MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuzztester | 2025-09-24 23:13:15+00:00
And later, I thought I'd check, you know, what Google itself has to say on this: ;)

what are the main programming languages used at Google

Result (unformatted):

AI Overview Google utilizes a diverse set of programming languages across its various products and services. The main programming languages used at Google include:

C++: Widely used for performance-critical applications and system-level programming, such as in the core search engine, Google Chrome, and other backend infrastructure. Java: Essential for Android app development and significant portions of Google's backend systems. Python: Employed for a wide range of tasks including scripting, data analysis, machine learning, and web development (e.g., YouTube). JavaScript: Fundamental for web application development and frontend interactions across Google's web-based services. Go (Golang): Google's own open-source language, increasingly used for cloud-based projects, microservices, and network programming due to its efficiency and concurrency features.

SQL: Crucial for managing and interacting with databases, which are integral to almost all data-driven applications at Google.

While these are the primary languages, Google also utilizes other languages such as Rust (for projects like Fuchsia OS), Kotlin (for Android development), and Dart (for Flutter framework development) for specific use cases and projects. The choice of language often depends on the project's requirements for performance, scalability, development time, and existing infrastructure. Dive deeper in AI Mode AI responses may include mistakes. Learn more

So it looks like the main ones I missed were Rust and SQL.

Dang! I should have thought of SQL, at least for their IT ops, but I was thinking only about their customer-facing apps.

Anyway ...
by OisinMoran | 2025-09-24 23:13:21+00:00
And how's that going for the US?

Public health recommendations have a notoriously poor record (take the food pyramid for example), so RDAs aren't exactly the way to build a healthy diet. [0]

For example, here's a paper uncovering a statistical error in the calculation of the RDA for Vitamin D (600IU), resulting in it being over 10x lower than it should be (~9000IU). [1]

[0] From Harvard Health website: "The RDA is the amount of a nutrient you need to meet your basic nutritional requirements. In a sense, it's the minimum amount you need to keep from getting sick — not the specific amount you are supposed to eat every day."

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4210929/
by spartanatreyu | 2025-09-24 23:13:22+00:00
Sublime text works better on large files (where file sizes are a few gb) compared to VSCode.

But, you can go faster depending on your usecase:

- If you're trying to manually look through the file, use `less`. You can scroll up and down, go quickly to the top and bottom of the file, and also search the file for strings quickly

- If you already know the string in the file that you're looking for, use ripgrep

- If you're trying to do a search and replace, and you already know what the strings are, use sed. (macos' built-in sed isn't good, so get the proper gnu coreutills through homebrew, and you can access the good sed through `gsed`)
by DarmokJalad1701 | 2025-09-24 23:13:35+00:00
Same thing happened to me. I wanted to get "Fit Notes" - a free and ad-free app. I searched for it and the first result is some adware/subscription-based crap. I skip over. I scroll down part the "Sponsored: Related to your search" section with a whole bunch of others. I am still seeing more paid/in-app-purchase/subscription-based apps.

At this point I thought that the app didn't exist for newer versions of Android.

It turned out that it was the second result, just above the "sponsored" one. It looked so much like a part of the first result that I just skipped over it.
by astrange | 2025-09-24 23:13:51+00:00
> or being controlled, by nation-state private companies

You don't need to publicly fund something to "control" it. You can pass laws about it, you're the government!

I always find this kind of rhetoric from Western socialists strange, it's like they've forgotten they aren't libertarians.

The other issue being that they've forgotten there are downsides to owning something, because you don't always want to own all the risk. eg if you're a tech employee and paid in your employers' shares, you own some of your means of production. But you /shouldn't/, it's way too risky! You should sell it as soon as you get it and put it in an index fund.
by crote | 2025-09-24 23:14:07+00:00
If I understand correctly, it basically works the same as Trusted Boot on a local machine, with the host's CPU used as the root of trust. The difference is that the CPU creates multiple completely independent environments, with for example independent memory encryption keys.

