MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by comex | 2025-10-16 19:35:23+00:00
You're the one who said "you literally can't tell the difference". I agree to a point. It seems plausible that they were experiencing some other effect such as hitching or slowdown, rather than just a constant 100ms delay (which again isn't supposed to happen).

On the other hand, I just thought of one way that even a small fixed amount of latency can be a material obstacle. Personally, I type fast but make lots of typos, and I don't use autocorrect. So I need to react to incorrect text appearing on screen, backspace, and retype. The slower I react, the more text I have to delete (which means not just more keypresses but also more mental overhead figuring out what I need to retype). For this purpose, I am bound by the human reaction time, but editor latency is added on top of that. The sooner the text appears, the sooner my 'reaction timer' can start, all the way down to 0 latency. [Edit: And 100ms of latency can make a meaningful difference here. I just did a quick typing speed test and measured 148 WPM which is around 12 characters per second, so 100ms is one extra character, or a bit more.]

Also, latency might affect productivity just by being annoying and distracting. YMMV on whether this is a legitimate complaint or whether you should just get used to it. But personally I'm glad I don't have to get used to it, and can instead just use editors with low latency.
by somethoughts | 2025-10-16 19:35:57+00:00
The burrito ballistic tech seems like it could probably handle the last 10 yards problem and enable drive by delivery.

Postmates - How we built a Burrito Cannon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br_KqzLWunM

Burrito Cannon Demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDdKYmStcIc
by causal | 2025-10-16 19:36:19+00:00
I have been pretty happy with Elixir - the syntax takes getting used to, but I'm usually impressed by its elegance.

Phoenix I'm mixed on - it has a few things that "just work" and I'm happy about, but being an opinionated framework I find myself bumping into those opinions the more I want to do things my own way. Usually there's an escape hatch, but being new to both Elixir and Phoenix it's not always obvious to me how to do things when the happy path fails.
by anal_reactor | 2025-10-16 19:36:28+00:00
If firing a bad performer is so difficult at so many places, then it must be a feature, not a bug. Otherwise the free market would've found a way to change this.

The thing is, everyone is judged by how much inefficiency they remove. This implies that for anyone to be successful, there needs to be inefficiency in the first place. This means that everyone has incentive to create inefficiency, which can be removed at a later time.

Imagine you have ten workers. They say "if we do ten things then the system will be much cheaper to run, but further improvements will be minimal". The most efficient thing to do would be to tell them to work on all things ASAP in parallel, but this means that you'll deliver a lot in the first year, and then very little later on. This makes you look bad as a manager. A much better approach is to artificially delay the tasks and force them to be sequential, one task a year. This means that from outside perspective, your team seems to be consistently delivering added value through entire ten years.

Moreover, imagine that you value all ten employees, but one day the upper management tells every team to fire at least two workers. At that point you'll wish you had two extra guys sitting and doing nothing because you'd be able to fire them without putting your own deliverables in danger.

Not to mention that as a manager, your prestige is proportional to the number of people below you. This means that you have incentive to create bloated teams that sit and do nothing, because having five good and five bad employees looks better on paper than just having five good employees.

In most companies, information flow is extremely opaque. If you're particularly unlucky then your direct supervisor might know your performance is bad, but other than that, zero chance of anyone noticing. And even your direct supervisor might either be too busy, lack knowledge, or simply not give a fuck, because he understands the business value of artificial inefficiency.
by kg | 2025-10-16 19:36:38+00:00
For some skill sets the non-games options to work in are comparatively 'soulless' or 'soul-crushing' (not my words, but ways I've heard people describe it). For example:

If you're a literature expert, do you really want to do copy-editing for doordash when you could be writing interactive narratives?

If you're a UI designer, are wireframes for the latest AI chat app even 25% as exciting as designing the HUD for a new video game?

