MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yawaramin | 2025-11-05 01:14:28+00:00
> I was really confused about a nonsense error in a match statement until I realized that it was because of a nested match statement.

This kind of confusion instantly goes away when you use auto-formatting with ocamlformat, which is the recommended formatting tool for the OCaml platform. It would line up your match cases in such a way that you would be able to almost immediately tell that the compiler is interpreting the dangling cases as part of the inner match.
by protocolture | 2025-11-05 01:14:55+00:00
>The real question is whether their networking has a value of hundreds of millions to the company, or to the CEO

And this is an important consideration for the board of directors/shareholders to consider.

>Why not? It's enough to live a very comfortable life. If you want to, you can retire after a single-digit number of years. Anyone who needs more money clearly has a serious spending problem and shouldn't be anywhere near your company's finances.

If someone is good enough to attract a higher salary, then the salary cap will send them to somewhere without the cap. You would likely keep the people simply able to talk their way into higher salaries, but guarantee that any actual talent goes offshore.

>And the whole "but look how much money they are making/saving the company" argument you usually hear is bullshit as well.

Arguable. CEO isnt meant to be peak sales guy, but it often is peak sales guy. The issue with this line of thinking is that it ends with "Well lets just pay them performance/sales bonuses" which is actually how a lot of them are getting big payments, but people are also already mad about those for some reason.

If you land a 20 million dollar recurring revenue contract, and you had a previous commitment to 5% of that as a bonus, your previous commitment should be honored. If you get an offer to come do that for someone else for 10 million per year, that's reasonable.

> I bet there are plenty of mid-level FAANG engineers who have saved their company literally tens of millions of dollars a year by optimizing some code, but they don't get those obscene salaries either.

If an engineer negotiated a contract that included such a provision it would be great. I imagine most engineers aren't as capable as a CEO to negotiate such a contract. Its not impossible I am aware of an engineer that resolved a technical issue for a stock exchange nabbing a few mil in bonuses that year. Mostly these things exist in the contract/consultancy space.

>It gets even worse once you take into account the bottom rungs on the ladder: paying the CEO tens or hundreds of millions a year would be a lot less problematic if that very same company didn't have workers literally peeing in bottles, having to work around the body of their dead coworker, or having the building literally collapse on their head.

Ok, is that a fixed goalpost or is it on wheels? Mike Cannon-Brookes is worth a few billion. Is anyone peeing in bottles or wrangling dead bodies at Atlassian?
by drivebyhooting | 2025-11-05 01:15:24+00:00
Let’s play out what the successful story looks like, for example in music generation:

* thousands of composers and musicians “contribute” their works for free to OpenAI and their ilk.

* models are trained and can produce movie scores, personalized sound tracks, etc

* the market for composers dwindles to a small sliver. Few if any choose to pursue it.

* OpenAI et al have a de facto monopoly on music creation.

* Soon the art of composition is lost. There are a few who can make a living as composers by selling their persona rather than their music. They actually just use OpenAI to write it for them.

Is that the future we want? Inevitable.
by epolanski | 2025-11-05 01:15:53+00:00
I don't think it is.

I think it's selective attention plus recency bias.

This drift has started 24 years ago with 9/11 and no president has stopped or slowed it.

People who dislike who's in charge say the same things as always, people who dislike such measures same the same things as always regardless of who's in the white house, etc.
by chipsrafferty | 2025-11-05 01:16:11+00:00
It would conceivably be possible to have a lot of physical states. That doesn't mean that they are actually possible from our current state and rewrite rules. So it's not actually a given that it can be built just because it's physical.

