MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fainpul | 2025-10-04 19:50:59+00:00
> Stupid mistake by a programmer assumption turns into a program crash.

I guess you can just catch the exception in Ada? In Rust you might instead manually check the age validity and return Err if it's out of range. Then you need to handle the Err. It's the same thing in the end.

> Why would you want to further constrain the field

You would only do that if it's a hard requirement (this is the problem with contrived examples, they make no sense). And in that case you would also have to implement some checks in Rust.
by smcin | 2025-10-04 19:51:17+00:00
Nokia's global market share was ~50% in smartphones back in 2007. Remember that?

Comparing "brand moat" in real-world restaurant vs online services where there's no actual barrier to changing service is silly. Doubly silly when they're free users, so they're not customers. (And then there are also end-users when OpenAI is bundled or embedded, e.g. dating/chatbot services).

McDonald's has lock-in and inertia through its franchisees occupying key real-estate locations, media and film tie-ins, promotions etc. Those are physical moats, way beyond a conceptual "brand moat" (without being able to see how Hamilton Wright Helmer's book characterizes those).
by Aurornis | 2025-10-04 19:51:45+00:00
> aware that "wanting to do engineering" probably is stopping you from financial freedom/a more interesting life.

This only makes sense if you assume the startup will fail and you ignore all of the high-paying engineering jobs out there.

If financial freedom is the goal, the easier and far more reliable path is to pursue the well-trodden road to a job in Big Tech and put some minimal effort into the promotion process.

The average startup founder does not walk away with financial freedom or even a functional company. The average outcome is that the startup doesn't work out and they pay the opportunity cost of having lost out on years of career income.

Even the acqui-hires and small time acquisitions that happen in my local startup scene rarely leave the founders with more money than they could have earned at a regular 9-5 engineering or EM role.

It's only a select few who get that coveted large exit that turns into financial freedom after 5-15 years of grinding.
by benbridle | 2025-10-04 19:52:18+00:00
The sketch layer is accessed with the 'eye' button in the bottom-right corner of the canvas screen. Clicking that button toggles visibility of the sketch layer and reveals three more buttons, and clicking the newly-revealed pencil button toggles drawing to the sketch layer instead of the canvas.

The decision to implement only two layers for Cobalt was a conscious one. The design of Cobalt is focused towards speeding up the user and helping them to finish their images, and I found that being able to go back and tweak each layer made it more difficult to commit to a final image.
by corimaith | 2025-10-04 19:52:26+00:00
Even if you only had a handful of civilizations, the sheer time that has passed and size of the universe should mean that life should still be alot more apparent.

With sublight velocities achievable today, I recall it would only take around a million years for a Von Newmann probe to cover the entire galaxy. Such a probe is quite conceivable, so why isn't there more evidence of such probes everywhere?

Another point I feel is that proliferation of life should be an self-reinforcing affair, for intelligent life even more so. A spacefaring nation may terraform or just seed planets, and these in time will replicate similar behaviors. At a certain point, a galaxy teeming with life should be very hard to reverse given all the activity. A life itself isn't necessarily evolved from biology, AI machine lifeforms should also well suited to proliferate, yet we don't see them anyways.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-10-04 19:52:47+00:00
> "Try different ways to refactor it. Tomorrow, show me your best solution."

The cost/benefit analysis doesn't add up for two reasons:

First, a refactored codebase works almost the same as non-refactored one, that is, the tangible benefit is small.

Second, how many times are you going to refactor the codebase? Once and... that's it. There's simply no need for that much compute for lack of sufficient beneficial work.

That is, the present investments are going to waste unless we automate and robotize everything, I'm OK with that but it's not where the industry is going.
by fivestones | 2025-10-04 19:53:27+00:00
I want to be able to do all these same kinds of searches too. Especially layering on searches, like what you said about how the search ideally could be bookmarked and searched on. Like any search result could become a smart album maybe. I’d love to be able to search something like [all photos in the box I drew on the map] and then out of those results [photos in 2021 and 2023] and then out of those results [photos of person x] and out of those results a clip search like [people walking on the beach]. It would also be great to remove photos from the search like [photos in this geographical area] but not [clip search for “yellow lab”].
by lnbharath | 2025-10-04 19:54:40+00:00
That’s fair- they do operate at very different layers of the stack.

