MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dgroshev | 2025-11-19 00:20:02+00:00
The way modern CAD systems work is by having a tree of features/actions that is then used to construct an analytical representation of a 3D object. The features/actions can rely on "sketches" (2D drawings that are coupled with a real time geometric constraint solver) and can be "projected" into sketches, creating new reference lines, that can then be used by the sketch constrain solver, generating a sketch that can be used for more 3D features.

This is already complex and fiddly enough. Just having a stable 2D drawing environment that uses a constraint solver but also behaves predictably and doesn't run into numerical instability issues is already an achievement. You don't want a spline blowing up while the user is applying constraints one by one! And yet it's trivial compared to the rest of the problem.

Having 3D features analytically (not numerically!) interacting with each other means someone needs to write code that handles the interactions. When I click on a corner and apply a G2 fillet to it, it means that there's now a new 3D surface where every section is a spline with at least 4 control points. When I then intersect that corner with a sphere, the geometric kernel must be able to analytically represent the resulting surface (intersecting that spline-profiled surface with a sphere). If I project that surface into a sketch, the kernel needs to represent its outline from an arbitrary angle — again, analytically. Naturally, there is an explosion of special cases: that sphere might either intersect the fillet, just touch it (with a single contact point), or not touch it at all, maybe after I made some edits to the earlier features.

Blender at its core is comparatively trivial. Polygons are just clumps of points, they can be operated on numerically. CAD is hell.
by porphyra | 2025-11-19 00:20:12+00:00
Blender is really an amazing case study of open source software. Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete.

Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Lightroom isn't losing to Darktable; and FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.

I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead? Godot is rapidly gaining users/mindshare while Unity seems to be collapsing, but Unreal is still the king of game engines for now. Krita is a viable alternative for digital painting.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-11-19 00:20:41+00:00
Thanks for the explanation! This definitely reminds me of CrowdStrike outages last year:

- A product depends on frequent configuration updates to defend against attackers.

- A bad data file is pushed into production.

- The system is unable to easily/automatically recover from bad data files.

(The CrowdStrike outages were quite a bit worse though, since it took down the entire computer and remediation required manual intervention on thousands of desktops, whereas parts of Cloudflare were still usable throughout the outage and the issue was 100% resolved in a few hours)
by bluefirebrand | 2025-11-19 00:21:15+00:00
> Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around?

Here's hoping we figure that out soon otherwise we're going to see how long it takes the poor to reinvent the guillotine

Personally I'm kind of hoping for sooner than later. The greed and vice of the upper stratosphere in society is wildly out of control and needs to be brought to heel
by fooker | 2025-11-19 00:21:39+00:00
Because it takes a lot more education to work at a modern factory than what it took in 1930.

The rest of the world has kept up. Even if you could hypothetically cram 12 years of education into six months of training, the kind of mental effort required to go through that training would be quite impossible for the average person.

But why do that when it’s so much easier to blame AI or immigration, or whatever the new boogeyman of the day is.
by aussieguy1234 | 2025-11-19 00:21:44+00:00
That's because of overhiring and other non-ai related reasons (i.e. Higher interest rates means less VC funding available).

In reality, getting AI to do actual human work, as of the moment, takes much more effort and cost than you get back in cost savings. These companies will claim they are using AI, even if its just a few engineers using Windsurf.

The companies claim AI is the reason they laid off engineers to make it look like they're innovating, not downsizing, which makes them look better in the eyes of investors and shareholders.
by nikcub | 2025-11-19 00:21:48+00:00
They require the bot management config to update and propagate quickly in order to respond to attacks - but this seems like a case where updating a since instance first would have seen the panic and stopped the deploy.

I wonder why clickhouse is used to store the feature flags here, as it has it's own duplication footguns[0] which could have also easily lead to a query blowing up 2/3x in size. oltp/sqlite seems more suited, but i'm sure they have their reasons

[0] https://clickhouse.com/docs/guides/developer/deduplication
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-19 00:22:04+00:00
> I’m not sure that anyone can really agree on a solution, but there should be some stop loss where these things can’t be delayed beyond a certain fixed length of time and/or they shouldn’t issue the initial visas if the backlog to adjust is so long.

What initial visas? If you are talking about selectively denying non-immigrant dual-intent H-1B visas to people from countries with long timelines in some or all immigrant visa categories (not that getting an H-1B doesn't imply intent to seek to immigrate, and doesn't require qualification in an immigrant visa category), that's...well, even as someone who thinks the H-1B is a bad idea ab initio, a remarkably non-helpful policy to layer on top.

> The reason that this and most immigration law hasn’t been fixed is that while most people agree that this is a problem, there is not really a compromise solution that everyone can really agree on.