Once you've got that, it's the usual TPM dance: each phase of the boot process verifies the next step and "ratchets" the TPM forward. The final OS uses the TPM's attestation to prove the TPM is genuine and not emulated, and the TPM's final state is used to prove it's running a genuine image booted through the proper process.

AMD had a whole bunch of SEV extensions for stuff like this. I reckon Intel isn't any different.
by renewiltord | 2025-09-24 23:14:19+00:00
That might just be that in the intervening 000000000000000000000060 years or so we haven't discovered anything. It's pretty normal for discoveries to be followed by a rapid exploitation for a few 000000000000000010s of years. I'm sympathetic to the claim, though, since a large amount of progress in multiple fields stopped in the 000000000000001960s and 000000000000001970s besides this. The NRC and nuclear power comes to mind.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-09-24 23:14:40+00:00
Mine has one sponsored link which is just a course for midjourney. But I don't doubt at all that the OP post is real. This stuff is all dynamically generated. There is probably even some AI deciding how many ads you'll put up with.

Ideally Google would offer some kind of ad free option, perhaps on a higher tier of the Google One plans.
by homebrewer | 2025-09-24 23:15:16+00:00
Sometimes it's good to live in a region that no one cares about. I just searched for Firefox in the Android Play Store application, there were no ads, and the first result was Firefox.

I also don't get any ads in American and UK podcasts for the same reason (except for those read by the host, but there are few of those and they're easy to ignore).
by ekzhang | 2025-09-24 23:15:32+00:00
Thanks! I think that's a great idea. Containers are nice, but there's nothing quite like a "real" VM system in terms of learning + developing, and they can be very cheap if you're OK with the performance hit from nested virtualization :)

Another idea I had is to customize the rootfs. It boots Alpine right now, but should be trivial to change it to anything else (and it only takes ~5 seconds to build!).
by Terr_ | 2025-09-24 23:15:51+00:00
From a free e-book published in 2006 [0] and still relevant these days, there's a certain weird chunk of the population that is, er, consistency-impaired.

> [Authoritarians] don’t seem to scan for self-consistency as much as most people do. Similarly they tended to agree with “A government should allow total freedom of expression, even it if threatens law and order” and “A government should only allow freedom of expression so long as it does not threaten law and order.” And “Parents should first of all be gentle and tender with their children,” and “Parents should first of all be firm and uncompromising with their children; spare the rod and spoil the child.” [...]

> When your ideas live independent lives from one another it is pretty easy to use double standards in your judgments. You simply call up the idea that will justify (afterwards) what you’ve decided to do.

> [When presented with two opposite versions of a hypothetical scuffle between protest groups] the sentences low [Right Wing Authoritarian scoring] subjects imposed on the gay Mr. Langley and the sentences other low RWAs imposed on the anti-gay Mr. Langley, you find no difference. Lows typically punish the crime, not the person. But among high RWAs, Mr. Langley’s beliefs make a large difference. The gay Mr. Langley always gets a stiffer jail term than the anti-gay Mr. Langley.

[0] TheAuthoritarians.org
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-24 23:16:11+00:00
The Internet was turned into a slop warehouse well before LLMs became a thing - in fact, a big part of why ChatGPT et al. has so extreme adoption worldwide is because they let people accomplish many tasks without having to inflict on yourself the shitfest that's the modern web.

Personally, when it became available, o3 model in ChatGPT cut my use of web search by more than half, and it wasn't because Google became bad at search (I use Kagi anyway) - it's because even the best results are all shit, or embedded in shit websites, and the less I need to browse through that, the better for me.
by yunohn | 2025-09-24 23:17:26+00:00
Every time this comes up, I don’t understand what the alternative is supposed to be.

X (Midjourney in this case) may/not be trademarked in the user’s country - so what makes X so special that Google/others should rank this one over others? Does this mean X owns the keyword and other related searches on Google forever? That sounds worse than domain squatting!

Speaking of, quite often, X.com is already registered, so companies buy getX.com or just non-.com TLDs. Now which one is the right result for searches for X? The pre existing one or the new company? What if they’re in different industries?