And then some skill sets are just not really transferable at all. Game design leans on skills that are transferable but 'game designer' doesn't really map to other fields at all, and it is a real specialization that some people have decades of time spent honing.
by vel0city | 2025-10-16 19:37:21+00:00
What? Just about every Walmart with a grocery I've been to sells blocks of cheese. These are all available at multiple Walmarts around me.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Block-Sharp-Cheddar-C...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Low-Moisture-Part-Ski...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Frigo-Parmesan-Cheese-Wedge-5-oz-...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Tillamook-Medium-Cheddar-Cheese-B...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Swiss-Cheese-Block-8-...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Dutchmark-Smoked-Gouda-Cheese-7-o...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Castello-Gourmet-Creamy-Danish-Ha...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Kerrygold-Grass-Fed-Dubliner-Iris...

and on and on and on and on and on...

It might not be right next to the pre-shredded cheese (usually those house brand blocks of cheddar and what not are), sometimes they're in a fancier part of the deli area. But I can't think of a time I've gone to a Walmart looking for a block of cheese and not found any cheese.

Its not going to be the fanciest varieties, but once again the question was for "basics" that don't exist. Having cheddar, swiss, parmesean, gouda, etc. is having the basics.
by jaymzcampbell | 2025-10-16 19:37:24+00:00
This could actually be a useful tool - I regularly do loops of "critique this design" via AI and find it immensely useful, but you're being disingenuous if you're serious that you built this to address getting "honest feedback". I guess you are trying to be edgy, but really this is just a bad attempt for some viral marketing. I'm also fully aware that developer rage baiting was probably half the goal too, and I'm falling for it.
by benterix | 2025-10-16 19:37:33+00:00
It's a pity the author didn't decide to offer a trial without attaching a credit card. I get it, we had these discussions here many times. But as a person that could potentially subscribe, I'm baffled at the choice.

You could argue that I'm not really willing to subscribe if I'm not willing to provide my CC details yet. But it doesn't work this way. Before I subscribe to a new service, I really like to know it well, to have a kind of emotional relationship to understand what it is giving/saving me. "Give me you CC or get off" makes me not even want to try.
by robinsoncrusue | 2025-10-16 19:37:53+00:00
My ancestors are from Asia. Over there, a saying goes something like this if I can translate it without the color of the language: "Give a man a solid breakfast and he will not make noise around the kitchen rest of the day". Even less colorful way to say it is if you want to be healthy, start with a healthy breakfast.

As much as there are all the science around low carb diet and optimizing calories, macros and what not, I think there are some wisdom to it in the long game view.

Someone that had a good nutritious breakfast (you will notice every major culture has its variant of breakfast akin to "English breakfast"), would have less difficulty resisting food with empty calories and doing frequent snacking. Contrary, if you had packaged "cereal" with questionable ingredients and nutrition density, no wonder by 11 you will feel the need to snack. And then if you happen to have a lunch in one of the typical take out restaurants optimized for cost at the expense of quality, a 3pm snacking is more likely than not.

By the end of the day, you had racked up calories intake with bunch of empty calories from those snacking episodes that could be entirely prevented with a solid dense breakfast.
by engomez | 2025-10-16 19:38:03+00:00
Yeah I think so. With LangChain, LangFlow took off because it was the "no-code" n8n style version that was layered on top of LangChain. To me it was always frustrating that it wasn't one ecosystem // fully interoperable. We're looking to make sure there's a good solution that works in either modality for agents.
by lesuorac | 2025-10-16 19:38:13+00:00
I think the main pro is that you can't have these arguments of the president being hamstrung by congress.

There's a very common trend of a president campaigning on something and then never delivering as president.

I don't think we'd see much difference in terms of corruption though if Trump was elected by people or congress. The heads of agencies and etc were all confirmed by congress and those agencies are turning a blind eye.
by simonw | 2025-10-16 19:38:18+00:00
I vibe-coded up a quick UI for exploring this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/prompt-caching

As far as I can tell it will indeed reuse the cache up to the point, so this works:

Prompt A + B + C - uncached

Prompt A + B + D - uses cache for A + B

Prompt A + E - uses cache for A
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-16 19:38:27+00:00
This has been the case in the US for at least 50 years but it did get recently much worse. Previously, Obama was openly shilling for Boeing. Reagan arbitrarily deregulated things, creating the S&L crisis and wrecked many other things, and funded American-trained death squads by getting poor and brown people hooked on drugs. The duopoly "choices" offered thus far have been between John Birch Society Nazis and limousine liberals... both warmongering corporatists who won't do anything for ordinary people but are totally engrossed on winning more money and passing more laws for their masters.
by javawizard | 2025-10-16 19:38:38+00:00
That's true, and yet they didn't. We can (rightfully) blame them for that, but people are still pissed off at Apple, and whether or not they deserve it they still suffer the reputational damage.

