MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andai | 2025-11-29 06:04:00+00:00
When I was a kid a friend asked me, "Hey, you speak three languages. Which one do you think in?"

I was bemused, and thought... "people think in words?"

Apparently people with ADHD or Autism can develop the inner voice later in life.

In my 20s, language colonized my brain. Took me years of meditation to get some peace and quiet back...
by compass_copium | 2025-11-29 06:04:04+00:00
It looks very nice. It's a nifty project. However, as the particular kind of weirdo who has a bookmark to https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ on his phone's desktop and checks it multiple times daily, I will point out that this UI doesn't add much that the color-coded plane icons on ADS-Bx don't already do, and it is more difficult to quickly visually glean information from.
by somenameforme | 2025-11-29 06:04:04+00:00
Obviously GDP growth does not magically make spending on something increase.

And similarly obviously classifieds didn't have even remotely near the same reach. Classifieds were an opt-in categorized system that was delivered to a small subset of classified viewers that was, itself, a small subset of all newspaper subscribers in society. And you're paying for small lines of text delivered to this opt-in audience as opposed to as opposed to graphical images, or even videos, imposed on people against their will.
by lojban | 2025-11-29 06:04:21+00:00
You might also find the book Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice by Joseph J. Fischel interesting. I started reading it this week after seeing it mentioned elsewhere, and it touches many similar themes to this blog post so it's very fitting to see this posted today. The book discusses many things that I've had on my mind since #MeToo, but was never able to quite articulate.

https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9780520295414
by redrove | 2025-11-29 06:04:24+00:00
Everything is FAST now, I 'member 10-15 years ago if someone came to you for help you actually had the time to pull up a (possibly virtual) chair and spend 3h helping them. If you do that now you'll get canned in 4 months.

Obviously the help also came with you bonding and chit chatting about other stuff, I miss it.
by lenkite | 2025-11-29 06:04:24+00:00
When I was a junior developer working in the outsourcing industry, I regularly had to maintain projects where the entire codebase was in a few major functions. It was a stressful nightmare to debug - such projects destroyed my health. No feature could be developed without extensive forking of the codebase and prototyping to see what works and what doesn't.

After several such bad experiences, I religiously incorporated my personal guideline of functions never crossing the upper limit of 100 lines - with some 1 in 10k exceptions like in the parsing domain or state machine dispatch. Short functions also heavily aid in unit testing.

The only folks who believe in big functions are developers who haven't been exposed to large quantities of other people's shoddy code as a significant fraction of their working career. Once you have been through several such nightmares, you will worship small functions.
by Andrex | 2025-11-29 06:05:20+00:00
I will write it one day. Right now other more fully-formed creative projects are taking precedence.

I do know that when I write it it'll be a different take, because it'll be my voice and perspective and a synthesis of the media that makes me, me.

But as they say, writing is hard. :)

My parent comment deals more with the idea that some fantastical sci-fi ideas or inventions become less fantastical the longer you sit on them. The idea for a touch-based slate computer in TNG was pretty cool! Now everyone has a tablet, and that took only about 20 years.

I don't believe other literary genres have this unique problem. If I came up with a Game of Thrones-esque fantasy story, I wouldn't need to worry about the worldbuilding becoming "outdated." (Maybe in esoteric cases like dinosaurs not having feathers before we discovered that they do, etc.)
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-11-29 06:06:27+00:00
I use pseudonyms and post weird shit online, but I still feel very reluctant to post anything on large public channels inside a company. Everything is tied to your real name and all of us are hyper aware now that every single fucking thing on the internet is monitored, and will be used against you if necessary. I am 99% confident a tool already exists that a manager can use to get all messages from employee X over the last N months and summarize the content and surface any "red flags", which in a corporate setting would be incredibly broad.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-11-29 06:06:48+00:00
> Well written. I hope one day the united states of Europe is a real political entity, burying the stupidity that is fragmented national interests.

And I personally hope it won't. Seeing how things are going, I have no interest for my country to become a small province of the EU to be managed by some bureaucrats in Brussels who have never set foot in it.