But I think what’s interesting is how their goals are starting to overlap, even if their architectures don’t. Even their recent product launches are alike.

Cloudflare’s building physical reach and reliability— real infra, like you said.

Vercel’s building emotional reach— developer trust, design, workflow integration.

Both are trying to own the default path developers take from idea to deploy.

So even if they’re not in the same market today, they’re converging toward the same developer mindshare.
by creer | 2025-10-04 19:54:42+00:00
Your comment mentioned

> cost 200 dev hours, and save 400 dev hours

And I argue that this is rarely the right perspective. It's 200 hours NOW - and that the company doesn't have budget for. In order to save 400 hours maybe perhaps, if the stars align, two years from now. It's not the same budget. It's not the same time frame. It's not your dept's responsibility. In theory yes maybe but in most businesses, no. These 200 hours now are an investment. This 400 hours maybe perhaps are savings, not profit. They may allow an equivalent 400 hours spent on some profitable new product - but then just ask for budget for the profitable new product, don't worry about where that money comes from. That's sooo far above your pay grade, it's not even funny. If the idea for where to spend the 400 hours is worthwhile, the chairman will raise money to do it. Bring THAT idea to management. THAT would be well received.

In summary: the savings and the new product don't come from the same bits of the balance sheets. They don't affect the future company the same. The wasted 400 hours are already considered in the estimates for the next few years, they are essentially already amortized. They already don't matter. It's not fun for an individual engineer to consider that their work for the next 3 years is financially already long forgotten, lol (?), but basically yes.

It MAY be the right perspective for several levels of management higher up, if people are REALLY working on a 40 year perspective for, I don't know, a mainstream database package, a compiler. But nobody does (in first approximation).

It's also is a good viewpoint where crazy thin differences do make an impact (a refinery).

Still: Most companies that don't plan to be gone in two years do have a methods department or working group. People who do try and make the processes better. They have budget to do that. Bring the idea to them. Hell, even start working part or full time on their budget. But with the understanding that this is yet another group, mission, budget. It's not 200 hours here in exchange for 400 there. And this is a highly technical group - not CXO track except perhaps for a brief stint there.
by prerok | 2025-10-04 19:54:50+00:00
I would argue that was one of the reasons why those languages lost.

I distinctly remember arguments for functions working on array of 10. Oh, you want array of 12? Copy-paste the function to make it array of 12. What a load of BS.

It took Pascal years to drop that constraint, but by then C had already won.

I never ever wanted the compiler or runtime to check a subrange of ints. Ever. Overflow as program crash would be better, which I do find useful, but arbitrary ranges chosen by programmer? No thanks. To make matters worse, those are checked even by intermediate results.

I realize this is opinioned only on my experience, so I would appreciate a counter example where it is a benefit (and yes, I worked on production code written in Pascal, French variant even, and migrating it to C was hilariously more readable and maintainable).
by beeflet | 2025-10-04 19:55:00+00:00
>Blocked by whom? If the relay (which pulls records from your PDS) “blocks” your PDS, you can simply switch to one that doesn’t.

Blocked by pretty much everyone, in the case of email. If most people use gmail or hotmail, and these mail providers block mail from new domains regardless of DMARC/DKIM/etc. then you are effectively blocked from sending email to most people. It's inevitable that this happens because there is no sybil resistance built in to the network layer, so providers have to be blocky to prevent spam.

> The beauty of AT infra is every piece of it can be run separately. That’s “meaningful” decentralization.

So kind of like how in the web, every website can be run separately?

