MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sowbug | 2025-10-16 19:24:06+00:00
Why must every service and thing in the US must be a private profit making thing?

In the US, some believe that it's better to replace a government function that costs X with a private entity that charges X. The reasoning is that the efficient free market will drive down X, leading to better prices for everyone.

In reality, my city's parking meters now charge a $0.50 minimum with a service fee of $0.25 to the private company that now runs them. I've tried competing by setting up my own lower-priced meters, but that's not working out so well.
Ask HN: What in the world is going on at Supabase?
by DANmode | 2025-10-16 19:24:11+00:00
Raising more money, but can't reply to vital support/security inquiries?

Like the final request of mine below, asking them to save their own resources, because someone was spinning up fake trials or something using my company's domain:

"Please cancel these signups, they're fraud." Hide quoted text

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Supabase Auth <noreply@mail.app.supabase.io> Date: Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 5:15 PM Subject: Confirm Your Signup To: <employee@***.com>

Confirm your signup Follow this link to confirm your user:

Confirm your mail

You're receiving this email because you signed up for an application powered by Supabase Opt out of these emails Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out to us. We have received your support request and your ticket id is SU-223879

Free plan will receive no guaranteed support response - we try to respond to outage related issues asap however Pro and Enterprise tickets take priority. Upgrade here.

For non-outage related issues, Free plan users are encouraged to ask their questions inside our GitHub Discussions https://github.com/supabase/supabase/discussions.

The Supabase Team.

Me: This is a pretty bad smell for this to still be unanswered and ongoing.

Your "Opt-Out" link remains broken - how is anyone supposed to get in touch with you?!

2-3 months go by: Hey,

For security reasons, we’re not able to process requests submitted by email. Please resubmit your request through the Support Portal so we can verify project ownership.

If your request falls into one of these categories, here’s how to proceed: If your issue is related to login access and this ticket was closed in error, just reply to this email and we’ll reopen it For account deletion, you can remove your account directly in your Supabase dashboard For the latest DPA, visit the Legal Documents page To report a security issue, please submit it through our HackerOne program

Thanks for your understanding, Supabase Support Team Website • Docs • Community • Twitter • Status Sent from Front

"Wow...I'm not a customer.

Months later, this is still unresolved?"
by Scarblac | 2025-10-16 19:24:43+00:00
Well, the supermarkets know know what the effect of their product placement is. If they change it, the customer buys different things, on average.

So, we can say it's reasonable for people to do some research and pick the yoghurt they consider best, but we know most people don't do that. And that supermarkets prefer to give the best spots to sugary yoghurts.

What's wrong with doing the research once for the average person and then regulating the supermarkets so they give those the eye level space? People can still make different choices if they want.
by gr4vityWall | 2025-10-16 19:24:50+00:00
> I wanted to know why that specific concern is an issue for GP

That's exactly what my comment is addressing! People advocating for Free Software don't usually advocate that _only_ the software they use should be free; they advocate for the freedom of all users.

> I never claimed it was Free Software.

You did not, indeed. Sorry if my wording gave the impression I was trying to put claims in your post. That phrase is an answer to this question from you:

> Why do you object to FSL for this specific type of software

We object to it because it makes the software proprietary rather than free.
by dlock17 | 2025-10-16 19:25:01+00:00
They're suggesting the video game workers get a better job outside of the video game industry, as their talents would be better compensated elsewhere.

I agree as this is the main reason why I do not work in the video game industry.

I would love to work in it like many others but seeing friends get chewed up and spat out has dissuaded me over time.
by kmacdough | 2025-10-16 19:25:45+00:00
This is one of known hardest parts of RL. The short answer is human feedback.

But this is easier said than done. Current models require vastly more learning events than humans, making direct supervision infeasable. One strategy is to train models on human supervisors, so they can bear the bulk of the supervision. This is tricky, but has proven more effective than direct supervision.

But, in my experience, AIs don't specifically struggle with the "qualitative" side of things per-se. In fact, they're great at things like word choice, color theory, etc. Rather, they struggle to understand continuity, consequence and to combine disparate sources of input. They also suck at differentiating fact from fabrication. To speculate wildly, it feels like it's missing the the RL of living in the "real world". In order to eat, sleep and breath, you must operate within the bounds of physics and society and live forever with the consequences of an ever-growing history of choices.
by SkyPuncher | 2025-10-16 19:26:46+00:00
I work in the space, this articles is kind of written in the style of "If you know, you know".

This role is becoming popular because customers and prospects are demanding more and more information about a company's internal controls and processes before committing to buying. Mega companies have cared about this stuff for ages. Historically, the need was met with Audits. A big ticket item that gets cooked into the price of a $$$$ deal. The buyer sends their people into the vendor to validate controls are in place. That type of stuff still happens on big deals, but it's essentially coming down stream to your every day deal. Often, as a byproduct of a compliance need (like SOC II).

