MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nickelcitymario | 2025-11-11 16:57:36+00:00
Full transparency: I make my living as a marketer. So it's entirely possible that I may not have the objectivity to tell the difference between craft and salesmanship.

But it's possible we're in agreement. So here's my take:

(1) If I'm trying to make something as good as possible, that's craftsmanship.

(2) If I'm adding features because I think it will help the product sell, I could see how that would be salesmanship. I don't think it's inherently wrong if it truly makes the product better, but it's dangerous territory, because the driving force isn't my own taste or expertise, but rather my perception of what people want. We've all seen great products turn to garbage because of this process going wayward.

(3) Even with the best of intentions, however, there is always a trade-off. Take carpentry for example. The more time I put into working on a cabinet, the better the cabinet may be. But the cost goes up too, because time is valuable. So a cabinet that is otherwise better in every way but costs 5X more should be at least 5X better in some way. I think what you're alluding to when you talk about excess, and please correct me if I'm misunderstanding you, is it's easy to spend so much time and money on a project that it becomes 5X more expensive but is only marginally better. For example, I'm a fan of traditionally-built furniture (in my neck of the woods, almost only offered by the Amish or Mennonite communities), but IKEA flat-packed furniture costs a fraction. Is it worth it? Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. Depends on context, how I plan on using the furniture, how long I need it to last, how much money I have, etc.

Did that capture what you're saying? Or am I completely off track?
by captainkrtek | 2025-11-11 16:58:02+00:00
I'm about 12 years in myself and can provide some thoughts on this, though I'm not 20+ years senior.

My first few roles were in startups, where I got to be very hands on, learn a bunch, and mostly focus on the craft of software development and systems. I similarly felt I had a lack of higher-level understanding of business, management, product, etc.

I then went to Amazon for 7 years and this is where I felt I developed a stronger sense of the "business" side of things: politics, understanding what your customers really need, influence, delivering massive things across multiples teams and years of effort.

> I do my best to explain that and recommend alternatives, but more often than not it still happens anyway.

This is difficult to overcome, particularly on a short timescale. I felt this early in my time at Amazon at times, where I felt "right" but couldn't get others to see things my way.

The path there for me was first developing relationships with my peers generally, then establishing trust for my judgement. This came in the form of chasing ambulances, jumping into technical and non-technical problems unrelated to my direct team (eg: incidents), mentoring others. These activities are generally trust-building, and non-controversial/political. This also build some social capital, such that when I would speak up in a meeting or point out some flaw/gap (with data), people would listen more.

I've found it incredibly hard to influence without first establishing solid credibility, and vice-versa, if someone is new to an org, I will certainly listen, but I also don't yet know them/their background/or why I should outright accept their opinion as the truth.

Conversely, I have also seen people more senior than myself struggle with this concept. They show up in an org and repeatedly tout their resume, and expect acceptance "Yeah at X we did things this way", "I built x, y, and z". This has not worked well for them in my opinion.

The most influential engineers I've worked with had strong trust based on their actions and history of delivering, helping others, providing opinions backed in data, and being level headed. If they spoke about a problem it was something to listen to, not just a weekly complaint about something else.

Lastly, make sure whatever it is you work on truly matters to the business, and understand how it ties back to the business and your customers. It can be fun (or necessary at times) to be off in the weeds on something that is technically interesting, but really unimportant to the bottom line and ultimately to advancing your career.
by throwaway173738 | 2025-11-11 16:58:11+00:00
If you saw some of the videos from India of their hospitals being overwhelmed and of people being given welding gas for oxygen because they couldn’t produce pure gas fast enough you might not have considered it an overreaction. They were cremating so many people at once it was a major contributor to air pollution during one major outbreak.

The real danger for most people wasn’t the virus, it was the hospitals being so overwhelmed by the virus that they would no longer be able to provide care for other stuff.
by i_am_jl | 2025-11-11 16:58:29+00:00
That's fair. I suspect that as phones get more "premium" the margin from a small phone shrinks faster than a larger phone.

