MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Some sales teams are killing their company
by Lopsii | 2025-10-20 02:44:18+00:00
If some founders or C-suite execs ever saw how their sales teams actually operate, they’d lose it.

Most founders I’ve known in their early stages worked like crazy to keep the lights on, land customers, and make the company worth celebrating. Building anything from scratch takes pure grit. You fight for every client, every partnership, every inch of progress.

But then you meet some sales teams… and it’s hard to understand why processes stall or communication breaks down.

We once had to email the CTO just to get their sales team to respond to a deal we were ready to move forward with. Another time, we followed up endlessly, no reply until we reached someone at the VP level. And in one case, the rep couldn’t even answer basic questions or connect us to someone who could. Then disappeared.

These were Series B/C stage companies.

I’ve never been one to create tension by escalating issues relationships matter deeply to me and to our company but we've had to take radical steps just to move the needle and keep things moving forward.

If someone ever had to reach out to me in our later growth stages because my sales team wasn’t responding, it would signal a serious problem that needed immediate attention.

Now, maybe this is a leadership issue. Maybe the team’s attitude reflects what’s happening at the top. But what this really highlights is a pattern I’ve seen in growing startups: when urgency and accountability slip, they undermine the very work that built the company.

A similar pattern appears in some government agencies: despite their focus on accountability, slow responses and bureaucracy can sometimes create the same kind of friction and inefficiency.

I don’t share this to trigger salespeople their job is already hard enough. I’m sharing it from a founder’s and builder’s perspective: a perspective shaped by the long hours, the stakes, and the grind of building something from nothing.

Have you experienced this too? Please, no company or government agencies names, just perspectives
by dredmorbius | 2025-10-20 02:44:29+00:00
One of the many joys of Debian (and derived GNU/Linux distros) is the dwww information server, which provides (local-only, by default) Web-based access to system information (man and info pages, package documentation, various documentation-oriented packages, etc.), and the doc-rfc-* packages, see:

<https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=rfc>

And for dwww: <https://packages.debian.org/trixie/dwww>

These provide you with your own locally-browseable and searchable versions of RFCs. The packages are split so that you need not install all RFCs if you prefer not to, with informational, experimental, old, and proposed being notable collections.
by LandOfMightDev | 2025-10-20 02:44:39+00:00
A few weeks ago I created the website livechannels.pages.dev which allowed users to create their own live-streaming internet channel from a list of video URLs. I remember watching ANIMAX as a child, then it disappeared, so i spent some time re-compiling all of the shows and creating a schedule/programming and here we are ! are created a live-streaming reboot style channel of Animax ! Enjoy, and feel free to make your own channels too!
by morshu9001 | 2025-10-20 02:44:44+00:00
The whole point of a rule-of-thumb is to be dumb. There are very few good reasons for a 500 loc func, and the code reviewer won't want to verify it's as simple as you claim. You could still have a 50 loc func that's overly complex, and they'll complain about complexity instead of length.

One consideration is that about 40 loc will comfortably fit in one code split, and it's nice if one func will fit in 1-2 splits. Past that length, no matter how simple it is, the reader will have to start jumping around for declarations. That might be ok at first, but at some point the ratio of offscreen to onscreen code gets too big.
by apparent | 2025-10-20 02:45:33+00:00
There are associations, but correlation is not causation.

I recall reading an NYT article about the relative health risk of various drinking levels. It seems that light drinking does not have much of an effect on longevity:

> For those who have two drinks a week, that choice amounts to less than one week of lost life on average [1]

Could it reduce quality of living without reducing lifespan? I suppose. But I had been led to believe, by many news articles, that drinking even one drink a week was going to do me lots of harm.