You can switch, but everyone else won't coordinate to switch at the same time. So you have been deplatformed. It is the same with the web, where if you get banned from a forum (perhaps one that changes its rules to suit sponsors), you can switch to using a forum that no one uses due to network effects.
by stebalien | 2025-10-04 19:55:05+00:00
I used to do this. What finally killed it wasn't reputation, it was the fact that I needed 100% uptime or risk losing messages, getting my address blacklisted, etc. Email is supposed to be resilient to down time (retries, trying each MX record, etc.) but I found that large mail providers tend to just bounce and walk away.

Worse, GitHub (back in 2016 and 2018) would mark a recipient as "unavailable" after a single bounce, refusing to send any more notifications to that address. They since improved the situation and their support was actually very helpful and responsive here, but it's pretty clear that modern SMTP senders have an expectation that recipients will be "always online" that didn't exist when the protocol was invented.
by bitwize | 2025-10-04 19:55:15+00:00
And nothing of value was lost. BYOD means Corporate can push whatever spyware they want onto your personal phone. I tell any employer I work for, if you really need me to be reachable by phone via an app, you can supply me a work phone. Otherwise I'll do without. I keep a bright-line distinction between personal devices and work devices, and never mix the two. My boss knows this explicitly.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-10-04 19:55:25+00:00
Strange, I've had the opposite experience: I've mostly worked with small startups and every few job changes will try a go at a big tech company. I'm always shocked at the gap in talent between small startups and large tech companies. Far and away all of the best and most talented coworkers I've had have been at small startups.

Of course there's a lot of variance among small companies (much moreso than large ones). But the one thing that all small companies have is people who can actually get shit done not matter what it requires. The amount of "not my lane" nonsense that occupies corporate life is both exhausting and boring. I understand why this exists for practical reasons, but it's no fun.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-04 19:55:28+00:00
> some typical b2b saas that makes 500k-5M in ARR.

The typical B2B SaaS startup never gets that far.

You're looking at a survivorship bias subset. If someone had an automatic path to get to that promised land then it would be an easy choice, but it's never that easy.

A 500K ARR SaaS is also hardly a path to financial freedom. That's too small to hire a competent engineer while also paying yourself a high salary, so you're basically on call all of the time. You're also doing sales, customer support, and possibly fretting a sudden 100K drop in your ARR if your biggest customer cancels their contract because the economy changes.
by striking | 2025-10-04 19:55:38+00:00
Not sure if I've been using it wrong but I've tried using the Zod-to-structured-output helper with GPT-5 and often gotten weird stuff like trailing commas that break a parse or seeing multiple JSON responses in the same response.

Ultimately there are still going to be bugs. For this reason and several others you'll still need it wrapped in a retry.
by manmal | 2025-10-04 19:55:46+00:00
> in the absence of a primary pathogen

And how can absence of a pathogen be determined, in vivo? That sounds a bit overconfident in current tools, no? H. pylori apparently can hide inside Candida cells. Biofilm lets pathogens prosper while hiding them from diagnosis. Who knows what else is going on.

I don’t think the microbiome hypothesis can be rejected at this point. Studies were flawed, yes.

I personally am not a fan of the status-quo-ism that comments such as yours express. There’s so much that’s not explored here.
by zer00eyz | 2025-10-04 19:56:11+00:00
> 59% of respondents (and 58% of Republicans) blame landlords and banks more than government regulation for the high cost of housing.

I find this stat odd.

It runs counter to another set of data that exists, the rate of home ownership: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

Home ownership is a great indicator of "I will vote" and furthermore its an indicator of "I will vote to protect the price of my home"

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/if-you-lived-here-you-...

So for as much as this data may be true, I'm fairly certain that it isnt an accurate measure of how people are going to vote.
by dangus | 2025-10-04 19:57:01+00:00
Genuine question, are they? The responses in this article seem very reasonable to me. Is there some evidence that these explanations are lies?

I’m a little out of the loop so it’s a genuine question.

I suspect that people are scared because the word “digital” is involved.