Your very idea is also predicated on the idea that it's possible for a real object to exist that isn't physical, and I think most modern philosophers reject the idea of a spiritual particle.
by fraserphysics | 2025-11-05 01:17:01+00:00
Yes! There's more oil in the ground than we should ever burn. The places where it's cheap to get out are ruled by unpleasant people. Shale limits the price they can charge. Yea shale. However, low prices encourage putting CO2 in the air. Boo shale. I wish we would find a better way to reduce use than paying unpleasant people high prices.
by devilbunny | 2025-11-05 01:17:22+00:00
Every country I have ever discussed with its residents has something that, on its face, is a reasonable safety precaution (I definitely don’t want to blow up my house), but in practice is just a way to make your life miserable while helping the people who work there have an easier day.

This just happens to be the one that affected me. Like modern gas water heaters that have electric ignition instead of pilot lights, because the one serious reason to have gas water heaters is that they work when there is no electricity. Now it’s just a price distinction.
Show HN: Send a message to my printer from anywhere in the world
by maddiedreese | 2025-11-05 01:17:42+00:00
I bought my first Raspberry Pi a little while ago. I grew up with my Grandpa building cool projects on the Pi. I was always interested in building my own, but never got the chance to.

Around a week ago, I saw two projects on Twitter. Once was a receipt printer that could print out daily tasks, and the other was a light display that people could send their own designs to.

Inspired by these, I decided to build my first Raspberry Pi project: Message Maddie. It’s a Raspberry Pi 4B connected to a generic thermal receipt printer. Built with Cursor, a Convex database, and frontend hosted on Netlify.

Basically, you go to the website: https://message-maddie.netlify.app, enter whatever message you’d like to send, and it’ll print out instantly on my printer.

I posted it on Reddit and have received over 1300 messages so far, from what seems like every corner of the world. It’s absolutely incredible to me what people have chosen to share: everything from a “Hello!” to their deepest hopes and dreams. I started this as a fun little project, but it’s become so much bigger than that. I’ve never felt so connected to the world.

I also decided to open source the project if anyone would like to build their own! I’ve had people tell me they’re going to build one to communicate with their small kids while they’re going through a divorce, or to send messages to their partners while they’re doing long-distance. This is my first open source project, so please reach out with any issues! https://github.com/maddiedreese/ticket-printer-os

Hope to see a message from you come through on my printer soon!
by gishh | 2025-11-05 01:19:12+00:00
I am a huge, huge fan of wasm. The first time I was able to compile a qt app to Linux, windows, Mac, and wasm targets, I was so tickled pick it was embarrassing. Felt like I was truly standing on the shoulders of giants and really appreciated the entirety of the whole “stack” if you will.

Running code in a browser isn’t novel. It’s very circular. I actually met someone the other day that thought JavaScript was a subset of Java. Same person was also fluent in php.

Wasm is really neat, I really love it. My cynical take on it is that, at the end of the day, it’ll just somehow help ad revenue to find another margin.
by asa400 | 2025-11-05 01:19:42+00:00
There are quite a few Elixir shops that are willing to hire people who don't have a ton of experience with Elixir but have experience building and understanding systems generally.

So my advice is, try to bolster your story that you can design and build systems (regardless of language), learn what is needed to get the job done, and _communicate_ your knowledge of those systems to people. Good teams will recognize this regardless of prior specific tech.

Source: I've been on hiring panels at multiple companies that used Elixir extensively and the factors that led to us making offers to candidates were rarely their preexisting Elixir experience.
by veqq | 2025-11-05 01:19:56+00:00
It's just inversion, like 2 to the power of 2 or 2 to the power of negative 2. These negative words inverse it just the same. You may dislike it, but millions of people have spoken this way for a long time.

> x literally means multiply

And some use the dot operator or even 2(3) or (2)(3). When programming, we tend to use *.
by 1gn15 | 2025-11-05 01:20:25+00:00
> Basically, it’s an open question that courts have yet to decide.

This is often repeated, but not true. Multiple US and UK courts have repeatedly ruled that it is fair use.

Anthropic won. Meta won. Just yesterday, Stability won against Getty.