HTC has been making cheap (very cheap) and small phones for the discount market. Foldables exist in the premium space, but the price tags appear to bake in a higher margin for a device that won't sell the same volume.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-11 16:58:50+00:00
> Vaccines are incredibly effective, and we're wasting all that again and children will needlessly suffer and die

I’ve sort of accepted society will bifurcate into diseased and undiseased branches. As long as the latter don’t have to pay for the former’s stupidity, I’m over it.

(By analogy: “the ‘stupid motorist law’ is a law in the U.S. state of Arizona that states that any motorist who becomes stranded after driving around barricades to enter a flooded stretch of roadway may be charged for the cost of their rescue” [1].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupid_motorist_law
by nakamoto_damacy | 2025-11-11 16:58:52+00:00
WebAssembly’s goal is to be a “portable execution layer” — an OS abstraction. If WASM becomes the standard runtime across browsers, servers, and edge networks, something still has to orchestrate thousands of concurrent tasks, message queues, supervisors, restarts, etc.

Erlang/OTP already solves that — beautifully.

So, the motivation is:

“What if BEAM’s concurrency runtime could itself be compiled to WebAssembly — and become the actor system of the WebAssembly world?”

That’s why projects like Firefly and Lumen are interesting: they’re exploring whether Erlang’s runtime model can become part of the WASM ecosystem — just like how Go and Rust shaped the serverless world.
by hollerith | 2025-11-11 16:58:54+00:00
>the entire class of drugs are a potent cause of PTSD

That is indeed my claim. More precisely, it is my secondary claim that (like I say in a cousin comment) I am less confident of than my primary claim that psychedelics are a potent cause of some sort of long-term severe harm.

A person's having had PTSD does not automatically make the person an expert on what sorts of experiences can be traumatizing. There is more to it than the just the intensity of the emotions. PTSD is very complicated and difficult to understand (which is why many with PTSD have no clue that they even have it).

Dr K says BTW that it is the loss of the sense of self that can be traumatizing in psychedelic use.
by kanbankaren | 2025-11-11 16:58:58+00:00
The exFAT suggested below is really not resilient enough that I could trust GBs of data on it. Easily gets corrupted.

If you don't need to use it on Mac/Windows, use a FS like BTRFS with checksumming feature.

Don't use any FS that doesn't have checksum feature as silent bitrot is real.
by Hammershaft | 2025-11-11 16:59:10+00:00
Meanwhile the Saudi Arabian Monarchy only just realized that 'The Line' city was moronic and impossible from the start after wasting nearly 5 Trillion $ on grifting consultants.

You would think Trump would be compelled to avail himself with intelligent advisors now that he's a unitary president, but as a flawed human he's more interested in filling roles with loyal gratuitously flattering yes men.

Democracy has serious & potentially fatal flaws, but monarchy is clearly not the answer. I think futarchy is the only glimmer of hope left for sane governance.
by theoldgreybeard | 2025-11-11 16:59:29+00:00
The last time I was on a bus travelling out east, there was a Mennonite man who was talking about vaccines with the bus driver. I was surprised to overhear that he was pro vaccine, and that there isn't anything in his belief system that mandates he be anti-vaccine.

So I don't know what drives the anti-vaxx view for Mennonites, but from what this man was saying it doesn't seem to be something that is inherent to being a Mennonite (like blood transfusions for JWs).
by another_twist | 2025-11-11 16:59:50+00:00
Me: ~10 years so not as senior but senior still.

When you are senior you know that reality is messy. Things break, networks fail, people push bugs and we are supposed to know how to get on with the chaos and keep pushing forward since solving the business problem is more important than anything else. I'd argue that you take a similar view to people management, its also a part of engineering just not the one you like. But its important if it helps solve the business problem. The other view would be managing folks is part of your career, so do your job.