I can’t get a job in the US without presenting a social security card and drivers license, or alternatively, a passport (and there are a few other methods of identification and proof of right to work). I have to prove that I have the legal right to work and the employer submits my information to an electronic system.

It would actually be nice if the process was more digital rather than having to send my employer copies of my ID(s) or physically presenting them.
by tliltocatl | 2025-10-04 19:57:03+00:00
None of all those memory-safe languages allows you to work without a heap. And I don't mean "avoid allocations in that little critical loop". I mean "no dynamic allocation, never ever". A lot of tasks doesn't actually require dynamic allocation, for some it's highly undesirable (e. g. embedded with limited memory and long uptimes), for some it's not even an option (like when you are writing an allocator). Rust has some support for zero-runtime, but a lot of it's features is either useless of outright in the way when you are not using a heap. Swift and others don't even bother.

Unpopular opinion: safety is a red herring. A language shouldn't prevent the programmer from doing the unsafe thing, rather it should provide an ergonomic way to do things in a safe way. If there is no such way - that's on language designer, not the programmer. Rust being the worst offender: there is still no way to do parent links, other than ECS/"data oriented" which, while it has it's advantages, is both quite unergonomic and provides memory safety by flaying it, stuffing the skin with cow dung and throwing the rest out of the window.

>strong dislike towards Go.

Go unsolves problem without unlocking any new possibilities. Zig unsolves problem before it aims towards niches where the "solution" doesn't work.
by fooker | 2025-10-04 19:58:12+00:00
> Such a probe is quite conceivable, so why isn't there more evidence of such probes everywhere?

Time, not space, is your answer here.

Two reasons -

(1) civilizations might not survive long enough to do this.

(2) 13 billion years is a long time. So you have the reciprocal of that as the chances to be in the right year to see such a probe. And with results from the new telescope we now have hints that the 13 billion number is bogus, the universe is likely far older.
by avianlyric | 2025-10-04 19:58:23+00:00
> Huh? If you have worked on this stuff, surely DDA and CDA ring a bell? They're both based on asymmetric cryptography, and they absolutely allow the terminal to dynamically verify whether a given card is authentic or cloned, without having to go online.

Yes I was a little wrong here. My most recent experience in this area is dealing with messages on the issuer side. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything serious at the card config level, and don’t have a huge amount of experience with the handshakes that occur between card and terminal.

The missing nuance is that the transaction cryptogram is symmetrical encrypted, and that’s the only cryptographic blob sent over the card network to the issuer. As the asymmetric stuff only happens locally between card and terminal, and isn’t included in any data transmitted from terminal to issuer.

So the terminal can check that the card is a real card using asymmetric encryption, and that the produced transaction cryptogram was produced by that card. But none of that evidence is passed on to the issuer, only the symmetric cryptogram, which can’t be used for non-repudiation is sent to the issuer later.

Hence the experience dealing with forged transaction cryptograms, which were forged by an acquirer in a systematic manner to try and gain stronger chargeback protection because their sloppy transaction processing resulted in them processing a lot of fraudulent transactions, and then being hit with a lot of chargebacks. The process of “proving” to the network that this acquirer was forging cryptograms was sending a letter signed by legal team attesting to fact we had evidence of forgery, plus a much nastier letter sent to the acquirer in question to knock it off, and stop doing obviously illegal things. Ultimately it’s the acquirers legal counsel that acts as the enforcement mechanism here, and the obvious threat of lawsuit they’re clearly can’t win tends to be a very strong motivator for companies to tidy up their act.

> EMV is a cryptographically sound (if dated and very complex) scheme, and secrecy of implementation is actually much less of a security factor than you seem to claim, despite the industry's (largely historical) obsession with secrecy.