My takeaway from this is that news outlets like to get clicks by telling people surprising and terrible things.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-r...
by nikolay | 2025-10-20 02:45:58+00:00
Many people glorify the simplicity of Lisp as an interpreter, but Forth is similar and underappreciated. Sadly, the only code I've written in Forth is... PostScript. Yeah, PostScript is a dialect of Forth. As a child, I really was amused by the demo of GraFORTH on Apple ][, which included 3D wireframe animations, which at the time were magical.
by mcdonje | 2025-10-20 02:47:57+00:00
It kinda happened with markup languages. HTML, SVG, and some other domain specific markup languages are all XML, which is a subset of SGML.

The thing there is those DSLs have their own specs.

Coding is a social activity. Reading code is hard. When there are multiple ways of doing things, it's extra hard. People want to have relatively standardized ways of doing things so they can share code and reason about it easier.

If there's a lisp or racket or a forth that's defined as a DSL, it might take off if it's standardized and it's the best solution for the domain.
by dietrichepp | 2025-10-20 02:49:11+00:00
Fantastic—I’ve written a QuickDraw PICT converter, but I focused narrowly on just extracting pixel data. The format is basically a way to encode QuickDraw drawing commands, and getting the original image back (in the general case) means reimplementing QuickDraw.

The old Mac game Avara used this format for levels. It was funky… you could place blocks in a 3D world, and control elevation and height by changing the corner radius of rectangles. You needed a QuickDraw image editor to make levels, like ClarisDraw.
by k310 | 2025-10-20 02:49:22+00:00
AFAICT, AIrticles are more rambling and verbose than well written articles. Technical articles need to be concise and (surprise) highly accurate, meaning checked.

Other articles need to be, as I've said of books, they are good because they (their chapters) are coherent, consistent and complete. Concise helps a lot.

This requires an understanding of narrative: envisioning the goal, how pieces build towards it, attention to detail, and importantly, understanding how humans process information to create understanding and meaning.

It takes one to know one.
by perching_aix | 2025-10-20 02:50:33+00:00
How so?

Functionally, the README describes that providing a game copy is necessary for creating a build. This would make sense, since unless the sound, image, text, etc. assets are all baked into the code, those would have to come separately.

Legally, it further doesn't make much sense. This is cleaned up (?) and painstakingly bytematched decompiler output (again based on the README), so it's unfortunately just plain illegal [0], disclaimers nonwithstanding.

[0] as always, legality depends on jurisdiction - so as always, if in doubt, consult an actual lawyer
by smartbit | 2025-10-20 02:52:07+00:00
Highly recommended documentary Seeds of Time (2013) [0] on Dr. Cary Fowler at the FAO responsible for building the Spitsbergen/Svalbard Global Seed Vault [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeds_of_Time_(film)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
by mmooss | 2025-10-20 02:52:09+00:00
From a/the related paper:

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/14/5/1087

> The Medieval (10th to 13th century CE) Wall System (MWS) stretches approximately 4000 km across extensive regions in northern China and Mongolia, as well as shorter sections in Russia (Figure 1). It represents one of the most extensive yet enigmatic architectural features in East Asia. In recent years The Wall Project, funded by the European Research Council, as well as other projects, has extensively studied and published on different sections of this wall line. Such research demonstrated that this extensive system of earthen walls was built by different empires from c. the 10th to the 13th centuries CE [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Among the different sections of the MWS, the wall section located in the southern Mongolia’s Gobi Desert is the least explored and still poorly understood. This study focuses on a 321 km-long segment of this wall line, located in Ömnögovi province of Mongolia, that we refer to as the Gobi Wall (Figure 2).
by tarkin2 | 2025-10-20 02:52:43+00:00
One simpler explanation: in forth you are forced to keep the stack, and modifications to the stack, in your short term memory, albeit only really three numbers in most cases. Whereas with C et al you simply look down the page at the variables, far less taxing on your short term memory.