That's why this quote is relevant to this situation: it's totally Electron's fault for not adequately testing their framework against Apple's latest developer builds, but Apple could have absolutely done more to minimize the chance that Electron would make a mistake like this and cause lots of folks to be mad at Apple over it.

Should Apple be required to? No. Will they still suffer reputational damage if they don't and something like this happens? Yes.
by bpt3 | 2025-10-16 19:38:43+00:00
Wages from a single entry level job absolutely did not support a family of 4 or more in the 1950s and 1960s, let alone as comfortably as you are probably imagining.

These delusions need to stop, because it makes it impossible to have meaningful conversations about the many actual issues that do exist. I would expect people here to be better informed, but that seems to be less and less true over the last couple years.

And yes, the wealth distribution is more uneven now than it was in those days, but not to the point that you are claiming.
by testing22321 | 2025-10-16 19:38:45+00:00
Factually, people in the US pay more for healthcare and get worse outcomes than developed countries.

https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2024/09/report-u-s-spends-...

I can’t find it on mobile right now, but the associated graph is very illustrative

It is not cheaper to pay a private company.
by firefax | 2025-10-16 19:38:59+00:00
Pirates of Silicon Valley, which famously features Steve Ballmer turning and talking directly to the viewer ala kevin spacey and Bill Gates Yelling At Steve Jobs also Woz gets gassed and runs like hell, that's not much of a spoiler because that's how it opens: Woz hauling ass away from a protest into the computer building. sweet, safe computer building!

anyway if we're putting herzon movies in here i say it fits :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_Silicon_Valley
by swiftcoder | 2025-10-16 19:39:14+00:00
> It also doesnt make senes that someone who creates all the value wouldnt just leave and capture all the value themselves. It's not like they're being forced to work for the parasite.

If they have a mortgage, kids in college, or just need routine health insurance coverage... they kind of are being forced to work?

Capturing the value yourself requires assuming a lot of risk, and most individuals can't access the kind of capital investment that a corporation can attract.
by fair_enough | 2025-10-16 19:39:30+00:00
That's the magic of action potentials. As sodium ions (+1 charge) propagate, they dissipate throughout the cytosol and sometimes leak out of the cell membrane, but they also trigger their own influx of regenerative current by opening voltage-gated ion channels on the cell membrane. Think of it as a "signal repeater".

As long as the initial stimulus is strong enough to trigger an action potential, the signal propagates all the way from the nerve ending to the central nervous system, and whatever response the CNS cooks up always makes it all the way to all the muscles it intends to trigger. Stated another way, the peripheral and central nervous system have enough of these signal repeaters for any signal to travel anywhere.
by teamonkey | 2025-10-16 19:39:52+00:00
In theory, yes, it’s true, the skills should be transferrable, but in practice it’s often hard for those skills to be recognised by employers outside the games industry.

The right words don’t appear on the resume. Software that the recruiter has never heard of and none of ones they have, job titles that don’t match those in other sectors and roles that seem to straddle more than one, different working practices, different challenges, different expectations, different measures of reputation and success. No recognised professional qualifications or certifications.

The reverse is also true, of course.
by dasil003 | 2025-10-16 19:39:58+00:00
In the corporate world ecosystem and fungibility of programmers are the top priority. The only way Elixir will get traction there is by Elixir companies literally growing to Fortune 500 size and showing the language/ecosystem is viable at that scale. Even then I doubt the advantages of Elixir will move the needle for that type of company because once you scale up the challenge is 99% people, teams, and communication; the elegance and efficiency of the code and ops don't matter much in those types of environments.
by Qem | 2025-10-16 19:40:05+00:00
That makes me wonder if all those vector extensions pilling on top of each other were really that necessary, or if they are mostly a means of keep churning out patents to delay expiration.