At this point, it's pretty obvious that it's legal, considering that media companies have lost every single lawsuit so far.

https://fixvx.com/technollama/status/1985653634390995178
by tptacek | 2025-11-05 01:20:47+00:00
Mitnick's use of the sequence number spoofing exploit was a super big deal at the time; it's half of the centerpiece of his weird dramatic struggle with Tsutomu Shimomura, whose server he broke into with that exploit (the other half was Shimomura helping use radio triangulation to find him).

Mitnick didn't write any of this tooling --- presumably someone in jsz's circle did --- but it also wasn't super easy to use; spoofing tools of that vintage were kind of a nightmare to set up.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-05 01:21:12+00:00
>Wouldn't it be weird if that didn't shape their perception?

No. I flat out reject the excuse you make on their behalf and consider you lesser than you would be had you not made it.

We're presumably discussing adults, not ten year olds or monkeys. They ought to f-ing act like it.

These people are almost all likely capable of the emotional restraint and logical thinking and sufficient abstract thought to think these things through and decide whether policy or action is good or bad regardless of if it's their guy doing it or their interest being served by it. The fact that they decline to do so is a failing of them. To excuse it only serves to reinforce or validate it and should be ridiculed.
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-05 01:21:12+00:00
Yes, it has been accelerating a long time. But I worry a bit about toning it down too much by both-sides-ing it. The Dems were no angels, but they most assuredly did not ever try to overturn the counting of the vote for president. They did not relentlessly claim the whole game was rigged. They never openly mocked the citizens who did not vote for them, made policy specifically to spite red states, etc. Or created government web sites like https://www.whitehouse.gov/mysafespace

By both-sides-ing this, it plays into hands of the people who support the current abhorrent behavior by claiming they're not doing anything different than their opponents have done. That is patently false, and we should not accept it.
by shash | 2025-11-05 01:21:29+00:00
Not to mention performance. So often, the traditional method is the only thing that can keep up with performance requirements without needing massive hardware upgrades.

Counter intuitively, I’ve often found that CNNs are worse at thresholding in many circumstances than a simple otsu or adaptive threshold. My usual technique is to use the least complex algorithm and work my way up the ladder only when needed.
by skulk | 2025-11-05 01:21:34+00:00
> I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results.

The same short combination of words can mean very different things to different people. My favorite example of this is "C string" because when I was a kid learning C I was introduced to a whole new class of lingerie because Google didn't really personalize results back then. Now when I search "C string" Google knows exactly what I mean.
by ajb | 2025-11-05 01:21:57+00:00
My parents used to have an old cooker which rather than having a spark button, had individual pilot lights for all of the hob burners and the grill. My mother was forever worried about whether one of the damn things had gone out (which they occasionally did). I think if you switched the supply off, switched it on again, and someone has left their house for a week, it might build up a significant amount of gas. Although they are supposed to be small enough not to. Presumably there were hardly any of those left now, but they can't assume they're all gone.
by lz400 | 2025-11-05 01:22:01+00:00
I'm not an expert but as far I understand, plasticity is central to most complex operations of the brain and is likely to be involved in anything more complex than instinctive reactions. I'm happy to be corrected but it is my understanding that if you're thinking for a while on the same problem and establishing chains of reasoning, you are creating new connections and to me that means it's fundamental in the process of thinking.
by Ariarule | 2025-11-05 01:24:26+00:00
I won't bother defending Google-style personalization as it exists for their search results, but since collisions in terminology across fields are common, it's not that hard to see how actual, thoughtful personalization could be useful. Someone searching for "Kafka" is going to want very different results based on whether they're thinking of software or literature. Opinions may also differ over the usefulness of sources, even for people ultimately interested primarily in facts; I find Kagi-style personalization (make your own domain list) very useful, but across Kagi's userbase Reddit is simultaneously one of the most lowered, most raised, and most pinned domains: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
by presentation | 2025-11-05 01:24:42+00:00
In my case we have a B2B SaaS where access patterns are occasional, revenue per customer is high, general server load is low. Cloud bills just don’t spike much. Labor is 100x the cost of our servers so saving a piddly amount of money on server costs while taking on even just a fraction of one technical employee’s worth of labor costs makes no sense.
by atm3ga | 2025-11-05 01:24:47+00:00
>Do NOT use this firmware on any thermostat that is critical for your heating or cooling needs.

