MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chii | 2025-11-29 03:19:10+00:00
> “You’re a senior engineer - why did fixing this take so long?”

exactly!

If a senior engineer is responsible for the problem, but he wasn't given room to develop a proper solution in the first place, then he cannot be blamed for the outcome. And yet, this is exactly what happens.

If a system had been made well, and functions well, same senior engineer does not get the credit for not causing problems!

This is what happens when management/stakeholders don't understand what is going on, but have an expectation that is not well communicated to the engineers (and also inversely too, where engineers are not communicating the situation properly to management - or they refuse to hear it/ignore it).
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-29 03:19:26+00:00
Yes, it charts the adoption rate (adopting firms/firms) against time. But it doesn't use the term "adoption rate" to mean the first derivative of "adoption" with respect to time.

When it talks about the adoption rate flattening it is talking about the first derivative of the adoption rate (as defined in the previous paragraph, not as you wish it was defined) with respect to time tending toward 0 (and, consequently, the second derivative being negative.) Not the third derivative with respect to time being negative.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-11-29 03:20:18+00:00
What do you want quantum to do? I thought it's good for medicine discovery and material discovery, where you might simulate physical quantum processes, but it's quite theoretical that we actually get an outcome from that isn't there? Is there any drug/protein/molecule simulation that people are trying to do but classical hardware is too slow to bother?

Qubits are neat and all I just won't be places bets.
by jrflowers | 2025-11-29 03:20:42+00:00
>Isn't the point that they intentionally glossed over ("We did not model what would happen if data center demand collapses and Meta cannot secure a new tenant. This scenario was excluded for methodological convenience.") a pretty important one?

It is a joke. This is a humor post on a comedy blog. This substack is not actually a bond rating agency.
by ford | 2025-11-29 03:22:16+00:00
At the end of the day writing good code is rarely the "end" someone is shooting for. It's more research, more features, more experimentation, etc. Maybe hobby projects and library maintainers are the exceptions.

In my experience, big companies have the biggest incentive to write good code. They have the highest conviction in their bets, and they know with high confidence they will be around in 10 years. One large tech company I worked at had a rule of thumb that all code would need to be maintained for ~7 years - at which point, as the author points out, the entire team may have been replaced. This is precisely when the time it takes to write good code is a worthy investment
by devnavigator | 2025-11-29 03:22:19+00:00
The diagram illustrates the continuous lifecycle of domain-specific language models within an enterprise setting, highlighting how AI systems evolve through iterative improvement. The left side of the loop focuses on building and specializing models—selecting a foundation model, curating domain-relevant data, fine-tuning with domain expertise, and validating performance. The right side emphasizes operational excellence, deploying models into business workflows, integrating human-in-the-loop feedback, monitoring accuracy and drift, and retraining for ongoing refinement. Together, these phases form a self-sustaining loop that enhances model accuracy, compliance, and value over time, driven by data, human oversight, and continuous learning.
by wyre | 2025-11-29 03:22:37+00:00
For sure, all these companies are racing to have the strongest model, and as time goes on we quickly start reaching diminishing returns. DeepSeek came out at the beginning of this year, blew everyone's minds, and now look at how far the industry has progressed beyond it.

It doesn't even seem like these companies are in a battle of attrition to not be the first to go bankrupt. Watching this would be a lot more exciting if that was the case! I think if there was less competition between LLMs developers could slow down, maybe.

Looking at the prices of inference of open-source models, I would bet proprietary models are making a nice margin on API fees, but there is no way OpenAI will make their investors whole because they make a few dollars of revenue for a million tokens. I am terrified of the world we will live in if OpenAI will be able to reverse their balance sheet. I think there's no where else that investors want to put their money.
by JohnMakin | 2025-11-29 03:23:18+00:00
I don’t mind bad code, I know why it happens and a lot of good points are made here in the comments.