You'll likely see this role dealing directly with customers to answer questions about compliance, security, and controls. Essentially, it's like a mini-audit.
by floxy | 2025-10-16 19:27:00+00:00
Here is the story I wanted to read about based on the headline. Post WWII, the U.S. government had given automobile makers a directive to include a spark gap in the rear-view mirrors of vehicles. If you were fleeing a potential nuclear event in your vehicle, this spark gap would then give a visual indication of the electromagnetic pulse from the detonation, giving the driver a valuable second or two to prepare for the slower-moving incoming shockwave. And that this little-known feature has survived in our mirrors up to this day, even though it is completely useless now with modern automobile's electronic fuel injection, etc. that would be rendered inoperable by the EMP.
by huqedato | 2025-10-16 19:27:15+00:00
The tragic part that all my 'corporate' customers don't even want to hear about Elixir. For them only JS, Python, C# and Java exist in this world. Any other stack is either "unacceptable", "unsustainable", "exceedingly expensive" or "unmanageable". In 7 years of using Elixir I couldn't impose it in any corporate project, used it only for hobby/personal/indie stuff.
by catgary | 2025-10-16 19:28:10+00:00
These companies are also biased towards solutions that will more-or-less trap you in a heavily agent-based workflow.

I’m surprised/disappointed that I haven’t seen any papers out of the programming languages community about how to integrate agentic coding with compilers/type system features/etc. They really need to step up, otherwise there’s going to be a lot of unnecessary CO2 produced by tools like this.
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-16 19:29:03+00:00
In my case the smell came from running over a rotten deer carcass. I settled on about a dozen trips through an undercarriage carwash them leaving the windows all open for a month. I figured the smell would go away eventually so I wasn't eager to risk long term damage from ozone, but my god was the smell awful for the first week.
by noelwelsh | 2025-10-16 19:29:23+00:00
Winner takes all just means that a few people capture most of the value. That is the case in entertainment. It doesn't say anything about the talent needed to succeed in that industry. What you need to succeed varies depends on the exact industry. Athletes (who are entertainers) have more objective criteria than, say, pop stars. Even in the case of athletes there are factors beyond genetics (e.g. access to coaching.)

For pop stars you need to have some combination of the right look and ability to perform. Ed Sheeran looks a bit like a muppet but seems to be very good at creating catchy songs. Taylor Swift, to me at least, isn't that good at catchy tunes but she has the look and lives the life style. I imagine there are aspects of personality that are not as obvious but very important to survive in the industry.
by jdlshore | 2025-10-16 19:29:39+00:00
I don’t think that story illustrates the point you think it does. Prices aren’t based on cost, they’re based on perceived value on the part of the buyer, and the marketing and brand recognition behind Fritos raises its perceived value much higher than the generic brand.

To put it another way: all generic brands are cheaper than their name-brand counterparts, and that fact has nothing to do with debt or cost structures.
by scrlk | 2025-10-16 19:30:01+00:00
Virgin Media in the UK are somewhat infamous for being non-committal about IPv6. There was a thread that ran for 13 years on their forums about it (locked in 2023): https://community.virginmedia.com/discussions/Setup/ipv6-sup...

Also: https://www.havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/
by mrkramer | 2025-10-16 19:30:13+00:00
Password managers and 2FA mostly solve the problem of credential stuffing but unfortunately millions of people still don't use it. 2FA is actually pretty good unless your account is a high profile account then bad actors might try to SIM swap[0] you and hijack your mobile phone number and essentially bypass 2FA. But there are others ways of 2FA too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_swap_scam
by dingnuts | 2025-10-16 19:30:24+00:00
>that we'll just have to let ChatGPT drive the ship and knock everyone out in cryosleep so they don't mess with the ship.

"Ah! It's good to be awake, Chat! Turn on the outside view so I can see where we are!"

display turns on.. nothing but space to be seen

"Uh, Chat, we seem to be in the wrong place. I can't see the planet we were traveling to!"

....

ChatGPT: "You're absolutely right!"
by badosu | 2025-10-16 19:30:24+00:00
Working with Phoenix, and even more so Elixir and OTP, has been a great joy at a similar to almost the same level I had when transitioning from DotNet to Ruby in 2010 for my experience.

There are still some rough edges, and the job market might be more challenging, but overall I feel anything Elixir related at the moment provides for a high quality filter - both in terms of job opportunities and teams as well as the general product development experience.
by beyarkay | 2025-10-16 19:30:36+00:00
> He is trying to lax the general public perception around AIs shortcomings

This is not at all what I'm trying to do. This same essay is cross-posted on LessWrong[1] because I think ASI is the most dangerous problem of our time.