Well-written and designed high-level forth words often transcend that and tend to be, quite literally, readable however, in a way that is incredibly rare to see in C et al. Of course the argument is that other programmers shouldn't be expected to see the problem in the way the original problem solver did.
by baubino | 2025-10-20 02:52:52+00:00
University research is conducted in pursuit of knowledge not truth. While there are overlaps, there is a distinction. The pursuit of knowledge allows us to question, consider, discuss, analyze, critique, etc, even if (and especially when) we are unsure of the truth or if there isn’t a “truth”to be attained. The pursuit of knowledge also allows us to study why and how something is false.
by shadowpho | 2025-10-20 02:54:05+00:00
It’s easy to do something that will work for weeks. It’s hard to do something that will last years.

For example, how does it handle wifi going down? Does it recover gracefully? Does it manage to save the data during downtime and reupload it all afterwards?

How does it handle updates through wifi? OTA updates are important for 10 devices deployed, but is not easy.
by lukan | 2025-10-20 02:57:17+00:00
What I heard is with Forth, basically no 2 environments are alike, but highly customized, meaning every forth programmer creates his own language in the end for his custom needs.

So collaborating is a bit hard like this. The only serious forth programmer that I know, lives alone in the woods doing his things.

So from a aesthetic point of view, I really like the language, but for getting things done, especially in a collaborative way?

But who knows, maybe someone will write the right tools for that to change?
by mmooss | 2025-10-20 02:57:32+00:00
> not a fair comparison. Most likely the door of the old one was not sealing well, hence the continuous running and frost buildup

That's an expected cost of old fridges, so I don't know that it's unfair. A major reason old machines are less efficient is accumulated defects (people too!). If I said comparing a new car's fuel efficiency to my old one was unfair, because my old one has a lot of problems, you might say that's very fair.
by morshu9001 | 2025-10-20 02:59:22+00:00
The type of monitor doesn't matter a whole lot because it's really limited by human eyesight. High-res monitor will enable rendering things tiny if you disable hi-dpi, but then it's unreadable. If you use a big 8K TV to display everything larger, you have to sit further away to comfortably view it. If you add more monitors, at some point it becomes too hard to look at so many things at once.

Personally, my setup has shown the same number of vim rows/cols on my 4K monitor vs my 1080p one (or whatever you call the 16:10 equivalents).
by ajross | 2025-10-20 03:00:45+00:00
Come on. Extremely mildly down-sloping if at all, and without anything like an inflection point that would justify "WTF Happened in 2007?"

You can't do this like this. I mean, you sort of can if the effect is big enough (c.f. the 1971 site which inspired this one, and which makes a much better case). But if you can't eyeball a very clear angle in the chart without argument, you need to come to the table with some kind of fitted curve and real research.
by thesmtsolver | 2025-10-20 03:00:52+00:00
> Did you copy and paste the numbered list from somewhere else? That isn’t how folks on HN typically format things here, and it seems reminiscent of AI output, which is not allowed under the HN guidelines.

No. I really wish you would have bravely responded to the points rather than accuse me. Do the guidelines encourage or discourage good faith arguments?

That "numbered list" is called a proof or argument. My PhD was in mathematical logic (see my user name).

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

https://people.cs.pitt.edu/~milos/courses/cs441/lectures/Cla...

An AI accusation on top of misrepresenting that the original point OP made was about population-level patterns.

> This is one reason foreign doctors come to the US to study and train. Modern countries with Universal Health Care treat at stage 1 and 2 with 3 and 4 being rare ... except for the USA. Need to study advance cancer and aggressive, this USA is a great place.

I don't think it is productive for us to continue this conversation. It is really sad that minor formatting and rudimentary logic is all it takes for some people to suspect AI usage.

Response to:

> If you reread what I wrote, I didn’t say you were AI or not using it, merely bringing to your and the other readers’ attention that your formatting wasn’t the norm for many folks who post on this site, whereas it is the norm for many AI-generated outputs.

Ah, the classic. "Did you beat your wife? I didn't make accusations! I am just questions!"
by BeetleB | 2025-10-20 03:00:52+00:00
> As usual, when money is to be found the soulless bean counting serious mba types come along and kill all the fun.