It's not just that people agree it is a problem and don't agree on a solution, people don't even agree on what the problem is though they might agree that, e.g., the long waitlists from certain countries are symptoms of some problem.

Like, when some people favor eliminating all immigration from certain countries, and other people favor eliminating per country caps, that isn't a different solution to the same problem, its a fundamental difference in what is perceived as the problem.
by xp84 | 2025-11-19 00:22:19+00:00
Except, now those companies have no leadership at all so just tell the workers to just do whatever seems like a good idea and hope for the best?

Why haven't we seen a bunch of successful companies without any management if management is so useless/harmful? Just ICs self-organizing to run the whole business. Without any execs to pay they'd have a cost advantage running that way.
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-19 00:22:30+00:00
> The 2nd used to mean that the states has a right to let their citizens arm themselves privately with military weapons

In particular, at the time that it was written, it meant arm themselves with military weapons for the purposes of military action. That's what the contemporary use of the term "bear arms" was understood to mean. Try to find any mention of self-defense from back then. It wasn't what they were thinking about.

Or look at this earlier version: “A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

That conscientious objector clause at the end certainly gives some context to the discussion.

The modern interpretation of the second amendment is very different.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-11-19 00:22:34+00:00
total compensation for Ford CEO is 24.9 million. But obviously it doesn't need to work that it is just taken from his money.

I propose that if the money for mechanics is needed, it can be gotten by redirecting capital from other parts of the system to invest in mechanics, funny that math is the subject here because this redirecting of capital could even be thought of a mathematical process, although really more a number of related processes together, I shall call these processes that control how money will be moved to handle problems in the systems that exist to generate more money "Capitalism".

In the rest of my work I shall discuss how the processes that control circulation of money will lead to its accumulation and conversion to power among a subset of power, allowing them to over time amass more and more power, I will note the problems this will imply but not really offer a solution as my primary interest is in describing the ways that need for a thing will cause the investment in that thing to rise over time, and decrease thereby investment in other things, as though the whole were an impartial and, as noted, nearly mathematical process in its elegance.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-19 00:22:39+00:00
> The American people have spoken time and again that we want these caps.

Evidence for this, or even that the majority of the American people understand the system of caps, whether or not they support it?

> That immigration policy should support diversity over other considerations.

The people most supportive of the caps are the people most openly hostile to the concept of diversity having value, generally.
by thatfrenchguy | 2025-11-19 00:23:00+00:00
Those four countries have very different quota problems though: folks from Mexico and Philippines face a long wait in family immigration, mostly to bring their kids & siblings to the US ( https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v... ), whereas Indian nationals also face long waits for employment based green-cards.

Noting that you can always use your country of birth or your spouse's country of birth (cross-chargeability) for an employment-based green-card, my understanding has always been that Indians have large preference (or face large pressure) to marry other highly-educated folks that they often meet in the US but are also born in India that other immigrants just don't face as much.
by Johnny555 | 2025-11-19 00:23:20+00:00
Even in a desert, people still use umbrellas for protection from the rain:

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2016/jan/19/fast-moving-storm-b...

And the rain still causes problems, even (or maybe especially in) a desert:

https://nypost.com/2022/07/29/las-vegas-braces-for-more-rain...
by recursive | 2025-11-19 00:23:26+00:00
Sometimes fiction went in the wrong direction. Sometimes it didn't go far enough.

In any case, the matrix wasn't my inspiration here, but it is a pithy way to describe the concept. It's hard to imagine how humans maintain relevancy if we really do manage to invent something smarter than us. It could be that my imagination is limited though. I've been accused of that before.
by aussieguy1234 | 2025-11-19 00:23:26+00:00
It does improve productivity, just like a good IDE. But engineers didn't get replaced by IDEs and they haven't yet been replaced by AI.

By the time its good enough to replace actual engineers, any job done in front of a computer will be at risk. I'm hoping that will happen at the same time as AI embodiment in robots, then every job will be automated, not just computer based ones.
by GenerWork | 2025-11-19 00:23:51+00:00
>mechanics lose money working on them because Ford doesn’t accurately represent the time it takes to fix something

I believe this is mainly for warranty or recall work. If it's out of warranty, then the charges can be much higher. It also depends on the difficulty of the work being done. I had my Mustangs rear diff seal replaced under warranty, and I guarantee you that doing that wasn't that bad in terms of pay or time taken.
by fooker | 2025-11-19 00:24:59+00:00
You could try to start a manufacturing business and see how it goes. It’s pretty dire.