I may have overstated it a little. Bad habits from spending too much time dealing with PCI rubbish. The difficult thing to get across in these threads about payment networks is how much of the systems “security” really comes from clever legal contracts, and smart distribution of liability and risk. Effectively making in everyone’s interests to not do anything really silly, but the actual technical security is almost secondary to legal mechanisms that exist to ensure that participants are highly motivated to make sure that fraudulent transactions are kept to a minimum.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-10-04 19:59:43+00:00
Wildly different. One of the biggest things at a small company is that you can wear multiple hats to solve a problem and not step on anyone's toes. Need to play PM, backend engineer and data scientist to get a product shipped fast? No problem, and you'll be seen as a person who can get things done by leadership (if you make sure to keep your work visible).

The main divide I've seen between what makes people happy in one or the other style tech company is whether they really enjoy solving problems or doing their job. If you want to check in, do only what is technically required of you and get out, then big tech corp is for you. If you are mainly interested in finding solutions to problems and you are happy to employ whatever is necessary to do so, you'll have more enjoy small companies much more.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-04 20:00:02+00:00
At runtime it depends. If we're using arbitrary outside integers which might be three, we're obliged to check yes, nothing is for free. But perhaps we're mostly or entirely working with numbers we know a priori are never three.

NonZero<T> has a "constructor" named new() which returns Option<NonZero<T>> so that None means nope this value isn't allowed because it's zero. But unwrapping or expecting an Option is constant, so NonZeroI8::new(9).expect("Nine is not zero") will compile and produce a constant that the type system knows isn't zero.

Three in particular does seem like a weird choice, I want Balanced<signed integer> types such as BalancedI8 which is the 8-bit integers including zero, -100 and +100 but crucially not including -128 which is annoying but often not needed. A more general system is envisioned in "Pattern Types". How much more general? Well, I think proponents who want lots of generality need to help deliver that.
by ranger_danger | 2025-10-04 20:00:13+00:00
> A lot of things actually are black and white

My issue is with people who take this to the extreme and apply it to the vast majority of their responses, the so-called "know-it-alls" that Dunning & Kruger told us about.

I think if we want to be seen as truly intelligent, we need to have much more humility and empathy, and accept that we can't know everything about everything, and not try to act like we do.

> almost never has the accuser been able to actually show a nuance to the situation

I accept that that has been your experience, but I don't think it applies to everyone, not even close, and I think it also doesn't mean that they were wrong, they may just be unable to articulate a better response than you.
by leptons | 2025-10-04 20:00:17+00:00
>its best to position yourself not as on the side of the "code" but as a EQUAL PARTNER to leadership/product/whoever has power.

That sounds so utopian to me that it's practically ridiculous. Never in my 40+ years working in tech has any higher-up treated me or thought of me as anywhere near equal. I try to treat the people on my team that I manage as close to equal as I can, but the higher ups would really have zero compunction about "letting me go" in favor of the new hot whoever that someone introduced them to recently, or whatever. They very rarely listen to reason about any issue and it's rare that I'd even get to talk to them.

It's been like this at every startup and company I've ever worked for.
by fragmede | 2025-10-04 20:01:03+00:00
Those are all fair points, but the Internet and smartphones happened. Software is a necessity for existing in society these days. Yeah it sucks that we'd be pulling up the drawbridge. Donate some of your software developer salary to non-profits to make testing accessible to whichever groups you see as the younger version of you to assuage your guilt. Crowdstrike shouldn't have been possible. Mulitple airlines going down for days because they botched an upgrade because it wasn't properly resourced. Someone cranking out some silly shit on the weekend doesn't need licensing, but having unprotected S3 buckets full of drivers license photos of your users in this day and age should be criminally liable.
by measurablefunc | 2025-10-04 20:01:05+00:00
If you believe computers can think then you must be able to explain why a chain of dominoes is also thinking when I convert an LLM from transistor relay switches into the domino equivalent. If you don't fall for the marketing hype & study both the philosophical & mathematical literature on computation then it is obvious that computers (or any mechanical gadget for that matter) can not qualify for any reasonable definition of "thinking" unless you agree that all functionally equivalent manifestations of arithmetic must be considered "thinking", including cascading dominoes that correspond to the arithmetic operations in an LLM.