MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apsurd | 2025-10-02 20:42:15+00:00
"Focus on problems, not solutions" is pretty standard practice. Seems like author cherry picks some abstract concept of "bigco" and their process-driven planning. I guess.

Came here to say, I don't deny those anecdotes, but just as many companies can and do intuit "what problem are we solving?" and then come up with some potential solutions in meetings across stakeholders. That's called planning. Time-box it and move on to some face-reality testing.

Planning anything, in any way, is imperfect. Partly fed by over-pontificating about the perfect way to plan!
by balder1991 | 2025-10-02 20:42:44+00:00
This is true when there’s plenty of competition that matter. When everybody and every business is in one app, the network effect forces everyone to be there or be invisible. So the “essential infrastructure” label is kinda debatable. I suppose it’s essential for many businesses.

So your analogy should be more like there’s one big shopping mall network in the city that basically everyone has to go because certain stores are only there — and the owners bought any competitor that seemed to start becoming popular in the past so there’s no perspective of competition either.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-10-02 20:42:54+00:00
The allies did not consider 1000 calories an acceptable dietary intake post-war. Here's a report from the Berlin blockade:

https://doi.org/10.2307/4588157

Quote:

Our clinical and other observations convinced us that 2,000 calories a day was a bare minimum and sufficed merely to keep the population at a subsistence level.

Where "bare minimum" refers to a community with high numbers of women and children doing little exercise or labor. They observed malnutrition in people consuming 1800 calories daily and recommended substantially more than 2000 calories for people doing hard labor.
by lovich | 2025-10-02 20:43:14+00:00
I always found product planning went poorly because the bosses of the people making the plans would make heads roll if you couldn’t draw them 7 parallel red lines, 3 of them being perpendicular, and in green ink

They’d get a plan that made them happy in the moment, we’d inevitably go off the rails in a few weeks but in a politically satisfactory way. Mission accomplished would be declared and then we’d start all over again next quarter/year.

That is unless you are working under the SAFe framework in which case you cut out all that time wasted trying to execute on the impossible plan and just doing constant rolling, planning of planning
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-02 20:43:15+00:00
> @btbuildem was expressing a personal distaste for other uses of power, and an avulsion to the technology because of that

Nihilistic Luddism. It works against any argument for making the world a better place.

> For example: labor camps

...what's the connection between longevity and labor camps? Empirically, as life expectancies (at birth and in adulthood) have risen, the prevalence of labor camps has gone down. We can see this both longitudinally and between countries.
by stale2002 | 2025-10-02 20:43:17+00:00
Just FYI, you are wasting your time with this user.

They've done this same tactic and question avoidance, perhaps quite literally hundreds of times on Hacker News. And I am frankly surprised people haven't caught on to this user and that they are even still allowed around here, given that this type of stuff is almost their sole contribution.

Its intentional, as well. I remember reading a comment where I think they just straight up admitted to doing this.

If you want a fun read, go back through their comment history and you'll find a multitude of users having the same problem as you are having with interactions with them.
by borski | 2025-10-02 20:43:22+00:00
> i have right-wing friends who most certainly do not want more funding for any school programs, including gifted

This is a strawman, though it may not seem like one. I agree that much of the right wants less funding for public education in general, and/or wants more funding for parochial schools and the like. But that is not who I'm talking about.

Those on the right who support public education also support funding gifted/talented schools/programs, because they base it on 'merit' and you may have seen that word thrown around recently by that orange guy. G&T programs explicity fit into their policy and world view, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

> i have classical liberal friends who think we should give tax breaks for private schools for “gifted”.

Cool, but they're not 'left' by the American standards. Classical liberals are more akin to American libertarians in terms of beliefs/opinions. Which again, is not who I'm talking about.
by zahlman | 2025-10-02 20:43:25+00:00
> unintuitive arithmetic without any of its speed advantages.