Check out the ‘Smarter Everyday’ YouTube video for what it took to get people to design and manufacture a simple grill scrubber in the US.

They could find exactly one old retired guy with the knowledge and experience to make a mold, across several states.

You can get this done and delivered in 20 minutes in Shenzhen, and talk to an expert over a storefront countertop by walking over a few hundred feet from your business.
by tom1337 | 2025-11-19 00:25:15+00:00
I mean the CEO posted the post-mortem so there aren't that many layers of stakeholders above. For other post-mortems by engineers, Matthew once said that the engineering team is running the blog and that he wouldn't event know how to veto even if he wanted [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45588305
by perching_aix | 2025-11-19 00:25:48+00:00
I don't really understand the Pirate Bay part. Torrent websites rarely if ever host anything copyright infringing. They're just a way to discover and access such material.

When people say they "got xyz from there", that is a simplification. It means that the site has successfully brokered them to a swarm with the desired bit of data, not that the site / site operators have actually served them any of that data. They solicitate copyright infringement, but not necessarily (usually?) engage in it. No bits of copyright data travelling through their assets necessary.

It's like trying to catch a fixer on a consumption charge. They don't possess the drugs, they don't distribute the drugs, they don't purchase the drugs, they don't consume the drugs. They only handle information. It's a derivate, associable conduct, not the conduct itself.

To speak about the legality of unmodified and modified proxying of such content then simply doesn't seem sensible to me, or related.
by judahmeek | 2025-11-19 00:25:58+00:00
> Does AI result in greater productivity for engineers, and does greater productivity per person mean demand can be satisfied with fewer people?

Between the disagreements regarding performance metrics, the fact that AI will happily increase its own scope of work as well as facilitate increasing any task, sprint, or projects scope of work, and Jevons Paradox, the world may never know the answer to either of these questions.
by jryio | 2025-11-19 00:26:06+00:00
You misunderstand what Rust’s guarantees are. Rust has never promised to solve or protect programmers from logical or poor programming. In fact, no such language can do that, not even Haskell.

Unwrapping is a very powerful and important assertion to make in Rust whereby the programmer explicitly states that the value within will not be an error, otherwise panic. This is a contract between the author and the runtime. As you mentioned, this is a human failure, not a language failure.

Pause for a moment and think about what a C++ implementation of a globally distributed network ingress proxy service would look like - and how many memory vulnerabilities there would be… I shudder at the thought… (n.b. nginx)

This is the classic example of when something fails, the failure cause over indexes on - while under indexing on the quadrillions of memory accesses that went off without a single hitch thanks to the borrow checker.

I postulate that whatever the cost in millions or hundreds of millions of dollars by this Cloudflare outage, it has paid for more than by the savings of safe memory access.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
by thundergolfer | 2025-11-19 00:26:19+00:00
Fly writes a lot of Rust, do you allow `unwrap()` in your production environment? At Modal we only allow `expect("...")` and the message should follow the recommended message style[1].

I'm pretty surprised that Cloudflare let an unwrap into prod that caused their worst outage in 6 years.

1. https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/option/enum.Option.html#recomm...
by xp84 | 2025-11-19 00:26:32+00:00
Sure. But unfortunately the effect of stupid CAFE on the whole fleet nationwide has been so extreme that the 85% of cars that are still gas have grown to be enormous, so understandably no one feels safe driving a little Civic if they can afford at least a CR-V and ideally a 3-row SUV.

Plus, giant EVs have more room for batteries and most Americans think 300 miles of range is necessary even if they drive 20 miles a day and even if they can charge at home!
by lovich | 2025-11-19 00:27:52+00:00
When the barbarians come to raid, it’s much easier to tip a rock over to stop them.

“I have the high ground” became a meme because of the Star Wars prequels but it was a legitimate force multiplier.

The US has a military strategy of air supremacy, notably different from air dominance, because of how easy it is to win when you can just let go of a rock and it’s guided to your enemy by gravity.
by otterley | 2025-11-19 00:28:04+00:00
It's in everyone's interest to mitigate threats as quickly as possible. But it's of even greater interest that a core global network infrastructure service provider not DOS a significant proportion of the Internet by propagating a bad configuration too quickly. The key here is to balance responsiveness against safety, and I'm not sure they struck the right balance here. I'm just glad that the impact wasn't as long and as severe as it could have been.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-11-19 00:28:26+00:00
8.5% of UC Davis [EDIT: UCSD, not UC Davis] freshmen start the year without having mastered high school math.

See page 11 of this report: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...

I'm guessing if we were to take a random sample of high school graduates, the % would be much worse.
by arp242 | 2025-11-19 00:28:29+00:00
> Sometimes people do DDoS your small blog because some random stranger didn't like something you said somewhere online.