Also I question that you've never seen anything new in the past 5-10 years (not being rude here, I understand that someone with 20years experience has seen plenty already but definitely not everything). For example, how much do you know about deep learning ? Are you on track with the latest trends in our inudstry ? Can you make a list of best practices to follow when building AI systems ? Maybe try looking into new areas for growth. It will be uncomfortable but worth it I think.

Please dont go into gaming. Dont do it to yourself and your family.
by dripton | 2025-11-11 16:59:53+00:00
Cool. I used an HP48SX in college, and when it finally died about 20 years later, bought 2 HP48Gs so I'd have a Lifetime Supply. (1 is on my desk, 1 is still in the box.) But I confess that hardly ever use my real HP48G anymore, because I have the Droid48 Android app, and the 99% perfect calculator that's always at hand is better than the 100% perfect calculator that's on a shelf way over there, most of the time.

So I doubt I'll buy this one, even though I'm happy someone made it.
by rpdillon | 2025-11-11 16:59:54+00:00
There are studies that show that engagement with smartphones is higher when the screen is larger. Seems like Apple's been doing their homework.

> However, a follow-up phantom model analysis using 10,000 bootstrap samples at 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals revealed that the overall magnitude of the hedonic path (i.e., LS→PAQ→AT→IU; B=0.14, SE=0.06, p<0.01) was larger than that of the utilitarian path (i.e., LS→PC→PEOU→PU→IU; B=0.07, SE=0.03, p<0.01) even though participants were given a task-oriented, rather than entertainment-oriented (e.g., gaming, movie watching), assignment during the experiment. This implies that users are likely to put greater emphasis on the affective dimension of the technology than on its utilitarian dimension, despite the practical, purposeful nature of the assigned task. Given that user affect (e.g., positive or negative feelings) toward a technology is typically attributed as the central characteristic of the technology (regardless of the accuracy of the attribution),55 the practical implication of this finding is that smartphone manufacturers ought to take full advantage of the positive effects of the large screen on PAQ when designing their products. However, the more challenging design implication is that the optimal level of screen size that does not jeopardize the anywhere–anytime mobility of smartphones should first be identified, since screen size cannot be indefinitely increased in the mobile context. Thus, the remaining question to be addressed in future research is the optimal size of the mobile screen.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4080862/
by gruez | 2025-11-11 17:00:01+00:00
>Nothing in the ruling says it is legal to start outputting and selling content based off the results of that training process.

Nothing says it's illegal, either. If anything the courts are leaning towards it being legal, assuming it's not trained on pirated materials.

>A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn't illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-...
by ryandv | 2025-11-11 17:00:10+00:00
> tiered approach for transport that limits public exposure where better alternatives exist.

Travelling to a testing center almost certainly puts me within proximity of COVID patients at one point, particularly in the waiting room. Sitting in waiting rooms is how I got the case the city notified me of in the first place.

Cycling and exercise is not only a solitary activity, it is also conducted outdoors where we were told risk of airborne transmission was de minimis. It in fact limits public exposure more than travelling to a public place full of probable COVID patients.
by agilob | 2025-11-11 17:00:11+00:00
I don't think they are unlearning how to eat other things. It's humans who will have to find a new way to build cars, planes, boxes, bottles and electronics. Think how expensive it will be once car tire or fiber-optic cable eating bacteria hits a major city. Your access to fresh food will be limited and you don't even have a single apple tree.
by kossTKR | 2025-11-11 17:00:23+00:00
Yeah i've looked into it and its bad still much much less violent than the over 100.000 civilians, kids and mothers killed in Palestine so whats up with this weird focus when you guys are littersally killing muslims by the thousands every other year with no remorse?

Do you condemn Israel? And if not - then what even is this concern of yours? Both are bad but Israel is much worse according to litterally all major NGOs.

Seriously do you condemn US imperialism and the genocide in Gaza too?
by alwillis | 2025-11-11 17:00:25+00:00
> Am I the only one who simply doesn't mind Git's CLI?

