, you won't notice it. But believe me it's there. The educated class know it but they've either a) accepted it ("mei banfa"), or b) have emigrated or have made contingency plans for their kids, or c) are carefully subversive.
by snowe2010 | 2025-09-03 05:21:08+00:00
Your phone getting hacked and you texting me with it can put me in danger. Your bank account getting hacked and me needing to send you money can put me in dire straights. Your back porch camera getting hacked and the footage of me and you getting uploaded can get me killed.

The logic that your device security isn’t tied to my safety needs to be rethunk. Every leaked password reduces password security for everyone. Every successful phish makes the next phish easier.

Your device safety is tied to my wellbeing.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-03 05:21:08+00:00
I've been sort of thinking the same. The Context Dependency Injection stuff was so great, allowed creating things on demand and in different scopes of demands so easily. Jax-rs annotations mostly worked fine & had sufficient hooks to make API writing pretty easy.

I never really was super concerned about verbosity. LLM's should help here yes.

Maven was an interesting blessing and a curse. Theres so many plugins that do so many various things. It took me a lot of my Java career before I stopped trying to find good docs and references & started just diving into the source to see how plugins worked: it freed me from a lot of feelings that everything was mystical & special & showed me many plugins were quite direct & simple, with a few outliers that did ludicrously many things (usually in a bad way).

the top post is pretty vague about what people think they might want or enjoy from Java today. I'd be curious to know more specifics about what folks think are highlights.

Also for the record I left around when java 8 was finalizing, IIRC? Long time.
by motorest | 2025-09-03 05:22:27+00:00
> Then why did HTML became so popular if win32 or MFC were so great?

One of the factors is that web dev pushes for a complete separation of concerns, and thus allows frontend developers to specialize in front end development. Therefore it becomes far easier to hire someone to do frontend work with a webdev background than a win32/MFC background.

Number of applicants is also a big factor. There is far more demand for webdev than pure GUI programming. You can only hire people who show up, and if no one shows up then you need to scramble.

Frontend development is also by far the most expensive part of a project. In projects which use low-level native frameworks you are forced to hire a team for each target platform. Adopting technologies that implement GUIs with webpages running in a WebView allow projects to halve the cost. This is also why technologies like React Native shine.

Also, apps like Visual Studio Code prove that webview-based apps can be both nice to look at and be performant.

It's not capabilities. It's mainly the economics.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-09-03 05:22:47+00:00
I agree with the article's assessment that the US also has a social credit scores, but:

- it's not at all the same as an aggregated government-assigned score (though we may be on the road to that)

- the take of "things are so bad in China and basically the same here" are very naive; live in China for 5+ years and I guarantee you'll have a different view
by dingaling | 2025-09-03 05:23:01+00:00
Regardless of how 'good' a phone camera sensor might be on a spec list, it's looking through a massively aspherical plastic lens that's about 5mm thick and admits a magnitude less light than your Sony camera for any given scene.

I think the best comment on the subject was here in HN years ago; although they're both called cameras, they're really different media. One is like charcoal sketching and the other is like oil painting.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-09-03 05:23:07+00:00
> Interviewing is mostly a different skillset from day to day work.

It’s not, really: this could be true if your day to day work is writing very basic websites without real performance or scale constraints, but if you are building large, performant systems, a good technical interview will give you a chance to show those skills.

There are plenty of places that have lower bars for hiring if you can call a JSON API in Python and run some Linux commands - but for the places everyone wants to work, you should expect a high bar. And that’s a good thing! A players want to work with A players. I would not want to work at a place that has a low technical bar for hiring.

> Knowing that you are good at the job you're applying for, perhaps better than the smug interviewer, yet blocked because you can't produce an optimal solution to their puzzle (that they probably stole from someone else and/or could not solve themselves in an interview)

It goes without saying that interviewer successfully passed that interview process to get hired there. So they have demonstrated at some point that they can do the problems they’re asking you to do.

Blowing a technical interview sucks, I get it - I have blown dozens of them. It’s humiliating, I’m aware, and so people find all sorts of copes (I would’ve been better than my interviewer at the actual job if I had just been given a chance! They couldn’t solve that problem anyway!) but they don’t want people that can just do the job - they want really talented engineers that can grow with the company and build all sorts of things.

Being a good engineer does not imply you’ll pass the interview (there are plenty of reasons good engineers fail interviews) but passing an interview does imply you’re a good engineer. (Edit: I’m assuming the interviewer is competent.)

And that’s the point: hiring a bad engineer is one of the worst mistakes a company can make. They’re expensive, take a long time to manage out, drain team productivity and morale, and can destabilize systems. You want a process that would rather say no to a good engineer than say yes to a bad one.
by BrenBarn | 2025-09-03 05:24:36+00:00
The main reason I've encountered is that async is generally an all-or-nothing thing. It's generally not possible to take an existing code base and just "add a little async here and there". The entire thing has to be restructured from the ground up for async. The gain has to be really major for this to be worthwhile, more so the better your existing code already works.

