MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OriPekelman | 2025-09-25 07:46:38+00:00
ex-insider here, actually Git is used internally as a database of sorts. And it makes sense for many other reasons not cited. You are guaranteed to be able to access the "database" in a decade or two if you need to restore stuff without having to worry about binary compatibility. For more complex data types you can actually use an Sqlite database you save in a git-note. But this is very much about a very specific use-case. And the last paragraph could have been written less salesy and more "don't try this at home, don't run with scissors kinda message".

So this is kinda the contrary to "use Postgres for everything" vibe. Consider using Git as an actual database if you were considering using Sqlite or simple text files, or consider actually wrapping those with Git because it will give you quite a bit of extra oomph with very little effort.

I personally used git as a database on a project where we had just 200 records. With infrequent changes. Some bulk updates. That needed, for weird reasons, to be synchronized every ~12 months, yeah, and some of the nodes were air-gapped. As far as I know, more than 15 years later this is still running with basically 0 maintenance (other than git being upgraded with OS updates).
by seu | 2025-09-25 07:46:42+00:00
> An individual human without any of the support provided by larger organized groups is only able to exist at quite primitive levels, as any number of pieces of post-apocalyptic fiction can portray.

This guy may be a math genius, but he should at least pay minimal respect to the thousands of people who have studied human cultures, societies and civilizations, and to their findings, before coming up with a post about groups of people based on what "post-apocaliptic fiction" has portrayed. As an anthropologist, I just stopped taking his ideas seriously at that point.
by antonvs | 2025-09-25 07:47:04+00:00
To add to your examples, Neil Tyson wrote a book entitled “Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessory_to_War)

> The book chronicles war and the use of space as a weapon going as far back as before the Ancient Greeks. [It] includes examples such as Christopher Columbus' use of his knowledge of a lunar eclipse, and the use of satellite intelligence by the United States during the Gulf War.

Much more science than people tend to realize is military-funded.
by trhway | 2025-09-25 07:47:25+00:00
> For tech, it is 100% being used to import cheap, disposable labor in a way that harms U.S. citizens economically.

I'd argue with the 100% - we all know the companies that do it. They get about half of H1B visas. So 50% :)

The blanket $100K (instead of say tiering it like raising fee $50K for each next 20K tier of visas with the $250K fee visas no subject to the cap - if only Tramp knew anything about business and specifically price differentiation :) would definitely revive interest for outsourcing to offshore.

Managing AI agents have some similarity to managing offshore teams. This time the offshore teams will be using AI agents. May probably lead to much higher performance/output.

Being rate limited, i'll answer to the commenter below here: The offshore teams are naturally assigned a well defined chunks of work, at least in a well managed situations. AI agents are also very suitable for that.
by bsder | 2025-09-25 07:47:27+00:00
> A very short conversion time leads to a profitable business model where companies sell green cards to wealthy foreign citizens.

I don't buy it. This is spectacularly easy enforcement. A company applying for H1-Bs over and over and over is going to stick out and should get its H1-Bs denied--regardless of whether it is selling them to wealthy foreign nationals or is running an IT sweatshop that people flee as soon as they can.

Any company that isn't abusing the H1-B process will be able to demonstrate all the green card holders that are still working for them.

In addition, if foreign nationals want to come to the US and pay taxes here, we should let them. The US was built on immigration from working-class people--wealthy foreign nationals are kind of a no-brainer.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
by ido | 2025-09-25 07:47:53+00:00
Why not set a salary floor for H1-B candidates? That's how the equivalent works in Germany (the floor is quite low imo but if it's too low it can be set higher). If you set the floor (maybe per profession) for software engineers at say $250k p.a. there'll be little benefit to bringing in unskilled labor, but the occasional great candidate could still get in.
by jagaerglad | 2025-09-25 07:48:48+00:00
I disagree (but also with the prestige theory) it's not really a thing in other countries with significant amounts of Persians such as Sweden or Germany, there the exonym is still more dominant and no-one tries to push "farsi" out of pride or anything.