Sharing intel and and resources why not? Becoming a vassal state of an EU federation no thanks.
by gls2ro | 2025-11-29 06:07:15+00:00
This sometimes happens also when the original leaders are still present but they dont understand the effect the metrics are having on the entire company when it grows big.

Have a senior leadership team and want them to not tell you bad news when you are the CEO/Leader? Then link their salary/performance to metrics like number of production incidents their team has. Suddenly the number of incidents that you know of decreases.

If that does not work to isolate you as the leader from thr reality of your company then link their salaries to a metric like number of projects finished before or at deadline and watch how tech debt increases multiple folds and how everything is suddenly estimates are increasing all over the place.

Want people not to ask meaningful hard questions in All Hands? Just make sure anyone that seems critical be labeled as not culture fit and done. All questions are positive and nice. Make sure to always ask for name and disable any anonymous questions asked.

Not trying to say metrics are bad or they should not be used. But they are not pure functions :) they do have side effects and sometimes very large ones.
by Atiscant | 2025-11-29 06:08:37+00:00
For most of my computer science PhD the “trick” was just to get the inductive definition to work, and then how to tweak it for the next paper. Or, get enough structuret we can do an “abstract nonsense” proof[0].

[0]:https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/category+theory#AbstractNonsen...
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-29 06:08:50+00:00
Yes and sites can also fairly reliably detect when a user is coming from a well known IP address block belonging to a VPN or VPS provider. It’s a built in feature of I know at least AWS

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/03/aws-waf-a...
by andai | 2025-11-29 06:09:15+00:00
When I started playing with this stuff in the GPT-4 days (8K context!), I wrote a script that would search for a relevant passage in a book, by shoving the whole book into GPT-4, in roughly context sized chunks.

I think it was like a dollar per search or something in those days. We've come a long way!

Anthropic, in their RAG article, actually say that if your thing fits in context, you should probably just put it there instead of using RAG.

I don't know where the optimal cutoff is though, since quality does suffer with long contexts. (Not to mention price and speed.)

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/contextual-retrieval

The context size and pricing has come so far! Now the whole book fits in context, and it's like 1 cent to put the whole thing in context.

(Well, a little more with Anthropic's models ;)
by tibbar | 2025-11-29 06:09:53+00:00
This reminds me of my further theory that everyone needs one 'heavy' and one 'light' technique. The 'light' technique is something that often works well as a heuristic and can be an effective unit of iteration. The 'heavy' technique is something that you can fall back on in difficult cases, something that can reliably solve hard problems, even if it's slow.

Sometimes the heavy technique is: just ask someone else. ;)
by eigenman | 2025-11-29 06:10:49+00:00
There is a joke in applied mathematics that we’re like Taco Bell. We all use the same six ingredients, mixing them in different ways.

For myself, I’ve found several techniques I use over and over again. Some of this is a “when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” But fundamentally there are only a handful of ideas. One professor of mine once said the only groundbreaking result in the past few decades was compressive sensing.
by RealityVoid | 2025-11-29 06:10:57+00:00
See my other comments in the other threads. This does not have EDAC. I was as surprised as you but it doesn't seems to be an MCU but a composition of several distinct chips. That flight computer was designed in the 90's and updated in 2002 with a new hw variant that does have edac. So yes, for this kind of thing, I can buy that a bit flip happened.

You can see much more data in the report:

https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao...
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-29 06:13:02+00:00
And Geolocation can also be blocked by your OS and is opt in. Access to photos is also opt in per app as is contacts

An app does not have permission to your name, address, contacts unless you explicitly allow it

And mobile apps don’t have access to your notes or any “habits” outside of when you use the app.

And “disabling JavaScript” in 2025 makes most websites unusable.
by EagnaIonat | 2025-11-29 06:13:10+00:00
> Bad developers complain about LLMs,

I'm finding the bad developers just do vibe coding because it is a shortcut. You look like an expert but you are not.

I coded for many years before I actually did formal computer science training. At that point I understood how bad my coding actually was. It worked, but was never scalable, never maintainable and used poor design patterns.