A reminder: Even years after inventing CUDA, Nvidia, the top GPU manufacturer, was fighting for survival. I'm not sure what saved them - perhaps crypto.

If you ignore the money, they appeared quite strong. But they struggled financially. Intel famously considered buying them around 2010 because they knew they could buy them cheap - Nvidia might not survive and weren't in a position to negotiate). Thankfully, the Intel CEO killed the idea because he knew Jensen wouldn't work well with Intel.

Nvidia may not have been saved by "bean counters", but they do have a place in the world.
by FLT8 | 2025-10-20 03:01:33+00:00
I have a (completely unscientific) theory that my tinnitus is a result of early exposure to CRT TV's and my brain trying to compensate for the noise. The reason I say that is that it's roughly in the same frequency band as the PAL horizontal refresh. It's been with me basically my whole life, since long before any real hearing damage would have set in anyway - I remember asking friends when I was 9 or 10 whether they could hear it too. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a window of opportunity when the brain is still plastic for these kind of "adaptations" to set in place.
by DarmokJalad1701 | 2025-10-20 03:02:01+00:00
> 10-100 line numerical experiments

There's plenty of satellites, rockets, re-entry vehicles whose guidance and control code were designed and written using MATLAB/Simulink and then "autocoded" to C using "MATLAB Coder".

While not my preferred way of doing things, it is popular for this purpose throughout the aerospace industry.
by _wire_ | 2025-10-20 03:02:47+00:00
Try applying your observation to you own counter argument:

Your "entire" counter "argument relies on an assumption that thinking or consciousness is" nothing special, just an algorithm.

As to rigor, you can support your argument very simply by showing an algorithm generate consciousness. As to "thinking"... define it.

However, those that think consciousness is something special beyond an algorithm need not produce any evidence beyond consciousness itself, because they claim nothing more than a mystery and the admonition to be wary as ordinary mechanical behavior may be confused with the mystery of consciousness, e.g., the Chinese Room.

IOW, if you think consciousness is not mysterious, all you need is a theory (i.e., mechanical manifestation) and a demonstration!

The world awaits!
by khuston | 2025-10-20 03:05:26+00:00
LLM-powered deep research tools are very useful at finding whether someone has already published on a research question. You could spend days performing keyword searches and traversing citation graphs but still miss relevant pockets of the literature. Semantic search is a genuine improvement here.

As to not trusting the generated text, you’re totally right. That’s why I use it as a search tool but mostly ignore the content of what the LLM has to say and go to the source.
by rpcope1 | 2025-10-20 03:06:00+00:00
VFDs and inverters are nice, but have you ever looked inside of an AC unit with an inverter and asked what it would cost if the electronics has a problem? Simple dumb single speed stuff looks like it costs more to run, until you have a problem, which you will. On simple single speed fridges and AC that don't do anything special maybe you need a motor cap or motor or something every parts house has for little money and easy to swap; the moment you introduce more complexity is the moment you bend over for GE or Mitsubishi or Samsung to gouge you for basically any part.
by peter_d_sherman | 2025-10-20 03:07:04+00:00
>"1.3. Low-Dependency

Libraries written in C do not have a huge run-time dependency.

In its minimum configuration, SQLite requires only the following routines from the standard C library:

memcmp() memcpy() memmove() memset() strcmp() strlen() strncmp()

In a more complete build, SQLite also uses library routines like malloc() and free() and operating system interfaces for opening, reading, writing, and closing files. But even then, the number of dependencies is very small. Other "modern" languages, in contrast, often require multi-megabyte runtimes loaded with thousands and thousands of interfaces."

Very laudable!

(I should also point out that SQLite could conceivably be compiled with small (in terms of lines of code) C compilers like Fabrice Bellard's Tiny C Compiler (TCC). Also SQLite's few required standard C library routines listed above could conceivably be coded inside of SQLite itself(!) (they are, after all, just additional lines of C code in a different place -- and those could conceivably be moved or copied) -- thus removing the dependency/requirement for any standard C library whatsoever!)