What I cannot stand and can barely tolerate is kruft and sloppiness. massive sections of commented out functions, leaving the poor guy to come along 2 years later wondering if it was important or why it was left there. Unused functions. bad, inconsistent, or nonexistent naming conventions. Terrible or annoying file/project structure.

None of this stuff has to be. Not doing this stuff requires a bare minimum of effort and time and doesn’t require any familiarity with a codebase. It’s a lack of professional pride, and that deeply annoys me when I inevitably have to clean it up because it’s an unreadable mess.
by frankacter | 2025-11-29 03:23:52+00:00
faq says:

"Audio-to-Sheet-Music: Upload or record audio, get accurate sheet music"

but the bot says:

"I can't process an MP3 for you right now, but I can totally help you generate some awesome classical piano sheet music! Just let me know if you'd like me to create some for you! "

Is this a future feature or is there another way I should be sending audio?
by petre | 2025-11-29 03:24:25+00:00
Sure. I start the engine and then proceed to get the snow off and defrost the windows using a broom and a scraper. Good way to adjust yourself to the cold. Remote start won't help much in anything more than 2" of snow because it would take half an hour to defreeze by itself. My wife prefers the garage, though. Still, we don't live in Alberta or Alaska for the car to freeze shut.

We had a hybrid replacement Yaris. It's nice but it still turns on the engine when it's cold. I wasn't complaining abut the noise, but the fumes. Diesels are the worst, regardless of CO2 rating, but gas engines produce a lot more CO even if they stink less. There are places where idling is regulated up to 5 minutes.

https://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/environment/pollution/air-qual...
by Fnoord | 2025-11-29 03:25:33+00:00
Yep, in fafs in 2021. Pew 2015: 8th. gsod 2023: 28th.

On all of the freedoms, USA tends to do best on freedom of speech. But how can you say such, when the press has less freedom than in other rich West countries? Isn't that counter interactive?
by simonlondon | 2025-11-29 03:25:53+00:00
Neato made a line of (good) vacuum robots with Lidar.

It seems there were bought by a company called Vorwerk, and Vorwerk are shutting down the cloud infra.

This means the app, floor plans, schedules, no-go zones etc will no longer work. The robot can only be manually started by pushing the button on the device.

As an owner of one of these robots this is sad but not unexpected for anything relying on an app.

By submitting to HN, I’m hopeful someone can point me in the direction of open firmware or OSS projects that can help me restore the lost functionality.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-11-29 03:26:15+00:00
Unfortunately I've uninstalled atuin while this bug is getting fixed

https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin/issues/2969

The slow turnaround is somewhat disappointing but not surprising for a FOSS project; I'd fork it but using a forked Rust project is quite inconvenient vs, e.g. Python where you can just clone it and go.
by sophia01 | 2025-11-29 03:29:03+00:00
The matter of fact is that big companies (think the usual monorepo business going on in FAANG) don't care about the actual code. The code was never the point of the exercise. Eventually you realize this. Code is like the ether. The company needs it in order to do its thing, and the code needs to be dealt with in order to operate.

In the end it doesn't matter how normalized and pretty you design the database, someone will eventually show up and write a pipeline that dumps every row of it into JSON once an hour and ships it to some far away corner of the company. Someone will write a shitty script to deal with the fact that those rows don't represent a consistent point-in-time snapshot of your database. In the end it doesn't matter anyway, it'll all be rewritten or coerced through some migration into some ugly system in a few months anyway that it doesn't conform to and could never match.

The thing that matters is the process. When you decide you want to do it, do you have the process to mend the ether to do what you need it to do in two months? Do you have the processes in place to catch it when it's so catastrophic it's blowing up your balance sheet?
by ford | 2025-11-29 03:31:00+00:00
Has it been many people's experience that big companies intentionally remove experienced engineers from your team to something unrelated, in the name of fungibility? I've surely seen efforts within a team to make sure that there's not a single person who's necessary for the team to reach full productivity, and I think most would agree this model does not make for resilient teams. But many of the best engineers I know have had much more energy invested in getting them to stay than to leave
by wasabi991011 | 2025-11-29 03:31:54+00:00
> I am not even sure whether logical components work at such low temperatures, since everything becomes superconducting.