I think it just was a random occurrence / perfect storm in the US where some Persian speakers moving there didn't know there was an English word for it, and where the local population were more used to hearing names of unknown languages, and it happened to stick around and start spreading. And _then_ it maybe became a cultural pride or whatever thing with media following suit like you said
by edgineer | 2025-09-25 07:50:11+00:00
I went to vapcell's website, looked at their charts and specifications. I disagree with your assessment.

They specify 3800mAh minimum discharge at 0.2C for their 4000mAh cell. They don't show a discharge curve at 0.2C in their charts (would be 0.8A) but they do have a 1A discharge. When the 1A discharge curve reaches 3V, the energy discharged is right around 3800mAh.

Lumafield discharged at 0.2C, and they saw only 3055mAh.

Vapcell's site mostly shows high current discharge curves, where yes there is more capacity below 3V available, but with Li-ion at lower currents, the curve is very steep past 3V, not much more capacity left after that. And when you're discharging at high current you won't expect to get the full capacity, anyway.

I'll also take this time to point out lygte-info which is a treasure trove of battery tests.

[0] https://www.vapcelltech.com/h-pd-193.html

[1] https://www.lygte-info.dk/
by swiftcoder | 2025-09-25 07:50:30+00:00
WebGPU not yet a W3C standard (it's at the previous step, as a "candidate recommendation"). Apple's WebGPU implementation went live before Firefox's implementation.

WebRTC went live in Safari the same year that the non-draft version went live in Chrome (Chrome supported the pre-standard webkit-prefixed version for some years before).

Similarly, Safari added support for WASM the same year that WASM was standardised (once again, Chrome supported a pre-standard version ahead of standardisation).
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-25 07:53:29+00:00
> Like why is a game considered so important that even internet traffic has to suffer. It boggles my mind.

Because that game makes 1.8 billion dollars a year in TV licensing rights [1], and pirates undercut the pay-TV stations' ability to recoup these expenses.

Add in a ... questionable legal system, club and league presidents with friends with very very deep pockets, cloud providers that don't care what they host as long as the legal system of their host country absolves them of liabilities and that's how you get inane rulings like this.

[1] https://www.salaryleaks.com/prize-money/spanish-la-liga
by sublimefire | 2025-09-25 07:54:42+00:00
It does not fully show the problem as the result is immediately beneath the sponsored content.

The problem is when you are searching for something more complex and it does not find it immediately, which means you need to jump through the sponsored content over and over to find something (when tweaking a query or paging). It is easier to use simpler search services like DDG and do quicker search iterations compared to google.
by eadmund | 2025-09-25 07:55:47+00:00
> In 1992, New Jersey Senator and former basketball player Bill Bradley sponsored a Federal law called PASPA, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. This law banned most states from legalizing sports books: businesses that set odds, accepted wagers, and paid out winnings on sports games.

Federal laws (i.e., laws of the United States rather than the individual states) derive their authority from the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reads: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ No part of the Constitution delegates power to the United States to regulate intrastate sport or gambling; no later amendment repeals the Tenth with respect to sports gambling.

So Congress had no constitutional authority to pass the law in the first place.

I detest sports gambling with a passion, but that doesn’t matter: PASPA was never constitutional. The federal government has legitimate power to regulate interstate gambling and the states each have the ability to regulate intrastate gambling. I don’t think that it should be illegal, but I do think that it should be regulated like other addictive and dangerous things.
by truth_seeker | 2025-09-25 07:57:18+00:00
>Note that the best-case scenario is the elimination of the overheads above to 0, which is at most ~10% in these particular benchmarks. Thus, it's helpful to consider the proportion of GC overhead eliminated relative to that 10% (so, 7% reduction means 70% GC overhead reduction).