> This "we can't fix a bug like in regular software" theatre hides the fact that we can design better benchmarks, or accountability frameworks

I'm not sure how I can say "your intuitions are wrong and you should be careful" and have that be misintepreted as "ignore the problems around AI"

[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZFsMtjsa6GjeE22zX/why-your-b...
by Tevo | 2025-10-16 19:30:36+00:00
Didn't one of the Elbrus CPUs have an x86 translation layer in hardware? Trying to get that to execute code at reasonable speeds, Transmeta style, to use as a replacement to western-supplied hardware wherever you have an explicit need for x86 wouldn't sound particularly far-fetched to me, if I didn't know so little about what's going on within Russia.
by timr | 2025-10-16 19:30:39+00:00
Yeah, I read the post. Telling me that there's a chrome extension and some apps tells me nothing. Saying that the code is 1/3 tests is...something, but it's not exceptional, by any means.

I've got an code base I've been writing from scratch with LLMs, its of equivalent LOC and testing ratio, and my experiences trusting the models couldn't be more different. They routinely emit hot garbage.
by benterix | 2025-10-16 19:30:41+00:00
> This is also why not everyone is an early adopter.

Usually, there are relatively few adopters of a new technology.

But with LLMs, it's quite the opposite: there was a huge number of early adopters. Some got extremely excited and run hundreds of agents all the time, some got burned and went back to the good old ways of doing things, whereas the majority is just using LLMs from time to time for various tasks, bigger of smaller.
by jojomodding | 2025-10-16 19:30:44+00:00
Because constructors are really weird. Usually in Rust, when a struct is constructed, it already upholds all its invariants because construction is the "last" step in the initialization function. But with a C++-like constructor, it starts with a struct where all fields are in an invalid state, and then the struct's invariants are slowly established field by field. This is kinda impossible to square with Rust's safety promise. Even in safe languages like Java, there are often bugs when one calls other function from the constructor, that now observes the instance under construction violating its usual invariants. And this is also something Rust wants to avoid.
by 0x457 | 2025-10-16 19:31:48+00:00
Snow Leopard is probably the most loved released. I like Tahoe though.

> I’m seriously considering only using a phone as my personal computing device now that Android takes convergence semi seriously.

Not really. Google, in fact, very opposes that convergence because it will hurt ChromeBook and chomecast sales.

Pretty much any android today and even Nexus phones let you go from usb-c to HDMI, but not Pixels. Because that's what chromecast is for.
by etaweb | 2025-10-16 19:32:35+00:00
I worked with Elixir/Phoenix for over 3 years, and I recently started to learn Crystal, mostly to create CLI apps or other programs where I want to create a simple executable binary. I wanted a more expressive language than Go, and easier than Rust.

Out of curiosity, I took a quick look at some of the web frameworks available, they are interesting. Lucky's Components looks pretty good, but I still prefer Phoenix's Components because the syntax make it very close to raw HTML. Compilation is not incremental and is single threaded which means I have to wait at least 5 seconds every time I make a change (this was on a minimal project). It's not that bad, but compared to Elixir/Phoenix where it's almost instantaneous, it makes a difference.

Still, Crystal is an awesome language, and if for one reason Elixir was not a choice for a web project, I would definitely consider a Crystal framework.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-16 19:32:38+00:00
Right, the 15 year old paying for Madden 32 doesn't realize that they could play Madden 08 released on the gamecube and have a nearly identical experience, including literally the same bugs and broken behavior as that game from 20 years ago.

Do people get that? Modern madden has worse oddities. Madden 08 wouldn't allow you to put more than 255 points on the scoreboard. Modern madden will completely break before you can even reach that point.

The animation/behavior systems have the exact same flaw where if you run a play for more than about 20 seconds characters just... shut off. They stop trying to run after the ball carrier even!

The knobs you can tweak on the simulation engine are the same on N64, Xbox 360, Xbox 1 X series X X'er hyper X, the damn Nintendo DS!

No wonder companies are so hostile to emulation. They would rather just resell the same game, sometimes with nicer textures.
by kulahan | 2025-10-16 19:32:43+00:00
In the Northeast corner of the US, there are tons and tons of bakeries. I was really bummed when I moved away and discovered most of the country just eats crappy bread.

Still, almost every grocery store I've been to (even the lower-cost ones in my region, like King Soopers) has a fresh bakery area. It's such a profitable product to sell, it really makes no sense not to add it if you have any space at all to spare. Even Target has one.

I'm cheap, so I go like 30 minutes before closing time and get the bread for like 80% off because it doesn't have the shelf-stabilization stuff, so it will go bad in a couple days.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-10-16 19:32:52+00:00
>Would you still follow through on a mission Ferdinand II of Aragon sent your grand grand grand grand grand grandfather on in 1498? I probably wouldn’t. These goal would likely not even make much sense to me anymore, or be completely irrelevant in today’s world.