For vibe coders they can't see that and assume the AI will.

Real developers can see the flaws, but if you start vibe coding without those skills then you are lost.
by stuffn | 2025-11-29 06:13:10+00:00
> Remote work eliminates a lot of problems with office work: commutes, inefficient use of real estate, and land value distortion. But software development is better when you breathe the same air as the folks you work with. Even with a camera-on policy, video calls are a low-bandwidth medium. You lose ambient awareness of coworkers’ problems, and asking for help is a bigger burden. Pair programming is less fruitful. Attempts to represent ideas spatially get mutilated by online whiteboard and sticky note software. Even conflict gets worse: it’s easy to form an enemy image of somebody at the end of video call, but difficult to keep that image when you share a room with them and sense their pain.

Every ounce of data proves this statement wrong. If you feel like you work better non-remote then do it. Don’t shill it as a panacea. I’ve been remote for 11 years now and if I wasn’t I wouldn’t have been able to take care of my family, go back to school part time, work on my health with better meals and reasonable gym hours, etc. even IF in office was better for the employer (even though all data says it’s not in terms of productivity) it is unequivocally better for the employees life to work remote as much as humanly possible.

This hot take is just simply insane. Humanity had no problem coordinating massive projects over IRC and mailing lists. It’s clear the author is a “nu-coder”.
by lelanthran | 2025-11-29 06:15:01+00:00
If you really hit the pathological edge case of needed sprintf at runtime with runtime-only buffer sizes, you can still work out the size safely, albeit slowly.

I've done it to make a "safe" sprintf function that allocates the destination buffer, so that the caller cannot overrun it: https://github.com/lelanthran/libds/blob/56d6e18c8970b84c9fa...
by pyb | 2025-11-29 06:16:22+00:00
The aerospace industry has had countermeasures in place against bit-flips for a long time, oftentimes thanks to redudancy

Airbus/Thales's fix in this case appears to add more error checking, and to restart the misbehaving component. https://bea.aero/fileadmin/user_upload/BEA2024-0404-BEA2025-...

("une supervision interne du composant à l’origine de la défaillance ; - un mécanisme de redémarrage automatique de ce composant dès lors que la défaillance est détectée)
by inferiorhuman | 2025-11-29 06:17:05+00:00
MacOS 9 was awful, a product of a rather unpleasant era for Apple really. I wanna say through 9.2.1 maybe even through to 9.2.2 the OS had a nasty habit of corrupting your disk. Hardware-wise Apple used CMD64x based IDE controllers so when OS9 wasn't screwing with your data the hardware itself would.

There absolutely were animations e.g. when closing a Finder window, but they were much lighter weight. As far as I'm concerned System 7 was probably the zenith.
by hairdrop | 2025-11-29 06:17:40+00:00
Not to midwit but I will stick to MISRA C for this sort of thing. It is very clear in why each thing must be done and it is hard to argue against most of it. It’s usually where safety and robustness deeply matter and using it would have avoided a number of high-profile exploits we have seen in the recent past. While not every “rule” may be applicable to all languages, many standard languages could adopt a good number of rules from it and benefit greatly. Anyone with a number of years experience with some reflection on what is good, clear and unambiguous style would reinvent a decent portion of MISRA C.

I’ll let others speak to the Barr standard.
by eichin | 2025-11-29 06:18:21+00:00
A couple of paragraphs in I started wondering if it was going to turn out to be systemd-tmpfiles (in ubuntu, 16.04 I think? The symptom was "about 10 days after login, X11 forwarding over ssh stopped working but local apps could still open windows just fine." I remember it as an ubuntu-specific misconfiguration, though I think the systemd defaults were changed to be less of a footgun in response...)

I was pleased that it was more interesting than that, and I want people to write more twitchy-detail-post-mortems like this :-)
by asdfman123 | 2025-11-29 06:18:49+00:00
It's because the only people who can understand the code are people who write the code every day. And sometimes the devs don't even really understand it.