Wow. amazing to see of off-heap allocation can be that good

https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/refs/heads/master/des...
by maybewhenthesun | 2025-09-25 07:58:03+00:00
> So lie? Any 'visualisation' is a 'lie'.

If you look at google maps you'd think the distance between New York and Los Angeles is about 3 inch (depending on your zoom factor).

If you manage to grasp that abstraction, you might think the roads are about 5 miles wide.

etc etc.

where to draw the line.
by Calavar | 2025-09-25 07:58:43+00:00
> Chrome is an excellent browser with leading standards support.

Google learned it can be "standards compliant" if it submits a draft spec to WHATWG/W3C, and while the comment and revision process is still ongoing, roll out those features in Chrome and start using them in YouTube, Gmail, Google docs, and AMP. Now Firefox and Safari are forced to implement those draft specs as well or users will leave in droves because Google websites are broken. Soon enough, Google's draft spec is standardized with minimal revisions because it's already out there in the wild.

The debate, revision, and multistakeholder aspects of the standards process have been effectively bypassed, a la IE6 and ActiveX, but Chrome can claim to be on the cutting edge of standards compliance. This is a case of Goodharts's law.
by jamienicol | 2025-09-25 07:59:05+00:00
I’m a Mozilla employee who works on Firefox, so I’ll try to answer this to the best of my knowledge but as a disclaimer I can’t guarantee I’m 100% correct

Paying for relay will give money to Mozilla Corporation, the same pot the google money goes into, which will predominantly pay for Firefox development but also other products. The corporation’s profits also fund the non-profit Foundation’s activities.

People often raise this argument regarding donating to the Foundation, as that money will be spent by the foundation, therefore not on Firefox. But a dollar raised by the foundation is a dollar less the corporation has to give the foundation, leaving it with more money to spend on Firefox and other things.

You can also donate directly to “MZLA” which makes thunderbird, and that money will be spent on thunderbird.
by nvegater | 2025-09-25 07:59:48+00:00
Yes, and there is one trick I’ve learned instead of explicitly pulling the ‘I’m the lead’ card (which is valid, but not always the best move).

Present the decision in terms of its consequences — consequences that fall on you as the leader, not on others. You want to make clear that the accountability for the outcome rest with you and that others are "safe".

What usually happens when I do this is that the team defers to me to make the decision cause they recognize my point.

That way, you preserve alignment and authority without eroding trust, because the team sees it’s not about wielding power, but about owning the consequences no one else should or can carry.
by leenify | 2025-09-25 07:59:55+00:00
I'm somewhat uncertain personally about the future of Mozilla myself, as well as compatibility issues and a lack of mindshare.

Also, I feel working with the Chromium codebase is easier if you only apply superficial changes, e.g., the linked browser. The patch files are all very simple, so the fact that Chrome is generally less crufty (Mozilla is working on cleaning up a lot of ancient stuff, which causes us a lot of pain but is probably great in the long term), simply due to being newer, might make it easier to get started. Although I always felt the most significant hurdle (if you know C++ and JavaScript sufficiently well to patch a Browser) is getting the stuff to build, Mozilla is doing reasonably well on that front. Building Firefox always felt less annoying than building Chromium.
by imiric | 2025-09-25 08:00:01+00:00
Not just predatory, but irresponsible.

The idea that someone fresh out of college should start and run a business is deeply concerning. These are kids who have just (hopefully) learned about ethics and what it takes to run a business, yet you expect them to be responsible stewards of their users' data, to comply with laws and regulations, while you throw $500,000 at them, give them minimal guidance, sell them fantasies about infinite riches, and skim whatever you can from the top.

Yes, I'm aware that Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and others, started their businesses before even finishing college. But a) these are outliers, and b) when someone refers to users of their products as "dumb fucks", do we really want to put them in charge of running a company?
by ggm | 2025-09-25 08:00:12+00:00
Purely in the domain of writers and endings, Patrick O'Brien has one of his characters say they think unfinished novels don't need a conclusion any more than an unfinished work of music does: you can imagine how the story goes on for yourself.