Using floating-point in Python is still much faster than using an exact type in Python.

$ # At this scale, we need to be aware of and account for the timing overhead $ python -m timeit 'pass' 50000000 loops, best of 5: 8.18 nsec per loop $ # The variable assignment defeats constant folding in the very primitive optimizer $ python -m timeit --setup 'x = 0.1; y = 0.2' 'x + y' 10000000 loops, best of 5: 21.2 nsec per loop $ python -m timeit --setup 'from decimal import Decimal as d; x = d("0.1"); y = d("0.2")' 'x + y' 5000000 loops, best of 5: 62.9 nsec per loop $ python -m timeit --setup 'from fractions import Fraction as f; x = f(1, 10); y = f(2, 10)' 'x + y' 500000 loops, best of 5: 755 nsec per loop
by lyu07282 | 2025-10-02 20:43:53+00:00
As someone not in the field it's hard to distinguish the "quantum startup raised x billions, claims quantum computing x years away" from "fusion startup raised x billions, claims fusion power x years away" headlines every few months for the past 10+ years.

Headlines like these are the outliers to the trend that thus appear more credible to me personally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45238481
by munk-a | 2025-10-02 20:44:01+00:00
As a Canadian I'd also say that having such a party is a huge boon to the country. Separatists are going to separatist - your choice, as a nation, is whether to allow them to organize and have their voices heard within the system of politics or whether to force them to resort to violence and underground organization. Those underground separatist groups will always exist but giving formal political representation to the desire for separation (even if it isn't granted) can help defuse extremism and provide better methods for airing grievances.

The modern BQ is much more tame than the BQ of thirty years prior - they've mainly morphed into a party focused on franophone rights within Canada and the maintenance of QC labor rights. So while they specifically no longer represent that separatist movement as directly there are other groups focused on prairie separatism that are a better modern parallel.
by godelski | 2025-10-02 20:44:43+00:00
> but that's poor UX, has many failure scenarios and takes a long time.

And requires you to build your social graph from scratch. That alone is killer to the average person.

Is signal the right tool for those hyper concerned with both security and privacy? No. But is it the right tool for the average person to securely communicate and get some good privacy? Absolutely.

People forget the GPG days. GPG had a huge flaw back then: you can't send GPG encrypted emails if no one was going to read them. It didn't become viable until that part was hidden in the background.
by SilverElfin | 2025-10-02 20:45:00+00:00
It’s not been under a “blockade” for even a year continuously. Literally earlier this year, hundreds of trucks carrying aid were allowed in per day. That was during the ceasefire that didn’t last. If you go back to the history of blockades of Gaza you’ll see it was very intermittent. And when things were tightened, it was in response to incidents like Hamas rocket attacks.
by LLyaudet | 2025-10-02 20:45:09+00:00
Nothing new about lexicographic order versus natural sort order. However, for people like me who love "creeping featurism", the UI and UX could be improved. First, both lexicographic order and natural sort order are not absolute, they are relative to an underlying character order, itself relying on character grouping algorithm (it is not the same thing to say a byte is a character and to group bytes to have an utf8 character or an utf32LE character). So far, the UI is just an "arrow" upward or downward next to Name column or things like that: easy as pie, one or two clicks next to a column name and you have the chosen order. But if you copy what is available in ERP with web apps like an ERP done with Django or another framework, you can: - sort on many columns, each column sort being one element of a bigger lexicographic order on the chosen columns, - propose many distinct sorts for the same column: most UIs stop at "increasing/decreasing" order, but with a modal, or one or more selects, you can propose to chose your wanted sort with more than two possible values. For example, if dealing with strings, most UIs only propose increasing/decreasing natural sort order grouping with UTF8 characters (GNU/Linux) or UTF16 characters (Windows) and default system collation. But instead you could treat any string as a sequence of bytes and select your character grouping algorithm (including a cascade : try to group as UTF8, if fails, try as UTF32LE, etc., if all fails use each byte as a character (not an ASCII one, UTF8 would have worked, an ISO-8859 for example, see collation after) ... you can start laughing ;) XD I'm still serious but I also know it is quite funny :) ), then select your collation, then select your sort between lexicographic and natural. This is usually not needed, but would give full control to the user. And I love "creeping featurism" and giving full control to the user :). Typically, if one day an AI can code a variant of Gnome and Nautilus in a matter of hours, then with this kind of knowledge, if you know how to ask, you could have such a complex and juicy UI that is functional in a matter of hours :). Maybe one day we will all have custom-made OSs instead of ready-made OSs, and people with knowledge and a taste for complexity will have options mere mortals never thought of :). To return on the current ground, distinct sorts is common in ERPs with "type" or "status" columns: imagine you have an ERP with a webpage for today deliveries, and in some office someone needs the list of today deliveries with those that are already delivered at the top, in another office someone else needs those that are still currently in delivery at the top, and again someone else needs those that have an anomaly at the top, 3 distinct orders at least. I made up this example, and it is simple enough to think that a filter could replace an order, since I only talked about the top. But I can tell you such things do exist in real world applications.
by imglorp | 2025-10-02 20:45:10+00:00
I think humans are weak and prone to leaping on gimmicks and extrapolating with limited information to wherever their imagination takes them.