This is sort of like the article's Problem 3, but it's not just maintaining two APIs, it's even creating the second API in the first place.
by AxEy | 2025-09-03 05:25:45+00:00
> "Personally, keeping chickens has almost completely put me off empathy with them. Roosters are assholes. Into the pot with you."

What a relief that we don't generally take this policy toward asshole humans.

At any rate, it's one thing to eat one asshole chicken and another to systematically farm asshole chicken to be killed.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-09-03 05:25:50+00:00
As per tim (thank you tim), yes, Business Analyst. I ask annoying questions to make sure everyone understands what the actual problem is rather than everyone making their own assumptions where there's ambiguity.

An additional device just to facilitate wired network usage over wifi usage felt like unnecessary additional complextiy and probably higher power usage. The blog author replied, however, saying that wifi was a bit flaky, explaining the design choice.
by tsavo42 | 2025-09-03 05:26:23+00:00
Anthropic just closed a $13 billion Series F at a $183 billion post-money valuation. Yeah, $183 billion for the company behind Claude. That's more than Nike or McDonald's - actual companies that make real things people buy - for a chatbot company. AI companies are getting crazy valuations compared to traditional SaaS.

Anthropic claims 5x revenue growth in 8 months, hitting something like $5B annually - if you believe their accounting. If those numbers are real, they've cracked the code. If it's startup math bullshit, reality will catch up eventually.

"Run-rate revenue" is VC-speak for "we took our best month, multiplied by twelve, and crossed our fingers." Real finance people want to see monthly recurring revenue, customer concentration, and unit economics. Industry benchmarks show healthy B2B companies maintain 85%+ gross margins and 15%+ net retention rates. Anthropic's keeping those numbers private, which is either smart or suspicious. Recent OpenAI reports show similar opacity around unit economics despite massive revenue claims.

The funding comes as OpenAI burns $5 billion annually while charging $20/month for ChatGPT. Benchmark studies show Claude 3.5 matches or exceeds GPT-4 on many tasks, but enterprise adoption data suggests most companies still prefer OpenAI for stability. Every AI startup claims their model codes better than ChatGPT. Maybe Claude does, maybe it doesn't - but $183 billion says investors aren't asking for proof. Major VC portfolios show investors throwing billions at anything with "AI" in the pitch deck.

Meanwhile, enterprise customers are trying to figure out if AI actually saves money or just creates expensive new dependencies. Anthropic's betting that their safety stuff and whatever they call Constitutional AI justifies premium pricing. We'll see if CTOs agree when budget reviews come around.
by snowe2010 | 2025-09-03 05:27:25+00:00
Physical goods are much easier to regulate and legislate than digital worlds. You choose to take a specific level of transit when traveling places, guided by your risk aversion and other things you know. But some stuff you don’t know, like the things that go on behind the scenes to actually make those things safe. From road markings to the type of joints used in train tracks.

This is the exact same thing. We don’t spend time educating users of roads on how the road stripe width affects their safety, nor about how train tracks carry radioactive material through their communities every day. We let the companies and governments work to make things safer for everyone, even if it comes at the expense of some.

I honestly can’t believe I’m having this argument. Making things safer for the world should be a goal we all strive for, even if a very very incredibly small minority lose a tiny tiny bit of what they want.
by nromiun | 2025-09-03 05:30:00+00:00
Maybe massive concurrency was not that big of a feature back then. But these days everyone wants to support a million connections at a time. Green threads and async tasks can do that without breaking a sweat, unlike OS threads. Also, Java virtual threads are still cooperative. Maybe they will move to preemption in time like Go did.

Some time ago I tried to run just 10k OS threads on a small PC and it just crashed. So clearly OS threads have not improved much.
by cpeterso | 2025-09-03 05:30:48+00:00
Here’s a related talk: “NVIDIA - Securing the Future of Safety and Security of Embedded Software”

https://youtu.be/2YoPoNx3L5E

> NVIDIA is working with AdaCore to implement Ada and SPARK programming languages into certain firmware elements to reduce this potential error. In this webinar you will learn how the combination of NVIDIA hardware with Ada and SPARK delivers robustness and security, improving efficiency and safety in the development pipeline.
Looking for Feedback: How Can We Improve Marketmint.dev?
by jamilmujahid | 2025-09-03 05:30:52+00:00
I’m the founder of Marketmint, a platform where we showcase the latest tools, startups, funding rounds, and tech updates — all in one place. We’ve been growing faster than expected, and now we’re looking to enhance the experience for founders, developers, and investors.

If you’ve used Marketmint or similar platforms, I’d love to hear:

What features would make discovery faster and easier?

Any pain points we should focus on solving?

Ideas for making it more useful for founders and builders?

Your insights would be incredibly valuable as we shape the next phase of Marketmint.

Thanks in advance!
by jadowdl | 2025-09-03 05:31:25+00:00
Prophet Town LLC | Various Software Engineering Roles | US – Remote and Hybrid | English fluency required | Full-time | $150K-$250K annual total comp (multiple)

I’m the founder, trying to do “enlightened business.” We are a people-first, fully-remote, boutique indie tech agency – building a team of talented, high integrity, and community-minded individuals first, then building businesses around them. Our leadership staff are ex-Fortune 100; everybody touches code. Notable recent projects: internal tools for Anduril, and voltagepark.com.