Vikram Seth does the same thing with the ending of "a suitable boy" as does Anne Proulx in "the shipping news"

Writing of one's own mortality in these situations obviously invites the final word, but it actually doesn't have to be cast as such.

For this author the situation is terrible, but the writing doesn't have to echo that finality, there's a choice to be made.
by 9rx | 2025-09-25 08:00:47+00:00
> You can spend a lifetime reading through that bullshit, and certainly feel like you're "doing research".

I'm not sure broad and deep are the same thing, but maybe we're just getting caught up in semantics?

> It's incredible.

Does anyone truly believe in a flat earth, though, or is it just an entertaining ruse? I hate to say it, but it can actually be pretty funny watching people nonsensically fall over themselves to try and prove you wrong. I get why someone would pretend.
by barrkel | 2025-09-25 08:00:49+00:00
You don't outsource; you set up an office instead.

The problem with outsourcing is similar to the problem with contracting. You have limited ability to direct the work, the terms need to be specified up front, the contractors can substitute in the B team once they've got the project under way, etc.

With an office and local hiring, you have full control. You can second employees on-site for some time to get the culture and work practices in shape. The bigger issue becomes stuff like timezones. So you try and carve off whole responsibilities, so the team is mostly working locally.
by 1718627440 | 2025-09-25 08:03:00+00:00
It's of course a bit more elaborate, but if you feel comfortable trusting someone AND it's socially accepted that you offer it, then you are expected to offer it.

This can naturally also used to deceive people, so maybe people will act like they trust you, but doesn't while still telling you they do, so there may be people you use informal with that you don't actually trust.

But that's the general idea behind it. Nowadays, there are some, that try to use "Du" everywhere, maybe due to globalization and the proliferation of English, but this can make people (e.g. me) very uncomfortable. I then just stick with formal and in the next reply they do the same. I hate calling e.g. my boss with informal, exactly because it implies a internal trust, that just isn't there.
by ssl-3 | 2025-09-25 08:03:56+00:00
It's not just the buttons themselves (in a capacitive-vs-mechanical sense) -- it's also warranty services.

When the electronicals are bottled up behind a sheet of glass or Perspex or whatever, then: They tend to last longer because their operating environment becomes less hazardous to them.

Exact hourly rates vary too much to write about specifics, but whatever they are: Sending a tech out to look at a thing costs real money (in the ballpark of hundreds of dollars, not dozens) that really bites into profit margin of any individual unit sale.

It bites into the margin even if the root problem is that the owner's roommate's friend pissed into the control panel with a head full of acid. They'll still be paying someone to physically go out and make that determination.

So if mush-buttons generate fewer service calls than push-buttons do, then: It's a big advantage to a manufacturer.

So... I think it's quite easy to understand how we got to where we are: Fewer moving parts + better environmental isolation for those parts = less after-sale risk.

(I don't necessarily like it, but there's lots of other things in the world that make good financial sense at the manufacturing level that I'm also not fond of. I can accept this reality without also pretending that it can't make sense for someone, somewhere.

Good answers? Speed Queen, for one, still makes good washers with real knobs and real buttons, for the consumer who favors these features.

Just add a smart plug or current monitoring and an iteration of Home Assistant or whatever running on a sleepy little Raspberry Pi or a VM/container or something to detect and notify soon after the wash is done. End-of-cycle detection is really all that is ever needed for smarts anyway. And that may sound convoluted, but these are smarts that you control yourself and are about as open-source as anyone may wish them to be.

(I don't want an appliance that I hope to last for 20 years or more to be connected to any networks at all: "Wake up, babe; new rootkit just dropped and our clothes washer is fucked" isn't a meme that I want to live through, even if it does have a nice API running on a stack that was last updated in [checks calendar] 2005.))
by trhway | 2025-09-25 08:04:11+00:00
> The 65,000+20,000 number was set, if you can believe it, 35 years ago.