If shown a dazzling, mysterious, $10m glass cube draped with all that hyperbolic "quantum future wow!!" marketing, ordinarily smart people will leap to anything. In reality, QC doesn't seem to have a ton of applications yet.
by SilverElfin | 2025-10-02 20:45:38+00:00
There’s no “proof” but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. The pallets that never made it to people in need didn’t magically disappear. There is also a history of Hamas stealing aid that goes back MUCH longer than the post-October-7 conflict:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip#Feb...
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-02 20:46:41+00:00
Yes, there can be problems. This can be counteracted by remembering that the file name does not make a header file. Having headers, i.e. forward declaration does make a C file a header file. They seams to be an aversion to include *.c files, but in my opinion doing the same in a *.h file makes the problem only worse.

I think what is the right approach is to make sure, that a header file really only contains the "public" API. Common definitions or static/inline functions should be better put into a separate *.c file that is then included in multiple translation units, but since it is separate from the real API, it can be included in much less other files. Some also use the convention to name this files *.inc or *.imp .

As for name conflicts, C has the tooling for this, as compilation and symbol handling are separate steps. It might not be the cleanest approach, but you can always bundle some translation units into a convenience library and apply a linker script, or strip symbols with objcopy.

Symbols names before compilation can be influenced with the preprocessor by naming a macro with the same name, which essentially renames the symbol. For the mentioned conflict of preprocessor names (aka. macros), I see no other way short of modifying the code or undefining/redefining. Most people also use a build system which can trivially call out to sed, before invoking the compiler.
by jl6 | 2025-10-02 20:46:55+00:00
When the upside is extraordinary, it’s very reasonable to expect some downside, just based on experience of, like, everything ever.

As well as the undeniable benefit to individuals, a cure for aging would unleash a whole new bunch of problems that have been kept in check through the mechanism of people dying off regularly. A society of immortals could be quite alien to us.
by orbisvicis | 2025-10-02 20:47:04+00:00
Maybe, maybe not:

"The NTSB will retain far more employees than during prior shutdowns when it had to furlough 90% or more of its workers. In 2019, the agency did not send investigators to 22 accidents because of the funding lapse. But it made the case to White House budget officials that it needed more personnel for critical functions."

https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/faa-would-fur...
by appreciatorBus | 2025-10-02 20:47:06+00:00
Fair enough, I am not a pilot, just a nerd so I wasn’t aware of this!

I’d agree the helicopter rules seem most appropriate, though I guess I’d still feel like that would still rule out operating anywhere near a building under construction.

