MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mitchellh | 2025-09-07 20:57:52+00:00
This must be new, if true.

I worked at an Apple retail store during college. We were taught to put the screens at a certain angle but it was a gut feeling angle learned through practice, and not measured. More senior people would correct you if you were off.

They did mandate putting the bezel, mouse, keyboard, etc. at specific grains in the wood that were consistent across the desks though to ensure they were lined up without having to bust out a level-like device.

Overall everything was made so that retail employees would continuously clean up the displays as they walked around the store (even while helping customers without them realizing it) so that the store always felt perfect. They had a phrase for it but I forgot now, it's been almost 15 years now...
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-07 20:58:53+00:00
To be fair when you look at most studies that are hemm and hawwed over in the press, they tend to look like that. Well controlled, high n, replicated in independent cohorts, the readership of mass market media doesn’t understand any of this nuance. The bar is merely whatever seems to validate an existing bias whatever the topic since the incentives are built around engagement and not scientific truth.
by jiggawatts | 2025-09-07 20:59:11+00:00
I keep telling customers: "The cloud will scale to the size of your wallet."

They don't understand what I mean by that. That's okay, they'll learn!

Anyway, this kind of thing comes up regularly on Hacker News, so let's just short-circuit some of the conversations:

"You can set a budget!" -- that's just a warning.

"You should watch the billing data more closely!" -- it is delayed up to 48 hours or even longer on most cloud services. It is especially slow on the ones that tend to be hit the hardest during a DDoS, like CDN services.

"You can set up a lambda/function/trigger to stop your services" -- sure, for each individual service, separately, because the "stop" APIs are different, if they exist at all. Did I mention the 48 hour delay?

"You can get a refund!" -- sometimes, with no hard and fast rules about when this applies except for out of the goodness of some anonymous support person's heart.

"Lots of business services can have unlimited bills" -- not like this where buying what you thought was "an icecream cone" can turn into a firehouse of gelato costing $1,000 per minute because your kid cried and said he wanted more.

"It would be impossible for <cloud company> to put guardrails like that on their services!" -- they do exactly that, but only when it's their money at risk. When they could have unlimited expenses with no upside, then suddenly, magically, they find a way. E.g.: See the Azure Visual Studio Subscriber accounts, which have actual hard limits.

"Why would you want your cloud provider to stop your business? What if you suddenly go viral! That's the last thing you'd want!" -- who said anything about a business? What if it's just training? What if your website is just marketing with a no "profit per view" in any direct sense?
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-07 20:59:14+00:00
Lot of hype, but man does Voltron Data keep blowing me away with what they bring out. Mad respect.

> There’s a strong argument to be made that RAPIDS cuDF/RAPIDS libcudf drives NVIDIA’s CUDA-X Data Processing stack, from ETL (NVTabular) and SQL (BlazingSQL) to MLOps/security (Morpheus) and Spark acceleration (cuDF-Java).

Yeah this seems like the core indeed, libcudf.

Focus here is on TCP & GPUDirect (Nvidia's pci-p2p, letting for example RDMA without CPU involvement across a full GPU -> NIC -> switch -> nic -> GPU happen).

Personally it feels super dangerous to just trust Nvidia on all of this, to just buy the solution available. Pytorch nicely sees this somewhat, adopted & took over Facebook/Meta's gloo project, which wraps a lot of the rdma efforts. But man there's just so so many steps ahead that Theseus is here with figuring out & planning what to do with these capabilities, these ultra efficient links, figuring out how to not need to use them if possible! The coordination problems keep growing in computing. I think of RISC-V with its arbitrary vector-based alternative to conventional x86 simd, going from a specific instruction for each particular operation to instructions being parameterized over different data lengths & types. https://github.com/pytorch/gloo

I'd really like to see a concerted effort to around Ultra Ethernet emerge, fast. Hardware isnt really available, and it's going to start out being absurdly expensive. But Ultra Ethernet looks like a lovely mix of collision-less credit-based Infiniband RDMA and Ethernet, with lots of other niceties (transport security). Deployments just starting (AMD Pensando Pollara 400 at Oracle). I worry that without broader availability & interest, without mass saturation, AI is going to stay stuck on libcudf forever; getting hardware out there & getting software stacos using it is a chicken & egg problem that big players need to spend real effort accelerating UET or else. https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/amd-deploys-its-firs...
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-09-07 20:59:19+00:00
It almost makes me wonder if the solution is the same as for arbitration clause. Giving users the ability to fight it in a semi-automatic way as well ( so AI generated response plan, calls and so on ). I am not entirely certain where it would go, but.. where we are at is already annoying. I have a good medical insurance and they still keep trying to chisel any way they can ( wife just got a letter asking to confirm she does not, in fact, have a health plan in her job ).
by ben_w | 2025-09-07 21:00:06+00:00
I think we're in a bubble.