I've received death threats. Do I engage in charged political commentary on my site? Not really. Just vaguely left-of-centre stuff in a way that I feel moves the discussion forward (and not even that often). The internet is fun: you're instantly connected to every unhinged asshole lunatic in the world.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-19 00:28:35+00:00
> RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago

Compared to 20 years ago that's true. But most of the improvement happened in the first few years of that range. With the recent price spikes RAM actually costs more today than 10 years ago. If we ignore spikes and buy when the cycle of memory prices is low, DDR3 in 2012 was not much more than the price DDR5 was sitting at for the last two years.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-11-19 00:28:40+00:00
I've worked on software used by these and have been called in to help support from time to time. One customer which is a top single digit public company by market cap (they may have been #1 at the time, a few years ago) had their SAP systems go down once every few days. This wasn't causing a real monetary problem for them because their hot standby took over.

They weren't using mainframes, just "big iron" servers, but each one would have been north of $5 million for the box alone, I guess on a 5ish year replacement schedule. Then there's all the networking, storage, licensing, support, and internal administration costs for it which would easily cost that much again.

Now people will say SAP systems are made entirely of dict tape and bubblegum. But it all worked. This system ran all their sales/purchasing sites and portals and was doing a million dollars every couple of minutes so that all paid for itself many times over during the course of that bug. Cold standby would not have cut it. Especially since these big systems take many minutes to boot and HANA takes even longer to load from storage.
by tclancy | 2025-11-19 00:28:52+00:00
As an old, I feel for the author. Her bio suggests she is or was sympathetic to the working class, but she done got old and moved to Silicon Valley so I wonder.

“The Ford CEO's grandfather was one of the company's early employees, hired to work on the Model T.”

Yeah, and one of my grandfathers was a cop and the other a foreman on a jewelry shop floor. Both of which have as much to do with my coding career as the square root of sweet Fanny Adams. My dad put himself through college by working in a garage. I will admit the math in the 50s or so was more rigorous than what I had in the 80s, but the idea anyone interested in working on cars can’t be taught from almost scratch seems like a strong take. Whether you paid attention in pre-algebra or not is going to have little to do with your ability to balance four tires as a system or clean a carb or set engine timing via a computer.
by dragonsenseiguy | 2025-11-19 00:29:10+00:00
Hi, I recently made a Pull Request review tool like code rabbit but for Hack Clubbers. All the source code is here, this is a project for Midnight(midnight.hackclub.com), a hackathon. What My Project Does: Reviews Pull Requests on Github Any feedback is welcome, if it is big I would appreciate it if you made an issue and left a comment here that you made an issue.
by SilentM68 | 2025-11-19 00:29:19+00:00
I agree with your statement, for the most part. Investing in community college programs is one route since they are essentially a business. The main problem with the CCs is that they are very corrupt, have been issuing students worthless degrees. Essentially, the graduates don't have marketable skills. The colleges' goal is reaching a "graduation quota," and not "employability."

Another way to go is adult and high school education, i.e. the old auto shop classes that are currently very hard to find. This goes for any other trade, such as Drafting, Welding, as well not just auto shop.

So, yea, companies should pay more and invest in education, rather than bitch and complain about the lack of fully train workers.

Sol Roth
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-11-19 00:29:33+00:00
I have my study with the sample of one as well.

At Kroger, they have these shopping carts that locks their wheels if they were to be taken too far from the store. Well, sometimes they just lock without any reason, so what does the person do as they grab one as they're entering the store an it's locked? They just leave it there, and pull the next one.

And over time, the Kroger entrance is just full of shopping carts that are locked and every customer that comes in gets agitated because all the initial carts they interact with are locked.
by ogig | 2025-11-19 00:30:11+00:00
I just gave it a short description of a small game I had an idea for. It was 7 sentences. It pretty much nailed a working prototype, using React, clean css, Typescript and state management. It event implemented a Gemini query using the API for strategic analysis given a game state. I'm more than impressed, I'm terrified. Seriously thinking of a career change.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-11-19 00:30:28+00:00
I have some understanding of "parametric" vs "mesh". I looked it up when I saw so many people going on about it.

Maybe it is the export or something. I run the 3D toolbox and often models are not manifold.

I see things like two circles in slightly different positions but both are connected in different ways to the surrounding "single" instance model. Things like this mean you end up with "infinitely small volumes". There is no fully enclosed "volume" and so mathematically there is "nothing to 3D print".

As a model this makes no sense to do, and so it irks me.

But clearly the slicer software doesn't care or autocorrects and people make their 3D print happen just fine.