Is it possible to just improve the original SSE extensions in a logical backward compatible way? Similar to what AMD did to x86, widening it to x86-64, dooming Intel efforts to push the incompatible Itanium architecture?
by dylan604 | 2025-10-16 19:40:07+00:00
The problem is that pretty much all small scrappy companies grow up to be large behemoths that all migrate to have process and controls that take over. The way workflows are created while being small and scrappy doesn't lend itself well when you have more than one dev working on something and there's no guidance for how the devs are to move forward. One dev wants to take 3 left turns, another dev wants to take a simple right turn. After that, you start having meetings to layout code and how to handle merges and the next thing you know you have processes and controls
Ask HN: Are you structuring knowledge for Agent usage
by tmaly | 2025-10-16 19:40:12+00:00
If you’re structuring knowledge for use with agents, what formats or approaches are working for you?

I want to help junior engineers on my team through a dynamic trainer.

I’m thinking about building a knowledge graph and exposing it via an MCP server so an agent can query and reason over the internal knowledge of the company.

How others are doing this? knowledge graphs? embeddings?
by nomel | 2025-10-16 19:41:31+00:00
No relation. This is free, open source, where you can fully use, modify, and continue it as far into the future as you want. A paid model, you lose access if you don't adhere. With this, you're losing nothing except future development time, which you were previously getting for free. These are completely different things.

My naive interoperation of this comment section says there were quite a few people making money on this work, without helping them pay their bills.
by lxgr | 2025-10-16 19:41:33+00:00
Yeah, ChatGPT “auto”, at least when it ends up routing to gpt-5-chat, is a slopfest. I discounted gpt-5 early on due to that experience.

Now I have my model selector permanently on “Thinking”. (I don’t even know what type of questions I’d ask the non-thinking one.)
by out_of_protocol | 2025-10-16 19:43:30+00:00
Definitely, Phoenix is way more streamlined than Django/Rails. Even if you jump to other language/framework, it'll teach a lot how to built stuff due to good defaults and project structure. Also simpler too. I remember spending hours trying to figure out how to use specific method and where is it coming from in Rails. In Elixir/Phoenix there's very few "import"s in use (single file you can inspect and modify), non hidden state. You see Foo.bar("some argument") and you know you don't need anything else to understand what it does. Rails is very magical in this sense, Django as well, a bit
OpenAI board member is violating export control, selling Claude API to HongKong
by justiceforai | 2025-10-16 19:43:31+00:00
OpenAI board member, CEO of Quora (Poe.com), Adam D'Angelo, has been selling export banned API access of ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude to banned countries like HongKong.

Poe used to be ranked at #2 at HongKong app store and they recently launched the API service for HongKong users.

It is interesting that OpenAI/Anthropic allows Poe.com reselling banned services to this region.

Poe at Hongkong App Store ranking: https://www.similarweb.com/top-apps/apple/hong-kong/productivity/top-grossing/

Related Reddit discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/15zp5lr/why_is_chat_gpt_banned_in_hk_but_poe_is_allowed/
by adastra22 | 2025-10-16 19:43:42+00:00
And yet we have SCUBA dive outfits and mountaineering shops that routinely sell equipment to adventurers, and provide guided services that sometimes do result in deaths. It is not nearly as black and white as you are portraying.

What these all have in common is the notion of informed consent -- I can get PADI certified and then rent SCUBA equipment, and if I then die while cave diving, that is wholly on me not the dive shop operator.

The critical test isn't that safety has been demonstrated, but that potential risks (known or unknown) have been disclosed and understood. I can go out and do risky things, if I want, under those conditions.

And yet I am not allowed to make my own medicine, or to take a completely unproven medicine that might very well kill me, even if I am fully cognizant of the risks involved. The rules regarding medicine and drugs really are different from how we handle other risks in our society.