Also, carefully consider its use with propane or natural gas HVAC units. Many can reach dangerous temperatures very quickly. Many years ago we had a thermostat failure that caused our HVAC to not shut off. While it had an over-heat cut-out, it was for temps above 200F. Because the unit had an oversized blower, it caused our home to reach dangerous temps as we slept, including our kids room which was a good 20F hotter than our bedroom. Luckily we woke up and the kids were okay.
by tpmoney | 2025-11-05 01:25:06+00:00
All of these apply to emulators.

* The use is commercial (a number of emulators are paid access, and the emulator case that carved out the biggest fair use space for them was Connectix Virtual Game Station a very explicitly commercial product)

* The nature of the work is imaginative and creative. No one can argue games and game consoles aren't imaginative and creative works.

* Quantity of use. A perfect emulator must replicate 100% of the functionality of the system being emulated, often times including bios functionality.

* Impact on market. Emulators are very clearly in direct competition with the products they emulate. This was one of Sony's big arguments against VGS. But also just look around at the officially licensed mini-retro consoles like the ones put out by Nintento, Sony and Atari. Those retro consoles are very clearly competing with emulators in the retro space and their sales were unquestionably affected by the existence of those emulators. Royalty avoidance is also in play here since no emulator that I know of pays licensing fees to Nintendo or Sony.

So are emulators a violation of copyright? If not, what is the substantial difference here? An emulator can duplicate a copyrighted work exactly, and in fact is explicitly intended to do so (yes, you can claim its about the homebrew scene, and you can look at any tutorial on setting up these systems on youtube to see that's clearly not what people want to do with them). Most of the AI systems are specifically programmed to not output copyrighted works exactly. Imagine a world where emulators had hash codes for all the known retail roms and refused to play them. That's what AI systems try to do.

Just because you have enumerated the 4 points and given 1 word pithy arguments for something illegal happening does not mean that it is. Judge Alsup laid out a pretty clear line of reasoning for why he reached the decision he did, with a number of supporting examples [1]. It's only 32 pages, and a relatively easy read. He's also the same judge that presided over the Oracle v. Google cases that found Google's use of the java APIs to be fair use despite that also meeting all 4 of your descriptions. Given that, you'll forgive me if I find his reasoning a bit more persuasive than your 52 word assertion that something illegal is happening.

[1]: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/...
by ebbi | 2025-11-05 01:25:09+00:00
I'm not saying democracy is a failed project all together, but something that has been on my mind a lot recently is that democracy is quite inefficient - where I'm from anyway (New Zealand). We are a small country, with general elections every four years. So most of the decisions our government takes a less bold, and optimized for short term interests and to get the next cycle vote. And when we have had times a government has made plans for a large infrastructure project, a successive government will come in and undo all of that planning.

For example, Auckland, our major economic hub, doesn't even have proper public transportation, and now citizens are battling with issues commuting to and from work.

I think part of Singapore's success has been it's ability to make bold decisions and see it through without worrying about short term election cycles.
by vkou | 2025-11-05 01:26:10+00:00
It is as accurate as any of the incendiary Pravda propaganda pieces[1] about how the capitalist swine lived. Other posters have helpfully pointed out the specifics of why your particular spin on it is not entirely honest.

---

[1] Often mostly factually accurate, but I doubt you'd find much common ground with the particular spin they'd put on describing your daily life.
by busterarm | 2025-11-05 01:26:16+00:00
Exactly this.