Almost all SaaS companies have multiple comparison pages or blogs/articles/etc that mention and compare themselves with competitors - specifically for SEO to show up in those searches. Should this also be banned?

I could go on, but I just don’t see a situation where Google can solve this satisfactorily for everyone, without becoming opinionated and picking/choosing/preferring one competitor over the other. As such, they’ve gone for the easiest model we have in modern day capitalism - put it up for auction and let the market figure it out!
by muzani | 2025-09-24 23:17:49+00:00
An actual use case I had for vector DBs was when users were using "credit card", "kredit kad", "kad kredit", "kartu" interchangeably.

If you're matching ("%card%" OR "%kad%"), you'll also match with things like virtual card, debit card, kadar (rates), akad (contract). The more languages you support, the more false hits you get.

Not to say SQL is wrong, but 30 year old technology works with 30 year old interfaces. It's not that people didn't imagine this back then. It's just that you end up with interfaces similar to dropdown filters and vending machines. If you're giving the user the flexibility of a LLM, you have to support the full range of inputs.
by NetMageSCW | 2025-09-24 23:18:38+00:00
The key to step 3 (of the merge sort) is the little nx in the middle that tells you to repeat step 3 n times. Each time, you take a right or left branch based on if the new weight from the half plank is lighter or heavier than the current weight. You also have to understand that step 1 means you recursively merge sort each half before you merge the two sorted halves.
by afavour | 2025-09-24 23:19:09+00:00
> if it is a 2 seater, and I have 3 passengers, that's on me for not planning for my passengers.

Well, no, it’s on all of you in the sense that all of your passengers pay the price for your mistake. But as the guy behind you in line at the rental place, makes no difference to me.

If a parent isn’t sat with a child everyone sat anywhere near the kid pays a price.
by wpm | 2025-09-24 23:19:18+00:00
There is something about the font weights or I dunno in the context menus on macOS Tahoe that I really like. Somehow, they feel a lot more readable than they did from Big Sur to Sequoia.

And even if I think they utterly botched the concept and execution, I will always cheer the death of "minimullizm" that destroyed Aqua. I've absolutely loathed how macOS looks since Big Sur.
by hungryhobbit | 2025-09-24 23:19:19+00:00
Can we be honest here? This isn't (really) Google's fault, because ANY company in the same position would do the same. It's our fault, for letting them.

We could pass a law preventing this nonsense tomorrow, and Google would have no choice in the matter. However, "we the people" don't have strong advocates fighting for us, while Google has both (very strong) legal and political contributions (ie. bribery) teams ensuring that never happens.

The real problem here is that we've ceded our democracy to corporations: blaming Google (or any individual corporation) is missing the real issue.

P.S. But, the good news is ... we can always take our democracy back.
by astrange | 2025-09-24 23:20:47+00:00
That's the wrong question. The competition is a family with one earner vs the counterfactual /same/ family with two earners.

The second one will have more money in the modern context so they're better off. At some times in the past, they wouldn't have been better off because their expenses would increase more than their income. Basically it's about cost of childcare.
by MountDoom | 2025-09-24 23:20:56+00:00
What makes me a bit uneasy about the project is that the website doesn't explain who is building it. For most open-source, I think that would be fine. But browsers auto-update, so their vendors essentially have the continued ability to run code on your machine. You want some confidence that they won't get owned and won't sell the access to bad actors down the line, so there is an element of personal trust.

All the website gives me is the name of a Wyoming LLC, Wyoming being one of the states you incorporate in if you don't want others to be able to find out who runs the company.

Granted, you can find out a bit more on Github, but in general, if you're building privacy- and security-critical tech... I think you ought to own it.
by supjeff | 2025-09-24 23:21:24+00:00
I don't know if it's fair to call this a dead-internet thing. Most comments on social media are nothing or misdirection. You might say "well that's easy if you're paying for fake activity from bots" but I've seen plenty of real people have transactional, nothing-exchanges in real life. I mean, the internet isn't the only place where people are fake/lazy.
by GoatInGrey | 2025-09-24 23:21:50+00:00
As well as gatekeep functionality behind the prompt box. Want to find and replace? Regex? Insert a new column? Add a line break? Have the AI do it and pay us for those tokens whether it works the first time or not!