That said, a regular helicopter that suffers a loss of power or other fault, still has options like autorotation to at least attempt a landing without killing anyone on the ground. Do drones have any equivalent ? I.e. if battery is below x% it returns to safe landing spot?
by freehorse | 2025-10-02 20:48:08+00:00
The chinese too, afaik, in shanghai drones deliver parcels in specific parcel stations. Flying drones delivering stuff (through the windows?) to upper floors of buildings sounds like sth between scifi and madness right now. Having specific pickup locations solves a lot of problems like the ones here, as drones can just have to follow specific, predetermined routes that can be more easily monitored, instead of having to go to some random, different address.
by runako | 2025-10-02 20:48:10+00:00
> If you discount R&D and "sales and marketing"

If you discount sales & marketing, they will start losing enterprise deals (like the US government). The lack of a free tier will impact consumer/prosumer uptake (free usage usually comes out of the sales & marketing budget).

If you discount R&D, there will be no point to the business in 12 months or so. Other foundation models will eclipse them and some open source models will likely reach parity.

Both of these costs are likely to increase rather than decrease over time.

> ChatGPT is already a new default "pane of glass" for normal people.

OpenAI should certainly hope this is not true, because then the only way to scale the business is to get all those "normal" people to spend a lot more.
by in_cahoots | 2025-10-02 20:48:20+00:00
I am way way out of my wheelhouse here. But you asked, so I'll share my experience and opinion in a roundabout way.

When I was a kid, my parents' nicknames for me were Spock and Ms. Literal. I was gifted, at the top of my class, and my parents advocated for me every single year so that I received a high-quality education. The school was receptive, and I thrived academically. I struggled socially, but being a girl it demonstrated in a lack of friends rather than behavioral disruption. So in every way I was the ideal student. Today I would easily be diagnosed as autistic, but in the 90s that wasn't in the conversation. Especially given our experience with my cousin. I don't think of myself as autistic, I'm just a person with strengths and weaknesses.

Today for better or worse we live in a society that thrives on labels and categorization. Your kid gets a label and all of a sudden the school is able to give him an IEP and the support he deserves and should have been getting all along. In the cynical perspective, your kid gets a label and that affects the way he sees himself and relates to the world. The label becomes a justification instead of just a descriptor.

From the educational perspective, I want the school to do everything possible to help my child succeed. If that means jumping through hoops to get him support then so be it. But from the identity perspective I want my kid to be unburdened. To learn from the world around him without getting pigeonholed. And if a diagnosis was going to lead down this path I would be very intentional about when and to whom I disclosed this information.

This isn't getting into the world of false positives. In my experience (2 boys similar in age to your own) teachers tend to be good referrers just because of the volume of kids they deal with. So if your teacher recommends this there's a good chance they will fall under some diagnostic criteria at some testing facility. The question is what to do with the information.
by rockercoaster | 2025-10-02 20:49:03+00:00
> Hell, the fact that the Supreme Court is a permanent bench of justices versus a rotating set chosen by lot for each case?

I've been making noise about this option but it doesn't seem to have entered even the online-politics-discussion mainstream yet. Everyone's like "expand the court" but I think both expanding it to match the count of circuits, and forming it by lot from lower courts each session (or multiple lots for a session—it might be good to at least have one group choose the cases, and a different one hear and rule on them) is a far more elegant solution and provides longer-lasting protection against problems, while also depoliticizing the reform to a degree (it wouldn't just be whoever's in control instantly gaining several justices) which I think makes it far more likely to actually be an achievable and durable reform.

It's even got a phase-in option that'd be immediately beneficial and also side-step any questions about whether an SC justice can be "demoted" to merely another federal judge: leave the current ones in place, start drawing the new seats by lot immediately. Existing justices' seats fall under the lot system as they come open. Done.
by octoberfranklin | 2025-10-02 20:49:20+00:00
> Picture a world where a slew of today's despots get to live for two, or three human lifespans

Uprisings or outright assassinations would become much more common.