We’re currently especially seeking:

Frontend Engineers (React, NextJS, Typescript; Animations, Performance optimization; sfbay local a plus)

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Developer (C++/Java; Siemens Teamcenter; Custom applications, workflows, data model updates)

Full-Stack Software Engineers (React, Python, Ruby on Rails; Database Design, Devops, and third-party API integrations)

Please apply using this Google Form: https://forms.gle/NZo1uRJ9QfT2j3P27. Applicants who submit before September 12 will receive a reply by September 19. Tier3 roles are typically 5-10 y/o/e with $150-$175k annual total comp. Tier4 roles are 11-20 y/o/e, $210-$250k annual total comp. Higher tiers exist, and we welcome exceptional applications.
by mlyle | 2025-09-03 05:31:52+00:00
They've gotta hope they get to cheap AGI, though.

Any stall in progress either on chips or smartness/FLOP means there's a lot of surplus previous generation gear that can hang and commoditize it all out to open models.

Just like how the "dot com bust" brought about an ISP renaissance on all the surplus, cheap-but-slightly-off-leading-edge gear.

IMO that's the opportunity for a vibrant AI ecosystem.

Of course, if they get to cheap AGI, we're cooked: both from vendors having so much control and the destabilization that will come to labor markets, etc.
by nmfisher | 2025-09-03 05:32:24+00:00
Were there many competitors to YouTube though? I remember Vimeo (still around) and Google Video (replaced by YouTube), but not much else.

Between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Facebook, xai, Microsoft, Mistral, Alibaba, DeepSeek, z.ai, Falcon, and many others, AI feels a lot more competitive.
by snowe2010 | 2025-09-03 05:33:37+00:00
> You're laying it on too thick, give us a break.

Says the person that thinks they are losing personal freedoms when a company makes a product change and they just don’t want to bother switching to a different product.

Buy a different phone. This isn’t affecting your personal freedom.

And yes, it does affect the number of scams that people fall for, as evidenced by iOS’s hiding of links in scam messages. It forced scammers to try and get the scammee to jump through several more hoops just to be able to open links. Immediate drop in scams.

There are tons of things to be done. None of them are affecting your freedom. Buy a different phone.
by pmontra | 2025-09-03 05:34:05+00:00
I considered doing something like that but eventually I went for the simpler solution of plugging my little servers into smart plugs. I shut them down, then power off the plug over wifi. I start them by powering on the plugs. The plugs draw very little power. The servers are ARM SoC and draw 1 to 4 W. One of them has an HDD that draws about 10 W but I can unmount and power off it when I don't need that disk and I still need the server on (it's also got a SSD.)
by aw1621107 | 2025-09-03 05:35:24+00:00
Interestingly, mpweiher actually submitted first. If you hover over the timestamp for this post you'll see 2025-08-30T06:55:30, while the "old" discussion has a timestamp of 2025-08-31T15:50:35. This particular post got put into the second chance pool [0] and I'm guessing HN's backend decided that now is the time to put it on the front page.

[0]: news.ycombinator.com/pool
by tylerhou | 2025-09-03 05:35:48+00:00
WCOJs guarantee an (asymptotic) upper bound on join complexity, but often with the right join plan and appropriate cardinality estimations, you can do much better than WCOJ.

The runtime of WCOJs algorithms are even more dependent on good cardinality estimation. For instance, in VAAT, the main difficulty to find an appropriate variable ordering, which relies on knowledge about cardinalities conditioned on particular variables having particular values. If you have the wrong ordering, you still achieve worst case optimal, but you could have done far better in some cases with other algorithms (e.g. Yannakakis algorithm for acyclic queries). And as far as I know, many DBMSes do not keep track of this type of conditional cardinality, so it is unlikely that existing WCOJ will be faster in practice.

The new hotness is "instance optimal" joins...
by zkmon | 2025-09-03 05:36:50+00:00
In terms of understanding why something is like that, Linear Algebra belongs to Geometry more than Algebra. Every formula in Linear Algebra which ultimately is justified by "it's just that way" can be better justified by geometry. The algebraic formulas are like animals who lost their natural habitat and were put in a zoo, making people think that these animals evolved in the zoo itself.

To give an example: A simple multiplication of two numbers is better seen as rotating one of the numbers to be perpendicular to the other and then quantifying the area/volume spanned by them. This gives vector dot product.

While geometry might better address "why", algebra gets into the work of "how to do it". Mathematics in old times, like other branches of science, did not encourage "why". Instead, most stuff would say "This is how to do it, Now just do it". Algebra probably evolved to answer "how to do it" - the need to equip the field workers with techniques of calculating numbers, instead of answering their "why" questions. In this sense, Geometry is more fundamental providing the roots of concepts and connecting all equations to the real world of spatial dimensions. Physics adds time to this, addressing the change, involving human memory of the past, perceiving the change.