I unfortunately have seen many AI-based tools being demoed with this approach. The goal is clearly to monetize every user action while piggybacking off of models provided by a third-party. The gross thing is that leadership from the director level up LOVES these demos, even when the models very clearly fuck up in the demo.

AI: "I have cleaned the formatting for all 4,650 records in your sample XML files. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help!"

Me: "There are over 25,000 records in that data..."

AI: "You're absolutely right!"
by KETpXDDzR | 2025-09-24 23:21:59+00:00
India: 71% of H-1B approvals

China: 11.7% of H-1B approvals

All other nationalities: 17.3% combined

Src: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/22/h-1b-fee-hike-whos-...
by wpm | 2025-09-24 23:22:55+00:00
I love having to install Deno so I can run yt-dlp to download a video that I want to see a brief or small detail in when that small detail happens to be in the lower third of the video because when I pause, it puts a stupid gradient over the video or blocks it entirely with the controls.

That's why the entire thrust of Liquid Glass was bad and dumb from the start. "The controls will get out of the way of your content....so we put them floating in front of your content" just absolutely braindead. There was a way to get them out of the way, give them their own space!
by throwaway-11-1 | 2025-09-24 23:23:14+00:00
1a. Ok so what exactly did he mean by “I want someone ‘cookie cutter’ not ‘Laqueesha James’.

1b. Is the implication allowing race based discrimination for hiring and voting considerations would improve black families’ material conditions?

2. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna191224

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_Access_Hollywood_... For real have you been in a coma?
by graycat | 2025-09-24 23:23:22+00:00
That's not "everything"! Just wasted ~3 hours trying to set up an account, supervised by me, for my 8 year old daughter.

(1) There are some old rules for a user interface.

(2) Billions of people know these rules, implicitly, and right away and easily use sites that follow the rules.

(3) Google, and others, want a new, different, original, snappy, creative, user interface but in this effort set aside the old rules so that at most only the programmer understands the user interface and in a month he (she) won't be able to use it either.

Analogy: They are really good at making pancakes but now are trying to make Bouillabaisse and are getting only rotten sea food.

Uh, the user interface has a lot of cartoons in a popular, new style but one of their cartoons shows little girl and some of the underside of her skirt -- dumb de dumb-dumb. If they make a mistake like that, then they are sloppy or worse workers and, thus, no wonder the rest is awful. Time to short the stock?
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-24 23:24:04+00:00
> During the "things get worse" phase, why not make it shorter?

Because it never gets better for the people actually living through it.

I imagine those in favor of the idea of accelerating collapse aren't all so purely selfless that they're willing to see themselves and their children suffer and die, all so someone elses' descendants can live in a better world.

Nah, they just aren't thinking it through.
by d4mi3n | 2025-09-24 23:24:04+00:00
"Don't get greedy" and similar variations assumes intent rather than what I see as the reality of how companies operate within the US--not a failing of individual virtues. If you're a public company, your shareholders will want stock prices to go up and are more than happy to use their shares to vote for whoever is willing to make that happen.

This is, of course, an exaggeration. Not all shareholders value profits above all else, but many big ones do. Ignoring what incentives (and disincentives) are put on a business drive it's behavior. If you want something contrary to those incentives, you need to change those pressures or you're doomed to be disappointed.
by astrange | 2025-09-24 23:24:24+00:00
> enables a secure _and_ good lifestyle

This (socalled "luxury space communism") is impossible insofar as a good lifestyle includes positional goods and social status. Demand is infinite, even your own demand, and you have to be able to outrun it.