Anyway, we love SQLite!
by jll29 | 2025-10-20 03:09:22+00:00
I strongly agree - I started teaching from slides and shifted more and more to blackboard and chalk.

I found that they can also be combined well by showing a slide that gives some guidance where "we" are in the material, supplemented by writing and drawing on the blackboard to explain one or more bullet points or statements from the slides, and to answer student questions.

This also forces students to take additional notes, which helps them per muscle memory.
by jama211 | 2025-10-20 03:11:46+00:00
This advice is aimed at students who are already getting good-great grades but want to optimise further. Advice for students that get poor grades is quite different.

That being said my grades in university were middling to poor and once I got out I applied for jobs with my degree in hand and not a single one asked for my academic transcript. Perhaps more prestigious graduate positions might have, but I just didn’t apply for those. But I got various positions and my career took off just fine.

Now the idea that anyone would care about my university grades seems laughable. So, it’s important to remember that learning in university is important but if you don’t get amazing grades it’s not something people should stress about too much IMO.
by thefaux | 2025-10-20 03:11:55+00:00
Chalk it up to youth perhaps, but this piece would benefit, in my view, from more "for me..." or "I found..." and less "You should/must/are..."

I have reached a point in my life in which I recognize that I do not generally appreciate direct advice, especially not the unsolicited variety. Even the bits that I agree with in this piece are tainted by the many cases where I did the exact opposite of what he advises and excelled academically.
by mrheosuper | 2025-10-20 03:12:39+00:00
Not parent commentors, but this part

>The real tragedy? Once you see it, you start writing that way too. You start thinking, "Well, maybe I should make this generic in case someone wants to use quaternions instead of matrices..." and suddenly, congratulations – you're building for someone who doesn't exist.

is awful similar to LLM writting. I can't put my finger on exactly where, but that the impression i got.
by goku12 | 2025-10-20 03:13:24+00:00
Wait! How was it against third-party tracking, when its entire purpose was to present advertisers with an alternative to tracking with third party cookies or browser fingerprinting? Yes, Google argued that it was designed to preserve the privacy and anonymity of the users, in comparison to the other methods. But this has been copiously disputed, given that Firefox's and Safari's solution was to not provide any alternatives at all. Google kept on insisting that it was essential to meet the advertisers' need to calculate click attribution and conversion rates. They give priority to the advertisers, rather than the users. That's pretty clear in the blog itself.
by jll29 | 2025-10-20 03:13:36+00:00
That may require some experience, which you can obtain gradually by reading lots of papers, some good, some bad, to see how they do it. Eventually, you can tell if an experiment is suitable for showing strong support of the RQ or not.

(And you will also learn to read between the lines e.g. "Our resulst are PROMISING..." = there is much space for improvement etc.)
by supersour | 2025-10-20 03:14:35+00:00
I think the prior probability in the bayesian sense is that the two entering cohorts are equally skilled (assuming students were randomly split into two sections as opposed to different sections being composed of different student bodies). If this were the case, the implication is that performance differences in standardized tests between cohorts are due to the professor (maybe one of the profs didn't cover the right material), so then normalization could be justified.

However if that prior is untrue for any reason whatsoever, the normalization would penalize higher performing cohorts (if it were a math course, maybe an engineering student dominated section vs an arts dominated cohort).

So I guess.. it depends
by rpcope1 | 2025-10-20 03:15:31+00:00
One thing that catches my eye here is the use of a smart plug on the refrigerator for current monitoring. I've tried a ton of different ones including the "good" ones like Shelly, and they all seem to use shunt resistors to gauge power draw. It would make me really nervous to use something like that to measure power draw on a big inductive load like a fridge. It's a shame, I've never seen a current clamp in plug form with no on/off switch, so you've basically gotta do some fab work, but that's basically really the only safe way to collect current data for anything that pulls a non-trivial amount of power.