If you are on a ship in the middle of an endless ocean, or interstellar space, with many decades or centuries before reaching somewhere safe then truly what choice do you have?
by niwtsol | 2025-10-16 19:33:01+00:00
I think this assumption is incorrect "Most cars are useful for 100,000 miles so the vehicle should be able to deliver for about 416 days."

There are several reports of the older version waymo cars lasting >200k miles, that would double the cost of your human driver and make the low end more profitable.

I'd assume that the insurance waymo has to pay per car is much lower as the removal of human drivers and proof of XXX miles driven without incident would drastically reduce the risk to insure. I also think the economies of scale and 24/7 always on + improvements on iterations will do nothing but drive those costs down.
by ericksoa | 2025-10-16 19:33:31+00:00
Sometimes layoffs are designed to give air cover for execs that want to get rid of "networks of detractors" who are causing problems, like how in a game company there might be a network of influential luddites who oppose use of LLMs over ideological reasons, even if the use case is good.

IMO those are virtuous layoffs, sometimes you need to clear your company culture of troublemakers who are getting in the way of company strategy.
by 0x457 | 2025-10-16 19:34:21+00:00
Yes, sorry, it wasn't clear. I meant this quote has nothing in common with this situation we're talking about.

> has to contend with that reputational damage if they don't take steps to prevent this sort of thing before it happens (like letting the developers know that private-on-paper API is going to be yanked in advance, or making it mechanically impossible for anyone outside of Apple's own code to invoke that API long before someone depends on it).

Again, that is what dev builds are for. Developers had months to verify their software still works on an OS that has confirmed release date and has very high ration of users that install the latest and greatest.
by Maxatar | 2025-10-16 19:34:27+00:00
Consider a move assign to a vector<int> from src to this. The first step is for this to free its resources, the second step is to assign src resources to this, the third step is to set src resources to null.

If src and this are equal and you don't check for it, then you end up destroying src/this resources and the end result would be an empty vector (since the last step is to clear everything out).

The expected behavior is a no-op.
by conradfr | 2025-10-16 19:34:42+00:00
That's also where I'm at. For any project with UI (and auth/auth etc) I went back to Symfony (and Vue). I can't stand Phoenix templating especially layouts and I couldn't convince José of the greatness of template inheritance like with jinja2 in python ;)

But I'm happy running worker type things in elixir & Phoenix if I can.
by alganet | 2025-10-16 19:34:44+00:00
Your angle is "there is no oversight, why are you asking for it?". It's the same overall angle as the guy who was spreading covid rumours here in this thread.

There are efforts at estabilishing it though. And it's hard and expensive for wet labs, but it could be much simpler for things like simulating biological pathways.

One could also see your response as "other nations are developing threats, we should race", which I personally think is misguided.

Instead of these petty armchair discussions, we should instead focus on being more serious about it.
by alephnerd | 2025-10-16 19:35:20+00:00
> where's that 20% time that used to be the norm in IT

That was never the norm outside of Google.

And to be brutally honest, if we are offering a TC of $200k-400k, we expect you to execute at that level of performance.

If you want to just be a code monkey, why shouldn't I find someone else?

> most companies aren't loyal to their employees - or they cease to be loyal and supportive towards their employees

There is no reason for employees to be loyal to a company nor companies to be loyal to employees.

Do you job or we can find someone else who can - most people overvalue their actual value to an organization.

Similarly, as an employee, if you detest an employer, find another job and give your 2 weeks - no more, no less.

But to land another job, you will need to self study constantly.

> Headhunter rates...

Most companies do not use headhunters.

> count the distributed costs for general hiring, "wasted" hours on interviews and their preparation that don't lead to a hire, or the cost to reacquire knowledge that hasn't been formally documented, or the time until the "new" guy has shown enough capability to be trusted to do stuff on their own

As a business, those legitimately are not as significant a cost as dealing with an underachieving employee on payroll when we are paying $200k-400k TC. Most product lines only generate high 7 figures to low 8 figures in revenue a year, so an underachieving but highly paid employee has a significant drag on the business of a specific product.

> To hire an individual person, yes

Even creating the AoP to hire N amount of employees is largely proposed by EMs and Directors, and then iterated or negotiated on with VPs and above

> To hire an individual person, yes. But the decision to do entire departments worth of layoffs because the stonk is going on a dive after some exec's pipe dream didn't play out? That's C level. And these fuckers don't get to feel the consequences.

If a business doesn't work out, there's no reason not to kill an entire product line.

Companies can and should take risks, but should also be open to kill product lines if they do not work out.

I have also axed execs on boards that I have been a part of if I have seen a persistent issue in performance that is directly attributable to their issues.

---------

Tbf, I think you are in Germany or Western Europe, so I cannot speak to how Engineering Management is done there in the software industry versus the US.

If I was paying German level TCs, I'd probably be more forgiving.