Occasionally you'll have a manager who manages in the day and codes at night, which is fine if not bad for his personal life. But HIS manager almost never does that. And his manager's manager? Forget it.
by sastrophy | 2025-11-29 06:18:56+00:00
Thank you so much for taking the time to review the code and pointing these out! I really appreciate it. To clarify: SiteIQ is designed to run locally on your own machine (localhost:5000) as a personal security testing tool - similar to how you'd run Burp Suite or OWASP ZAP locally. It's not meant to be deployed as a public-facing web service. That said, your points are absolutely valid and I'll definitely work on fixing these. This is my first open source project, so feedback like this helps me learn a lot. Thanks again!
by stuffn | 2025-11-29 06:18:57+00:00
It is exactly that and it’s clear the author is one of these “yappers”. I like that term. These people are also absolutely obnoxious irl and completely fail to read the room. I once had a PM like this who went into a near mental health crisis that the team of engineers were not “engaging” enough with her (in her head) witty “engineer” banter.

Perhaps it’s useful to have these people in the office, in a room of mirrors, where they can listen to themselves talk all day. There’s a subset of people who have weaseled their way into tech coming from the world of hyper-anxious very public social media engagement that simply make life miserable for everyone else.
by Chirag | 2025-11-29 06:23:51+00:00
I don’t think we can ignore this. Calling him "senile old men" and pushing for 70-hour work weeks says everything about the mindset. When you've run a people sweatshop model for years, of course, you want more "billable" hours.

He seriously needs to step out of his echo chamber and get real advisors and a far better PR team. Even Instagram dog accounts manage their public image better.
by noobcoder | 2025-11-29 06:24:14+00:00
This isn't really about fooling lenders, they already underwrite this as Meta risk i feel. What is wild is how much economic substance you can legally shove into these non‑consolidated boxes, while GAAP still pretends form wins over who actually eats the downside

If this becomes the default template for AI capex, headline leverage stats for most of big tech are going to drift further and further away from their real balance sheets
by londons_explore | 2025-11-29 06:27:14+00:00
I'm very surprised that a plane doesn't have voltage, current and glitch monitoring on every power rail, logged to the data recorder.

You would pretty much be logging, every millisecond, the minimum, maximum and mean voltage for every 1ms period (and the same for current).

Then any failing solid state relay would be obvious in the collected data, far before you start to get word corruption!
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-11-29 06:27:35+00:00
Dear Neal Stephenson: thanks for actually ending your well-thunk writings with complete sentences/thoughts.

----

I just finished Dave Wallace's 520 page PhD thesis, his first novel The Broom of the System, which literally ends with a liar proclaiming:

>I am a man of my

( "word" is presumed to follow, but another DFW book which just [abruptly!?!] ends )

Like his other two novels (Infinite Jest & Pale King), Broom is an ensemble of disconnected characters, with no clear destination nor moral lessons navigated in a few-hundred-too-many pages — just raw human condition. Very powerful writing style, but with no executive function.

Now that I've read 2000+ pages of David Foster Wallace, I will continue NOT recommending his novels to anybody (this is the same review I gave after IJ and PK). DFW was definitely a powerful thinker/writer, but he should have stuck to his shorter non-fiction meanderings.

----

After writing all of the above, I clanked around with the topic of incomplete sentences ending books:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/broom-ends-with-an-incomple...

>Your sense that the mid-sentence ending and related choices feel like bullying is a legitimate aesthetic and emotional response, not a misreading or a sign you “don’t get it”

Just so fascinating — best book club buddy, ever.
by magicalhippo | 2025-11-29 06:28:08+00:00
I like JSON schema, but I haven't found any good tools to designing them. Or at least not a few years ago when I was looking.

However, we already had an XMLSpy license, so decided to just stick with designing XSDs in XMLSpy and then just translate that to JSON Schema.

If you make some small decisions, like value with attributes becomes an object, you can get a fairy decent subset of XSD to map 1:1 onto JSON Schema 2020-12.

As a nice side effect of writing the XSD to JSON Schema converter, it's trivial for us to support reading XMLs and convert that to JSON. Great for the customers who have programs that doesn't speak JSON.
by kuerbel | 2025-11-29 06:28:34+00:00
When I started doing cloud there were two options at my old company: AWS or Azure. I went for Azure.