The best technology I know for this is Ozempic. If there was a way to ban yourself from getting loans that would also help, but you wouldn't like it.
by neehao | 2025-09-24 23:24:26+00:00
from a new customer perspective who just heard about midjourney, search may be a good spot to find alternate products. what google needs to know is if it is a navigational search and unless it keeps a long history, it may not know that. the simpler answer may be that companies who know you use a product like the one they make may just be willing to spend a bunch and google may be willing to add friction for the $.
by rawgabbit | 2025-09-24 23:24:52+00:00
The US actually had a working system with the McCain Feingold legislation that prohibited “dark” or unregulated money in election campaigns.

The legislation limited the power of wealth which made government more willing to police corporations bad behavior.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United, we are now in a free for all. Wealth now translates to political power. We are seeing not only de-regulation but the active collusion of the current administration and favored corporations.
by riemannzeta | 2025-09-24 23:25:14+00:00
Terry seems to have recovered a key feature of the theory expressed by North, Wallis, and Weingast in Violence and Social Orders. On their view, industrialization depended upon a handful of nation states achieving what they call "door step conditions", which include the ability for citizens to freely form legitimate political parties or for-profit corporations without an affirmative act of government.

According to North, Wallis, and Weingast, the "double balance" of open political and economic competition — between incumbent large organizations and what we might call "startups" — is what allowed a handful of countries to transcend the "natural state" or "limited access order" in which an oligarchy of elites control the economy and government (including access to violence).

It seems like his posts represent an independent reproduction of a key piece of their theory.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-09-24 23:26:11+00:00
I am highly suspicious tech markets do not see realistic average Google behavior for whatever reason. The pervasive belief in tech that Google Search is even passable suggests people in the Valley or even Austin aren't getting the experience most people do.

I recall a Googler once suggesting to me that Googlers seeing ads might look like ad fraud to advertisers, so I'm not positive Googlers dogfood how bad this is either.
by arduanika | 2025-09-24 23:26:22+00:00
Yes, that's absolutely the allusion. Brautigan's line is a popular title for stuff, including a widely read post by Dario Amodei two months before the CCC talk you've linked:

https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace

And it's also the title of an Adam Curtis documentary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...

It's a good line.
by cassonmars | 2025-09-24 23:26:23+00:00
Does YC ever intend to revisit doing remote batches again?

There's many founders in the country who are just as driven and motivated, but have real-world situations that cannot allow uprooting themselves for several months, two very common ones:

- new parents

- disabled family members, or are themselves physically disabled

The discourse on Hacker News has frequently chastised companies demanding RTO, and some of the companies in your portfolio are remote-first (or remote-only), why does YC make the same kind of RTO demand with batches?
by ayaros | 2025-09-24 23:26:37+00:00
Why did anyone think it was a good idea to put tabs in the title bar. How the hell am I supposed to easily drag a window if I have 100 tabs open? Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Why do I feel like the only sane human being left on Earth? Why is this project continuing to use this horrible UI convention?

How are they going to make money or enshittify this in the future or sell it off to an evil billion dollar corporation who will sell my data off to god knows who?

</rant> :/ ...the site design is nice at least.
by w10-1 | 2025-09-24 23:26:45+00:00
There's both less and more to making decisions than ensuring they get made.

First: get others to actually decide. Jean-Louis Gassee at Apple (componentized mac's in the late 1980's) said that when dueling managers brought him a decision to make, he would always come up with a decision both of them hated, so they would scurry away and work together with an alternative they could live with.

Second: be sure to get everyone really on board - you first. This is really hard for managers who are following the wind. Law students are often careful and analytical, hedging every evaluation, but lawyers have to be assertive. Although they understand the precariousness of the legal position, it only works if you convince everyone (on your side and theirs) that this is how it will be. That transition is typically what weeds out new attorneys, and distinguishes partners from associates.

(Before you object to the attorney analogy: it's nice when you achieve collegial scientific consensus, but it can be a luxury. Then you have to figure out how to compel people do want they don't want to do, without straining authority. Usually it works to focus on picking a customer, or a definite time for results to appear; a more concrete objective/goal explains the decision and focuses follow-through.)