Currently finishing a course where the final project is designing a semiconductor (quantum dot) based quantum computer. Obviously not mature tech yet, but we've been stressed during the course that you can build most of the control and readout circuits to work at cryogenic temps (2-4K) using slvtfets. The theoretical limit for this quantum computing platform is, I believe, on the order of a million qubits in a single cryostat.
by JohnMakin | 2025-11-29 03:32:18+00:00
sandbagging or messing with metrics is an inevitable part of playing a role in $BIGTECHCO. Even if people don’t admit it or aren’t aware of it, it happens everywhere. If anyone resents it they just resent you’re doing it better than they could. much of what we do is all a political game. I’ve had situations where I cannot do something that clearly needs to be done, I in the past will find reasons to slow things down and point to (thing that needs to be done) as the reason why. Eventually the manager above you will prioritize it or discipline you. If you’re right and are valuable and your manager isn’t stupid, you’ll get your way, and they can take credit for the sudden velocity gain. I’ve also done the opposite in speeding things up to expose brittle unsustainable processes.

Not endorsing it, but, it just seems to me the way most performance management works at these companies (I came from a company that liked to think it was amazon with stack ranking) you have to do it or you will get shanked inevitably before you vest. This is just my personal experience. TLDR it’s how you make things “happen”

It’s very cynical. Thankfully these days I work on much smaller teams where everyone helps as much as they can because you’re constantly treading water, but there’s very little room for this kind of political maneuvering and bs.
by LexiMax | 2025-11-29 03:32:23+00:00
Pretty much.

At the point where tensions rise beyond polite disagreement, HN ceases to be a functional social space and turns into a game of "who can make the other's opinions disappear first."

Doing so is technically against the rules, but either the moderators don't care, aren't doing it on a large enough scale to be an effective deterrent, or are knowingly complicit.
by surajrmal | 2025-11-29 03:34:06+00:00
Catching architecture problems in code review is usually a red flag for process problems. Anything substantial should have been reviewed for architecture prior to a code review, especially if it spans multiple commits. Code review should feel rote and focus on rubrics around style and best practices in an ideal case. Of course you will still find architectural issues during code reviews in many cases but that shouldn't be often as it's not reliable to expect the reviewer to have the necessary context to catch them.
by anonzzzies | 2025-11-29 03:34:51+00:00
> computers after work is a bad thing; people can have families and other hobbies?

No not bad per se, but it did clearly show that, without on the job courses, why all of them are stuck in the early 2000s tech wise.

Some people start with a company and get lucky with early success and then get restricted because of that success: get new clients via existing, everyone likes it and asks for new features and without noticing it you might find yourself 15 years down the road with ancient tech and no one understanding anything current. Then you can still thrive if your clients like it... we have similar clients: a 1980s factory, another 1980s factory, a logistics app from the 1990s etc. Things deeply ingrained in some vertical, expensive but better priced than the SAPs etc of this world so it keeps going and going.
by makingstuffs | 2025-11-29 03:36:55+00:00
> The big draw of Teslas is the autopilot/driving assist features, but they rely on clear lane markings and predictable behavior. However, that country's traffic culture is more like: no lanes, people (especially two-wheelers and "autos") driving on the wrong side (in fact they come at you in all directions), pedestrians everywhere, cows, random parked vehicles, people cutting across constantly (including beggars and street sellers). No one obeys the traffic rules, it's complete and utter chaos. I'd imagine even the best AI systems would struggle to deal with this chaos.