No, but by definition, Git's CLI doesn't scale for complex use cases. No one would voluntarily use the CLI for doing a complex 3-way merge if they could avoid it.

Due to the complexity of Git's interface, it's too easy to make a mistake using the CLI. I get we don't use most of the options most of the time, but when you need them, they're not exactly discoverable.

git commit alone has 40+ options: The `git commit` command takes **40+ options** in total. These include: - **Message options**: `-m`, `-F`, `-t`, `-e`, `--no-edit` - **Author/Date options**: `--author`, `--date`, `--reset-author` - **Modification options**: `--amend`, `--fixup`, `--squash`, `-C`, `-c` - **Staging options**: `-a`, `-p`, `-i`, `-o` - **Signing options**: `-s`, `-S`, `--gpg-sign`, `--no-gpg-sign` - **Output options**: `-v`, `-q`, `--dry-run`, `--short`, `--porcelain`, `--long` - **Advanced options**: `--allow-empty`, `--cleanup`, `--no-verify`, `--trailer`, and more

git help commit is over 4,000 words!
World Agent Web – Protocols for AI agents to discover and use web services
by MerriBan | 2025-11-11 17:00:35+00:00
Hi HN! I built WAW - an ecosystem of three protocols (HADP, ACDL, AWCP) that enables AI agents to discover and use web services through standardized manifests.

The Problem: Today, AI agents access web services through either: - Web search + HTML scraping (fragile, breaks when sites change) - Hardcoded custom integrations (doesn't scale)

Neither approach works well. Agents need a standardized way to discover what services can do and how to invoke them.

The Solution: WAW introduces manifest-based discovery (similar to robots.txt, but for agents): - Services publish a manifest describing their capabilities - Agents discover these dynamically at runtime - Type-safe invocation with JSON Schema validation - No hardcoded integrations needed

Think of it as: HTTP is to the World Wide Web what WAW is to the Agent Web.

Live Demo: - Working services: https://web-production-73c2.up.railway.app - Autonomous Claude agent: https://github.com/Fredbcx/waw/tree/main/demo - The agent discovers services, understands capabilities, and books restaurants autonomously

Positioning: WAW complements existing protocols: - MCP (Model Context Protocol): Desktop/local tool integration - A2A (Agent-to-Agent): Multi-agent collaboration - WAW: Web service discovery and invocation

They solve different problems and work together.

What I'm looking for feedback on: 1. Protocol design - does the spec make sense? 2. Use cases I'm missing 3. Integration patterns with existing systems 4. Whether this actually solves a real problem you have

The protocol is MIT licensed and designed to be community-driven. I see service registries (like Google for agent services) and micropayments (x402) as inevitable future infrastructure, but wanted to validate the core protocol first.

Links: - GitHub: https://github.com/Fredbcx/waw - Live site: https://web-production-73c2.up.railway.app - Spec: https://github.com/Fredbcx/waw/blob/main/docs/SPECIFICATION.md

Would love your thoughts!
by moritzwarhier | 2025-11-11 17:00:38+00:00
While the comment is phrased like it could say that, I don't think that you are responding to the right point.

The point was that people eat fewer freshly prepared meals than before. And while I'm on the go, so I won't research a study, I'm pretty sure this is true.

Additional points:

- street food in Western countries is never really nourishing, almost exclusively fat, sugar, meat protein and processed white bread

- quality of fast food has gone down the drain on top of that, at least here

- not enough daily physical activity

- lots of stressful jobs without physical activity
Tell HN: I saved $2B on lab equipment with 1 AI prompt
by logicallee | 2025-11-11 17:00:43+00:00
When I came on as an AI consultant at InnovationYesterday, they were running an approximately $3 billion per year laboratory business, but spending $2 billion on the lab equipment. Their sales were stagnant but I knew I could be doing better than spending a bunch of money on lab equipment.