That said: In principle, if the tech did what the strongest proponents forecast it would do, it would change "the economy" in a manner for which we don't even have a suitable metaphor, let alone soap and locomotives.

Now, I do not believe the AI on the horizon at the moment[0] will do any of that. The current architectures are making up for being too stupid to live[1] by doing its signal processing faster than anything alive by the same degree to which jogging is faster than continental drift[2].

As for "minimum" needed for this to not be a bubble, it needs to provide economic value in the order of 0.1 trillion USD per year, but specifically in a way that the people currently investing the money can actually capture that as profit.

The first part of that, providing economic value, I can believe: Being half-arsed with basic software development, being first line customer support, supplying tourist-grade translation services, etc. I can easily belive this adds up to a single percentage point of the world GDP, 10x what I think it needs to be.

Capturing any significant fraction of that, though? Nah. I think this will be like spreadsheets (Microsoft may be able to charge for Office, but Google Docs and LibreOffice are free) or Wikipedia. Takes an actual business plan to turn any of this into income streams, and there's too many people all competing for the same space, so any profit margin is going to be ground to nothing until any/all of them actually differentiate themselves properly.

[0] Not that this says very much given how fast the space is moving; it's quite plausible a better architecture has already been found but it isn't famous yet and nobody's scaled it up enough to make it look shiny and interesting, after all Transformers took years before anyone cared about them.

[1] Literally: no organic brain could get away with being this slow vs. number of examples needed to learn anything

[2] Also literally
by jerlam | 2025-09-07 21:01:22+00:00
The bones of their software are over 20 years old at this point, back to the Forerunner 101 which came out in 2003, predating modern smartphones. You had to plug them into a COM port to download your runs. I have Garmin watches from this time period that still work, but I can't figure out how to get any data from them. They're also issued in some military circles where they're not allowed to connect to a smartphone, and the lack of a microphone is a plus.
by myself248 | 2025-09-07 21:01:50+00:00
I feel the same about the 1993 issue of Mondo 2000's "R U A Cyberpunk?"

https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Mondo_2000_ma...

Except the stun gun, volt meter, and the cash. Even back then, they call out the value of non-digital paper money. A phone absolutely can't replace that.
by jajuuka | 2025-09-07 21:02:42+00:00
According to the GSMA last year phone theft (which arguably has much more part serialization and anti-theft measures implemented) has been a steady 1% of smart phone users worldwide. It does not seem these attempts to lock down systems are successful in reducing theft. https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/industry-services/...

However I wonder if they have had an impact on data and financial theft. Which things like part serialization wouldn't affect but system security measures would.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-07 21:03:18+00:00
> I truly never could comprehend how Hitler got to power.

There are two great movies about this. 'The Third Wave' and 'Er ist wieder da'.

Of course we have reality now and we see how ostensibly smart people are lured in by soundbites and simple solutions to complicated problems. The dumb ones I can't really blame but the smart ones are a much bigger problem. They twist and turn like eels on a hook to try to justify that which can't be justified at all, not even in the abstract. And yet, they persist. And in doing so they normalize the language and the attitude that goes with that. It's like watching something viral replicate.

> Now we’re seeing it in action, and it scares me.

Yes, it scares me too. It scares me in ways that I did not think I could be scared. It scares me to the point that I wonder if we're not already past the point of no return, that this - like WWII - has to burn out before things can get better again. Assuming there will be anything left. Too many forces are working really hard to destabilize the world that we've come to take for granted.

What I have realized though is that at the head of these movements are a relatively small number of people, each with their own agenda. And you have to wonder: if it hadn't been Hitler, who would have come to power there? None of the cast that we know had the power of oration that Hitler had, his ability to make people believe that he had the answers, when he clearly did not. The dissatisfaction of the German populace with the outcome of WWI and the finger pointing are very much reminiscent of what is happening right now in many places all over the world. The exact same patterns. And instead of radio (which never lost its power) we now have the TV and the internet to push our buttons and make us act against our own interests.

'May you live in interesting times' always was a curse, not a blessing.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-09-07 21:03:25+00:00
> In just 18 months since ChatGPT

ChatGPT came out almost 3 years ago.

> AI has already displaced coding, design, research, and support roles

No it hasn't.

> Once businesses see it can fully replace repetitive work at near-zero cost

It can't.

Not surprising takes from someone with 0 professional experience and in their second year of college though.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-09-07 21:03:31+00:00
<< DMCA copyright infringement complaint from Cyble Inc., acting on behalf of Burger King

I am mildly amused, but it only now makes me want to dig through internnet archive ( I believe another poster already helpfully provided ). GL BK. It sounds like Streisand will strike again.

edit: Good read btw. I am curious as to why employees are in that database though.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-09-07 21:04:06+00:00
https://fortune.com/2025/08/06/data-center-artificial-intell...