This made me chuckle as it is 100% on the money. Whenever my wife and I come here we rent a car and she is just completely amazed that I calmly navigate the plethora of hazards that make up the Indian roads. Literally, nothing is predictable about traffic here. Monkeys, cows, dogs, cats, people selling stuff, people asking for stuff, tractors on motorways, horse drawn carts on motorways, tuk tuks, scootys which have been modded to have three wheels, trucks that are so overloaded they take two lanes, small vans which have been vertically lengthened to make them into some weird ass quasi truck, bicycles, traffic lights tha don’t work, traffic lights that do work but are facing the wrong way, traffic lights which work but are covered in so much dust you couldn’t even see their current state and this isn’t even half of what you have to regularly navigate. I think any self driving car would just burn out its processor within seconds of leaving the showroom floor.
by JohnBooty | 2025-11-29 03:37:02+00:00
I feel as though my post didn't really connect. Let me give an example, sort of:

This stock image is roughly the level of thing I'm talking about, except even with women who are less obviously chesty:

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/two-senior-black-fe...

It feels very UNsurprising to me that nudity, or revealing photos, would get more views. There's various ways we can feel about it. But "surprised" would, erm, certainly not be one of them for me!

However, I was still surprised that extremely tame photos of slightly curvy women would get relatively large numbers of views, in a world where most people can easily find all the lewd, nude, and explicit images and videos they want.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-11-29 03:37:24+00:00
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037573

Related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45999024

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45999024

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035977
by TkTech | 2025-11-29 03:37:42+00:00
(I'm biased, I'm the author of Chancy)

One of the major complaints with Celery is observability. Databased-backed options like Procastinate and Chancy will never reach the potential peak throughput of Celery+RabbitMQ, but they're still sufficient to run millions upon millions of tasks per day even on a $14/month VPS. The tradeoff to this is excellent insight into what's going on - all state lives in the database, you can just query it. Both Procastinate and Chancy come with Django integrations, so you can even query it with the ORM.

For Chancy in particular, retries are a (very trivial) plugin (that's enabled by default) - https://github.com/TkTech/chancy/blob/main/chancy/plugins/re.... You can swap it out and add whatever complex retry strategies you'd like.

Chancy also comes with a "good enough" metrics plugin and a dashboard. Not suitable for an incredibly busy instance with tens of thousands of distinct types of jobs, but good enough for most projects. You can see the new UI and some example screenshots in the upcoming 0.26 release - https://github.com/TkTech/chancy/pull/58 (and that dashboard is for a production app running ~600k jobs a day on what's practically a toaster). The dashboard can be run standalone locally and pointing to any database as-needed, run inside a worker process, or embedded inside any existing asgi app.
by rglullis | 2025-11-29 03:38:23+00:00
> Brave was engaging in fraudulent behaviour.

Allegedly. This, the "Brave was putting ads of their own on other pages" and "adding the referrer code for Binance" stories get thrown around like they were (a) are all huge sources of profit (b) carried on with malicious intent and (c) on par with the BILLIONS of dollars in ad fraud that goes around and Google so conveniently turns a blind eye.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-11-29 03:38:41+00:00
It sounds like you have some serious knowledge gaps about AI. It's perfectly normal to use AI on a dataset without incorporating that dataset into training a new AI model. If you download a free model and run it offline on your data, your data doesn't get magically incorporated into the model on the site you originally downloaded it from.

This is the same thing, and it's backed by a contract and the threat of lawsuits from the many businesses using Google Workspace.
Show HN: HitCommit – Pay Devs to Solve Your GitHub Issues
by nerdzoid | 2025-11-29 03:40:23+00:00
I built HitCommit.com, a simple way for maintainers to attach real bounties to GitHub issues. Maintainers pick a repo, set rewards, and contributors can get paid instantly through PayPal or Stellar. I’m aware there are similar tools out there, but the goal here is to keep things extremely lightweight: no tokens, no marketplace complexity, just a clean bounty layer directly on top of GitHub issues.