Seriously. Every senior government official or sniper in Russia who isn't happy with Putin is placated by telling themselves "everybody dies sooner or later". Take that away and you'll force people to do something instead of just waiting out the clock.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-02 20:50:09+00:00
I agree, but the converse is also true and is where the value of this DARPA grant lies:

There's a lot of legacy C code that people want to expand on today, but they can't because the existing program is in C and they don't want to write more potentially unsafe C code or add onto an already iffy system.

If we can rewrite in Rust, we can get safety, which is cool but not the main draw. The main draw, I think, is you now have a rust codebase, and you can continue on with that.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-10-02 20:50:37+00:00
> The problem is that Intel doesn't know how to be a foundry in terms of volume and breadth of customers and will need an indefinite amount of capital to learn.

Indefinite is much less than infinite, they will learn because they have to. For better or worse, throwing money at the problem is how the US operates, trowing trillions into AI cannot risk being dependent on unstable Taiwan or capacity-constrained Samsung.
by SilverElfin | 2025-10-02 20:50:48+00:00
Great. So why did Gazans elect Hamas to power in 2006? Their charter includes things like eliminating Israel, people of all other religions, subjugating women, etc. It doesn’t seem like they wanted to decide who is to live or die. And by “they” I don’t just mean Hamas but the population that put them into power and still supports them today. Hamas is the one who attacked Israel with rockets for more than a decade. Their actions caused numerous intermittent blockades that affected residents of the area. It seems like they are content deciding who gets to live or die both in Israel and in the Gaza Strip. But somehow the comments here don’t seem to acknowledge this.

Remember, there have been several two state solution offers in the past. None were accepted by the Islamic Arabs who now call themselves “Palestinian”. Because they aren’t content with coexisting. They want to eliminate Israel and take over the entire region of historical Palestine. That’s what “from the river to the sea” means.
by deadbabe | 2025-10-02 20:50:50+00:00
So basically if this true, you prove my point. If Americans weren’t paying these high costs then R&D would slow down and the whole world wouldn’t get these drugs.

America subsidizes these drugs for the rest of the world, which does not pay its fair share into R&D costs. If we’re to fix our healthcare system, this kind of thing can’t continue.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-02 20:50:58+00:00
At least it's uniform. Unlike Material 3 expressive which might look different depending on the app, or not be implemented at all, or only half implemented in some of Google's own apps even, much like with every other Android redesign.

I get Google can't force it on all the OEMs with their custom skins, but they can at least control their own PixelOS and their own apps.
by ndneighbor | 2025-10-02 20:51:25+00:00
Hello there! Author there, and surprised/delighted with the response. I don't think we had the issue with the cadence, the quarter is arbitrary, but we think it gives us the ability to just go heads down to focus.

With that said, one thing we did and I don't why we did it was that we would "re-justify" why we would want to work on something every three months which isn't great. There is a world where if we had more eng. resources we could have more people than problems and we could take stuff on board as it arrives, but for us deciding on what to work on is a hard decision.

I also agree that market fit is a key factor. I think Railway was lucky that we didn't have to pivot the product 3 to 5 times to get some latch.

What would be the post-quarterty planning process that you would like to see?
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-10-02 20:51:33+00:00
The only sense in which punishment of any kind is reasonable is when it works to disincentivise harmful behavior. If higher risks for shareholders convince them to take a more active role in ensuring that their investment isn't causing harm to the rest of us, then they're at least as reasonable than any other sort of punishment.

If the cheating had gone unnoticed, the shareholders would've been rewarded, so they should bear some risk whether or not they sold after the crime was committed.

As it is, we've got incentives set up to encourage investment in bad behavior so long as you get out before your people get caught.

As for the government abusing the justice system... What rules would create justice is sort of orthogonal to the circumstances under which the rules are broken.