I think what many people are missing is that everybody values AI companies as if they're special, when I'm seeing customers approach it as a commodity - once a task is done it's done. It has about as much lock-in as a brand of toilet paper, and the economics more like steel production than VPS' or social media.

There are some qualitative differences, but none that seems to last for more than 6 months. On the flip side, the costs are energy & location. Scaling won't bring that down.

In a twist of irony, big tech might structurally reduce their high profit margins because of AI.

I'm bullish on AI, and competition is great for consumers in the end.

But first the bubble has to pop, and it is going to hurt.
by rafaelmn | 2025-09-07 21:04:26+00:00
Check out Withings ScanWatch if you want ECG and a long battery life.

The passive HR monitor, sleep tracking, SpO2, etc. are all shite compared to Apple but the ECG thing should be good enough I guess.

My main selling point is that it lasts forever (20+ days), and even when the battery dies it still works like a watch for weeks. It looks like a proper watch, it has notifications so I need to look at my phone less, and it does the tracking OK enough that it's useful to check it out. They also have a BP monitor with ECG and a stethoscope that automatically recognizes some heart problems - so if you're worried about heart problems might be worth looking into.

I would really like if they could get their HR sensor/activity tracking up there with Apple but it looks like no company out there is able to get into that league.
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-09-07 21:05:21+00:00
I think it is a cool feature, but I see some practical issues.

For me, encapsulation is a feature. I would like to see that a function uses a network call deep down, but only in a static analysis sort of way. So I don't want to mark something as potentially using a network until it actually uses it. And at the same time I wouldn't want to change every effect of every intermediate function just because I made something use an LLM or Redis cache.

It also seems that cross-cutting components such as observability instruments are just going to contaminate all functions with their need for memory, network, io, files, clock, locale, reflection, etc.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-07 21:05:24+00:00
OP, agreed.

Prior to Chrome, Google actually used to promote Firefox on its own pages instead - which was a major driver of Firefox adoption. Google did it because they had a partnership with Mozilla, and were very much in favor of users switching to a browser that's not Internet Explorer.

Then Google decided they wanted more control over Firefox. Mozilla decided that Google isn't going to get it. This resulted in Chrome.

Firefox was evicted from Google's promotion, and it never quite recovered.
by nailer | 2025-09-07 21:06:07+00:00
> I can't possibly recommend class based CSS soup anymore.

Me neither!

> you can simply remove or add classes as you need

That sounds like exactly what I was thinking when you said class soup.

> you don't have to dig through loads of CSS files to figure out where the CSS is

The CSS should be in your components, or in a .css file beside your components at worst. React having bad defaults doesn't need you need to change to adding 20 classes to every HTML element.
by sonofhans | 2025-09-07 21:06:09+00:00
You know, for many decades — centuries, even — people have had ideas like you had here, mandarwagh. You extrapolate ideas into the future, think really hard about it, and try to lay out a compelling vision.

Typically people also wrap character and whatnot around this skeleton and call it a “science fiction short story.” That also requires that you justify parts of the narrative, though, otherwise people might claim that what you’re writing is unrealistic.
by jmull | 2025-09-07 21:06:48+00:00
> Did I misinterpret the experts' assertion of imposibility?

Misstated, I'd say. You said "nobody" but the actual quote is about the assumed conventional wisdom of the time, which is quite different. And while this was probably inadvertent, you phrased it in a way that almost made it sound like that was Dr. Hipp's original opinion, which, of course, is the opposite of true.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-07 21:06:59+00:00
> In C++ this can be done when very verbose inheritance and virtual calls

Virtual methods overload the corresponding method in the parent class they are inheriting from. It could be a named method like "add()", or an operator like "+()".

The author of that comment is implicitly assuming that all types are derived via inheritance from a common base type that defines all the (virtual) methods/operators being overloaded.
by arcane23 | 2025-09-07 21:07:24+00:00
That might account for a small set of scenarios, most times they just go for whatever sticks to their hand, in pockets/purses, without knowing what they'll get. As long as there's devices that can be monetized they will attempt to steal them if they cannot make sure it's not worth it.