I’m also working on a new feature called Issue Contests, where maintainers can pool a single bounty across multiple issues and contributors compete by solving any of them—useful for larger, time-boxed sprints.
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-29 03:41:19+00:00
Good code is subjective, especially once you start wandering into the territory of more esoteric approaches such as functional programming, domain-specific languages, code-generation, etc.

Bad code is one of those things that we can almost all agree on, often even the person writing it.

Alternatively: I don't know how to make a good movie, but I can recognise a really bad one, and you'll almost certainly agree with that opinion. You and I however will almost certainly not agree on what our favourite movie of all time is. The nuances and personal tastes become more important at the last few percentage points approaching 100% "like".
by QuiEgo | 2025-11-29 03:41:29+00:00
I work in firmware.

Firmware build times can be comically bad. Most firmware builds are heavily optimized and you often build the same codebase dozens of times with each build optimized for one particular hardware configuration of many. You then get to deploy to a legion of test devices (also managed by machines you remoting into) and see which special snowflake you managed to break this time (it somehow is never the one you sanity checked your changes on during development :-D).

It's common to throw (a lot) of compute at the problem, and at some point it's way nicer if the 100+ cores you're cranking to 100% CPU for a few min are somewhere you're not sitting next to. It's also nice that those resources can be shared among many devs so they don't sit idle most of the time.

So, you end up with the thin client pattern. It's usually practical to build locally as well for a few particular targets, which might be a random dev board at your desk. But if I have a remote build system with a few hundred cores cores and a few dozen TB of ram, why would I not just use it instead of using my laptop?

Athough firmware and hardware is such a huge, varied field many people likely have different experiences. Brining up a big custom SoC is way different than bringing up a board with an FPGA and all off-the-shelf stuff.

What's "far more than ssh to some remote server" mean to you? It's always fascinating how different everyone's experiences are.
by dogline | 2025-11-29 03:42:06+00:00
Until just now, I've been trying to figure out why people think that JSON is necessary in the database? Yes, lots of data is hierarchical, and you just normalize it into tables and move on. The fact that some people don't work this way, and would like to put this data as it stands into a JSON tree hadn't occurred to me.

What problem does normalization solve? You don't have to parse and run through a tree every time you're looking for data. You would, however, need to rebuild the tree through self joins or other references in other cases, I suppose. It depends how far you break down your data. I understand that we all see data structures a bit differently, however.
by fluoridation | 2025-11-29 03:42:17+00:00
>Historically, to prove the earth is round, people have relied on the sun shining directly overhead on wells in different cities.

That wasn't to prove the Earth is round (and it doesn't prove it). Eratosthenes assumed two things when he performed his experiment: 1) the Earth is round, and 2) the Sun is an infinite distance away. By just this experiment he would have been unable to distinguish between this situation and the Earth being flat while the Sun being only a finite distance overhead (and in fact a fair bit closer than it actually is). Eratosthenes and his contemporaries were already convinced of the roundness of the planet, and he simply wanted to measure it.

>But this approach proves it without the need to refer the sun.

A flat-earther would just tell you that you're not able to maintain a straight path over such long distances without relying on external guides that would definitely put you on curved paths. If the Earth is flat and you stand at 0 N 0 E, how do you move in a straight line East of there? I.e. continuously moving towards the South because the polar coordinates curve towards your left as you progress.
by vidarh | 2025-11-29 03:43:09+00:00
Because you get the biggest time-savings when you can let it run longer between each time it needs a human in the loop.

I have multi-week runs of Claude Code going to work on a compiler project. I have a week-long run of Claude Code where it is writing a real-time strategy game.

In both cases I occasionally review code, and complain a bit about things it has gotten wrong until it's back on track. In both cases it is working to specs that have produced plans that have produced TODO lists. In the latter it wrote the specs itself. In the former, the specs are externally imposed (rubyspecs test suite).

In both cases it means I get involved ranging from ever tens of minutes to every few hours, but mostly then to just confirm it can continue, with more detailed reviews every day or so.

Having to review output and give instructions every turn would drastically diminish the value.