I am saying it shouldn't be that way.
by gordonhart | 2025-10-16 19:43:53+00:00
We extensively benchmark frontier models at $DAYJOB and Gemini 2.5 is the uncontested king outside of a few narrow use cases. Tracks with the rumor that Google has the best pretraining and falls short only in tuning/alignment. Eagerly anticipating Gemini 3 as 2.5, while king of the hill, still has lots of room for improvement!

Edit: narrow use cases are roughly "true reasoning" (GPT-5) and Python script writing (the Claudes)
by jklinger410 | 2025-10-16 19:43:58+00:00
I'm going to stop going back and forth on this. But let me just say this: verifying paid traffic, within the ad platforms as well as on your website is totally possible.

If you want to second guess the psychology of whether or not the ad "drove" the user to make a purchase or not, that is up for discussion. Or whether Google/META do shady shit in their bidding environment. Absolutely.

But this idea that you can't track everything is bullshit.
by Arainach | 2025-10-16 19:44:24+00:00
This really isn't true. Take Microsoft, for instance - one of their recent layoffs eviscerated the Principal band including a number of high performers. I'm talking people I personally knew who had climbed the ladder rapidly, were directly working with multiple external partners driving tens of millions in revenue (that is, external partner has problem, threatens to pull spend on product, this employee is one of the first pulled in to engage and get it solved), with visibility all the way to the VP level and higher happy with their work and partner teams trying to poach them away - still laid off.
by nradov | 2025-10-16 19:44:49+00:00
I'm always skeptical when someone posts that little nugget about shoes. Maybe it used to be true but I don't think it still applies in the era of high-quality mass manufacturing. I have worn shoes that cost $50 to well over $200 and if anything the more expensive shoes tend to fall apart faster.

Walmart has plenty of shoes and work boots for about $50 that will last more than 6 months unless you really abuse them. They don't look great but they're functional and reasonably durable.
by ShellackGobln7 | 2025-10-16 19:45:16+00:00
Learning about IMAP - This does not support gmail because per the included checker app:

Password: 2025/10/16 15:43:03 Connecting to imap.gmail.com:993... 2025/10/16 15:43:03 Connected successfully 2025/10/16 15:43:03 Logging in as user@gmail.com... 2025/10/16 15:43:03 Logged in successfully 2025/10/16 15:43:03 Server capabilities: 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - ENABLE 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - APPENDLIMIT=35651584 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - IDLE 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - NAMESPACE 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - ID 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - XLIST 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - UIDPLUS 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - ESEARCH 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - UTF8=ACCEPT 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - CHILDREN 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - CONDSTORE 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - LIST-EXTENDED 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - LITERAL- 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - UNSELECT 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - QUOTA 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - MOVE 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - LIST-STATUS 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - SPECIAL-USE 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - IMAP4rev1 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - X-GM-EXT-1 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - COMPRESS=DEFLATE

Checking for required capabilities: UIDPLUS: SUPPORTED NOTIFY: NOT SUPPORTED CONDSTORE: SUPPORTED QRESYNC: NOT SUPPORTED

Some required capabilities are missing
by Pet_Ant | 2025-10-16 19:45:23+00:00
> FSL uses this "eventual open source" mechanism too.

I stand corrected. I hate license proliferation, but the naming and marketing is better. I hope the other former open-source companies consolidate on something.

> undergoes delayed Open Source publication (DOSP). [1]

and that "DOSP" (Delayed Open Source Publication) is an OSI concept! [2]

But I cannot (yet) find what the timeframe for the DOSP is... because we don't want to wait 90 years for Mickey to be public domain.

[1] https://fair.io/about/

[2] https://opensource.org/delayed-open-source-publication
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-16 19:45:29+00:00
Sounds like Erdős might have had ADD/ADHD or something similar, and amphetamines was his medication.

Edit: Never read about Erdős before and came across this: "Erdős published around 1,500 mathematical papers during his lifetime, a figure that remains unsurpassed". Maybe he was just a functional addict :)