Now I do m365 consulting and some Azure and I feel terrible. First of all those are terrible products, they lock you in heavily, they are overly complex. I would love if we started selling sovereign cloud solutions, open desk etc and I think our customers would be interested too. But we don't.

I'm actually thinking about starting my own business.
by sedatk | 2025-11-29 06:32:00+00:00
Obviously, because it was a fictional, simplified example for the post. My real use case was more complicated and involved multiple developers working on different parts of that flow.

The problem with if-else chains is it's easy for a programmer to forget to handle a case that another developer added in the called component. Unit tests can't help a spec miscommunication. But, visitor pattern can as it forces the handling logic to be complete.

Hence my example at the end using discriminated unions and exhaustive pattern matching in F#. Much, much simpler with the same benefits.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-29 06:32:15+00:00
> how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it.

IRC selects for people who like chatting and communicating via text.

I think the mistake made with remote work was assuming that everyone could easily work that way.

The best experiences I had with remote work were pre-COVID, when the teams working remote were carefully selected for having good remote work abilities and anyone who couldn’t handle it was kicked back to the office (or out of the company)

Then something changed during COVID and remote work was treated as something everyone could do equally well. The remote teams I worked with were now a mix of people who could work well remotely and people who wanted to work remote but tried to force communication to happen like we were back in the office: Meetings for everything. Demands to “jump on a quick call” when a few Slack messages would have done the job. Then there were the people who read “Four Hour Work Week” and thought they were going to do their jobs from their iPhone while traveling the world or at the ski resort.

I don’t know. Having seen the before and after it doesn’t feel so surprising that remote work faltered when applied indiscriminately to everyone. The best remote teams I work with to this day are still the ones who know how to communicate in that old school IRC style where communication flowed easily and everyone was on the same page, not trying to play office games through Slack.
by spankibalt | 2025-11-29 06:33:03+00:00
> "[...] is it (what I believe) trying to sneak in their moral judgements behind a veneer of supposed 'neutrality'?"

Yes, that's precisely what it is. Moral judgements based on outdated ("conservative", especially clerical) understandings of the world, wrapped in some delusional sense of "objectivity". Only the scientifically and philosophically illiterate fall for it. In German, we call it Bauernfängerei (swizzling, duping; lit. "pawn catching").
by genezeta | 2025-11-29 06:34:57+00:00
I think you're both right. But there are two ways to do what you said and you didn't specify which one.

First, a rectangle of height 1 and width 1/2. The perimeter is 1 * 2 + 1/2 * 2, two sides of height 1 and two sides of width 1/2.

You "glue" the second rectangle. As one may understand this, you glue them by putting them one beside the other standing up, i.e. you glue them along one of the heights. Sorry for the crude ascii art:

---- -- ------ | | || | | | | || | | | | + || -> | | | | || | | | | || | | ---- -- ------

Now you have a single rectangle, height 1, and width 1/2 + 1/4. The perimeter is 1 * 2 + (1/2+1/4) * 2. The "added perimeter" in this step is just 1/4 * 2 = 1/2.

Go on doing that and for a rectangle of width 1/n, you only add 2 * 1/n to the perimeter. In the end you get a single rectangle with height 1 and width 2. The perimeter is 2 * 1 + 2 * 2.

---

Now, maybe, you may want to specify that you glue the rectangles along their widths, not their heights.

That way, the resulting shape when you add the second rectangle is not a rectangle but an irregular shape with 6 sides. Sorry for the crude ascii art again:

1 ---------- | |n/2 | | 1 n| ---------- | |n/2 | | -------------------- 2

The added perimeter now is exactly 2 * 1 on each step. Now the final perimeter is infinite but the area is not.

But you didn't specify this option over the other one. And, honestly, if we talk about putting rectangles in a sequence, I think it's more common to think of the rectangles as standing up side by side with their heights together as in the first option. For the second option I would describe the rectangles as having a fixed width of 1 and decreasing heights.