We have to use cloud because we're at the low end of 10^5 servers. Once you hit the high end of 10^3 this is really where you need to be.

Everything we're doing is highly inefficient because of decades of fast and loose development by immature software engineers...and having components in the stack that did the same.

If I had 5 years to rewrite and redesign the product to reflect today's computing reality, I could eliminate 90%+ of the cost. But I'll never get that kind of time. Not with 1000 more engineers and 1000 more years and the most willing customers.

You might get lucky enough that you and a bunch of your customers are so fed up with your company that you get to create the competition.
by drewbug01 | 2025-11-05 01:27:14+00:00
> People can and have successfully sued, winning substantial sums of money in the process.

I would be quite interested to know if you can cite sources on that.

> And we also live in the social media age where nothing gets more of those sacred likes and other such things (including that sweet sweet GoFundMe money) than framing oneself as a victim.

What, exactly, is your argument here? That it’s all fine because you think people will play victim and strike it rich on GoFundMe? I’m struggling to see what point you’re actually trying to make.

> They are actively trying to make a mountain out of every single molehill, yet they are clearly finding themselves annoyingly short of molehills.

Sources? Please list out what molehills were made into mountains. What evidence do you have that they are actively trying to do it because of their “bias”? You’re regurgitating tired, right-wing talking points. Back it up with evidence if you’re so sure about it.

> which is probably a higher end ballpark since I doubt they were especially critical of any claims they discovered

Well, sure. Let’s see some evidence that they weren’t critical enough with their reporting. My understanding is that they are a highly respected journalistic outfit. What makes you so sure they were playing fast and loose with the facts?
by zelphirkalt | 2025-11-05 01:28:15+00:00
Basically, you have said it: It is about what the team is knowledgeable about.

In my book Nodejs doesn't belong on the server, but that's the choice they made. Python at least is thought out as a backend language, but can also be criticized for many aspects. If a team is more knowledgeable about modern languages, of course there are many technically probably better choices than both Nodejs or Python.
by defrost | 2025-11-05 01:28:15+00:00
It's equally, if not more, probable that the intelligence about shipment departures came from non-US MAOC-N members and the "the operation" of tracking the craft was where the US liasons provided assistance.

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

The US isn't the only country with agents blending in on the supply side keeping eyes and ears on activity.

The EU end has had repeated success infiltrating and cracking 'encrypted' criminal networks on the demand side of such markets.
by p1necone | 2025-11-05 01:28:15+00:00
Location based personalization is pretty useful - if I search for 'Bob's Discount Linguine' I want the one in my neighborhood.

Lots of niche things (like programming) also reuse common english words to mean specific things - if I search e.g. 'locking' it's nice to get results related to asynchronous programming instead of locksmiths because google knows I regularly search for programming related terminology.

Of course it's questionable whether google does a good job at any of this, but I absolutely see the value.
by ghc | 2025-11-05 01:28:41+00:00
If you look at the first 10 years of Whole Earth Review, starting in 1985, it's startling to see the similarities to the issues of today.

January 1985: Computers as Poison - "It is not our hand that we put into the computer, it is our attention."

July 1985: Digital Retouching - "The end of photography as evidence of anything"

Winter 1985: "Islam: Beyond the Stereotypes"

Spring 1986: "Peering into the age of Transparency" - about space surveillance

Summer 1986: “This text tries to explain how minds work. How can intelligence emerge from non-intelligence? To answer that, I’ll show that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.”

Fall 1986: The Fringes of Reason - Strange myths and eccentric science

Winter 1986: AmerRuss - Joining America and Russia into one country

Summer 1987: What is real & A No-Cash Economy that Works

Fall 1987: Doing Drag & Male Identity

Summer 1988: The Far Left & Far Right Converge Summer 1988: The Rights of Robots

Summer 1989: Is the body obsolete

Summer 1991: Electronic Democracy

Winter 1991: Questioning Technology

Fall 1992: Artificial Life