And this would account for pros, let alone newbs in stealing, or just irrational behavior, or people who just enjoy creating harm with no gain. I think this is a case where the justification is weak and in reality it's more about greed and control on Apple's side rather than some potential benefit that is actually seriously diluted by a lot of other not mentioned factors.
by hackrmn | 2025-09-07 21:08:16+00:00
Testing by "simulating" button presses and other actions like that, including inspecting pixels, is part of so-called "black-box" testing, and offers merit(s) of its own. At least because software is used by people who click buttons which may modify pixels, and these people are not concerned what your model is, they don't even know anything about the way you may have implemented the latter. In the end everything is run on a fairly RISC-y CPU, it either works or it doesn't (from user's perspective) -- replicating the user's workflow is useful in that it it uncovers issues that matter to users and thus normally affect your bottomline.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-07 21:08:58+00:00
I think that misses the nuance of what happens as this shakes out. We have ghost towns all over the west and cities with a fraction of their historic population in the middle of the country. Maybe employment is 95% in whatever county that ghost town is in, but that is only because people have left for other jobs and not stuck around to be destitute. And this was made possible thanks to there being other jobs available someplace else.

Now, what happens if there are no jobs available someplace else? Would the sort of leadership we have in power these days consider a New Deal esque plan for mass public work projects and employment opportunities when the private sector has none available? Or would they see it as an opportunity to bring back a sort of feudalism or plantation economy where people aren’t really compensated at all and allowed to starve if not immediately economically useful?
by cbdevidal | 2025-09-07 21:09:10+00:00
No bones, unless I miss one in the can of salmon. Mostly just threeish pounds of beef every day. Just passed five years. Not tempted to cheat because I’m stuffed all the time lol. Got inspired from Jordan Peterson’s daughter. A dear friend told me about it and I thought why not give it a try. Five years later, still going.
by dang | 2025-09-07 21:09:19+00:00
Reposts are allowed through after 8 hours if a story hasn't had significant attention yet. After that, we treat reposts as dupes for a year or so. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

This is on purpose, because we want good stories to get multiple chances at getting noticed. Otherwise there's too much randomness in what gets traction.

Plenty of past explanations here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by neg4n | 2025-09-07 21:09:31+00:00
Thanks! I agree that benefits in web dev are generally low for most of the cases where it would be applicable (only technically). In small/medium products the data volume and the frequency of its transfer is not that high to even consider optimizing it and the runtime gains are quite not important if you're not writing game servers in JavaScript/TypeScript. It can also be cumbersome at DX level, especially for people that haven't worked on the bits level.

The benefits of applying it in cases of enormous data transfer and its volume on disk are also not that big (I did projected benchmarks of bandwidth and disk usage in the article), as things replaced by bit flags are possibly only a drop in the ocean in such application's backends. But still - it is one of an option of the optimization.

And if you decide to go with the bit flags implementation - I must respectfully disagree with changing stack being classified as the low hanging fruit to pick. In my opinion it is the most error-prone event that could happen in development lifecycle of any product. Both from business and technical perspective considering factors such as talent pool availability, team mentoring, migration process, testing the systems on automated/real users level and likely loads more. All these things introduce costs and time complexity. It would be a tough decision to make for the CTO.

I may be wrong but IMHO it would be easier to hire one guy that knows systems from a little lower level perspective, mentoring the team (that have web dev only knowledge) and establishing solid development rules while proceeding with bit flags than migrating whole (or even a part) application to the other stack, changing the team completely or creating a possibly terrible in its results responsibility of one developer to manage it.

Curious to hear different opinions!
by DoesntMatter22 | 2025-09-07 21:09:52+00:00
Windows 95 is comically easy compared to most of the stuff that Tesla does.

|People care about how a company can improve their life and despite all the fanfare, Tesla Motors have produced very little improvment through its history,

This is just objectively not true. They produce some of the safest cars in the world, and have the best selling car in the world. Obviously those same people you are talking about disagree with you.

Tesla was founded in 2003, not 2002. Regardless they are still a startup compared to all the other US car manufacturers. Regardless though Tesla has done amazingly well, been very profitable while others are suffering, and despite major cap-ex are able to still make a profit.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-07 21:10:05+00:00
On the web there is a lot of confusion about "MVC" in that the heart of it is not the model, it is rather having the controller (router) which is able to look at the URL, form parameters and such and decide which view to show you.

This is in contrast to the 1990s model of web programming where you wrote an HTML page with a <form>, pointed the action to some URL, and that URL was a cgi-script that couldn't redraw the form so error handling was difficult.

In a lot of cases you could say the data fetching is a dependency of the view and not the other way around, for instance if it is a blog post you might have a model object for the actual blog post but then want to put arbitrary widgets into the view which in turn requires fetching whatever model objects are necessary to draw the widgets. From the viewpoint of a CMS user, for instance, they want to drop the widget into the template and have it "just work" (have the framework figure out the fetching.)

The first exposure a lot of people had to this paradigm was Ruby-on-Rails and since it had a rich model system people thought the model system was the important bit but I'd say the router is the most important bit and how you fetch the data and format it is secondary, in fact it's totally fair to use different fetching and templating paradigms for different pages that live under the same router.