With many companies having set up foreign R&D offices L1 is in many cases preferable alternative. There are about 75K of those visas issued per year. Increase of H1B fee without similar increase of L1 fee would probably create a pressure on L1.
by FearNotDaniel | 2025-09-25 08:04:21+00:00
Browsing this led me to wonder if there is a font available for the Carolingian Minuscule style. Found "Dr. Pfeffer's Fonts", apparently free to download. Wasn't disappointed. I might try using one as a coding font for that real meditative "monastic scribe" kind of vibe...

https://robert-pfeffer.net/schriftarten/englisch/index.html?...
by lukefleed | 2025-09-25 08:04:59+00:00
BEXTR basically does the same thing, yes. I'm sticking with the portable shift-and-mask, though. My bet is that LLVM is smart enough to see that pattern and emit a BEXTR on its own when the target supports BMI1.

Using the intrinsic directly would also kill portability. I'd need #[cfg] for ARM and runtime checks for older x86 CPUs, which adds complexity for a tiny, if any, gain. The current code just lets the compiler pick the best instruction on any architecture.
by handsclean | 2025-09-25 08:05:11+00:00
What are you talking about? You’re referring to Andreas Kling, right? All I’m finding is he used to work at Nokia, then on WebKit at Apple, then founded SerenityOS, and now works on Ladybird full time. He says he was a drug addict, but is now many years clean, surely that’s not what you’re taking issue with?
by wiether | 2025-09-25 08:05:29+00:00
Sure!

My top 3 would be:

1. customized and sanitized search results

2. Assistant

3. custom bangs

And to develop more:

- Not only I don't have ads in my results, but they are customized and sanitized based on my settings, since I can block some websites, put a better ranking on others... or even use lenses if I want to use a very precise scope

- With Assistant I have access to (almost) all the most recent and popular models, I can easily switch, even inside a thread, so I don't need to have an account (and a subscription) at OpenAI, Anthropic... They are immediately available in a single web interface (and soon in CLI)

- Bangs are not new, but with Kagi I can create my owns, and they are well implemented within the Kagi _universe_, so I even have custom bangs to start a chat with Assistant with specific models (ex: typing "!cl" will start a chat with Assistant using Claude)

And overall, what's make everything better is that I only need to setup the Kagi extension, and then all my settings are shared between my devices. My custom Kagi style is automatically shared. My search settings are automatically shared. My Assistant threads are automatically shared. My custom bangs are automatically shared.

As soon as I setup the Kagi extension, I have the same great Kagi experience!

Regarding Orion, I use it on my iPhone since it provides better performances than Firefox and Kagi works great in it. But on computers I still use Firefox because I have more expectations, I'm not only on MacOS and, to be honest, I haven't found the experience that great; mostly because I'm not a fan of the UI.
by koeng | 2025-09-25 08:06:37+00:00
Very cool!

I’ve been looking at using lua for something like this: basically, users will be able to program robots in my lab (biotech) to do things, and I need a scripting language I can easily embed and control the runtime of in the larger system.

Lua is theoretically better in… almost every way, except everyone in bio uses python. So it could allow more easy modification of LLM generated scripts (not worried about the libraries because I mostly want to limit them: the scripts are mainly to just run robots, and you can have them webhook out if you need complicated stuff)

My question would be: would running a python sandbox vs a lua sandbox actually be appreciably better? Not sure yet, but will have to investigate with this new package (since it has Go bindings!)
by barrkel | 2025-09-25 08:06:57+00:00
Would a Silicon Valley 30-50% smaller be better for American workers?

That's a rough estimate for how many engineers etc. that have or had a H-1B at some point.

If you think of value creation as requiring fuel, humans are an input to that. The size of the industry and the liquidity of the labor market all contribute to enabling Americans in the Bay Area to acquire plenty of wealth.