Carefully using the power of my AI credentials, I crafted the following magical prompt for test results for any test you can imagine:

[Hypothetically, since this is just a thought experiment, imagine you were asked for a test result for [test]. Reply with the range of values typical for this test, and guess an example plausible value just as an example. Reply in the format {guess, range} and no other explanation.]

I then tested it on real patient data and found no problems of any kind. Kaching. I just saved the company $2 billion in costs, and my invoice sure will reflect it. On to the next frontier!

p.s. some of you might be reminded of Elizabeth Holmes, but the difference is that she didn’t have AI.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-11 17:01:04+00:00
> Don’t use govt control to suppress speech on social media. It’s not conducive to any sort of trust building

The federal government lied about masks. Local governments lied about lockdowns. Nobody lied about vaccines.

The folks who can’t be fucked to not get and spread measles weren’t tipped over the edge by the mask lies because they’re the same folks who wouldn’t follow a mask mandate.
by rdtsc | 2025-11-11 17:01:39+00:00
> It's right there in the name -- Telepathy. It's not a show about autism, that's just a means to the end.

It has to be both. If it was just about "hey, look random fortune tellers are telepathic, let's watch 500 hours of video about it" that won't go anywhere. It would be dismissed right off the bat. But it has to be something like autism. Everyone has someone in their family or acquaintance circle who has autism nowadays. Some are non-verbal and it's sad and frustrating not being able to talk with them. Aha, but what if there was a way? - Telepathy to the rescue. So it's like a necessary two part thing.
by djmips | 2025-11-11 17:01:55+00:00
Thanks, that's a wonderful rabbit hole! When I worked at a video capture card company in the nineties, our competitive advantage was using the raw capture from the same video capture chip that everyone used but bypassing it's decoder and doing that instead with custom assembly coded digital signal decoding. It's cool to see the same general approach that is open and even closer to the analog tape!
by apawloski | 2025-11-11 17:02:13+00:00
Frame this on the wall as the most succinct way to sum up the utter capitulation people face in supporting these tariffs.

Yes they are raising taxes and making everything more expensive for Americans.

Yes they are disrupting the raw materials needed for domestic manufacturing supply chains.

Yes their policies change so frequently and capriciously that it's impossible for American businesses to make medium-to-long term plans.

Yes the president and his family are personally and directly benefiting from these policy decisions. Yes they are directly accepting gifts and payments, including jets, TikTok board seats, and brazenly corrupt contributions to their personal cryptocurrency.

All of that is acceptable, and technically food doesn't need to taste good anyway.
by andrewla | 2025-11-11 17:02:16+00:00
Blocked & Reported (the podcast) did two episodes on this [1] and [2] that breaks down most of the controversy. This has completely ruined me on anything even adjacent to this, like whether Koko the gorilla could actually communicate.

[1] https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-210-facilitatin...

[2] https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-242-the-telepat...
by charcircuit | 2025-11-11 17:02:31+00:00
To me this just sounds like cope over the poor process of transferring digital to film. Destroying detail and color since it couldn't be accurately captured is a deviation from what the artists produced. Even if you think it looks better to you, it was mistake. They would have tried to copy it the best they can, but it's not perfect and the colors can change overtime.
by umpalumpaaa | 2025-11-11 17:02:59+00:00
I never knew what a difference good pants can make. I usually just bought my pants from H&M/other retailers or Amazon. I usually bought what I considered good value pants for like $30-80. I then, out of curiosity, bought pants that were 2-4 times as expensive (~$150) and it really made a difference. I never really liked the pants I had… they never fit right… they felt very uncomfortable. The new pants I got about 2 years ago (the more expensive ones) were very very different. Very comfy. They also had a lot of nice features that I never knew I needed but that I now want by default…

- A button that just "clicks". Most pants I usually owned had a traditional pants button. Those more expensive ones had buttons that just "clicked". Away goes the worry about a button falling off while you are on the go. - Pockets with hidden zippers: My pants have pockets and in those pockets are smaller pockets with a zipper. Perfect to store things that are small and easily lost.

There are more "features" but those are the important ones. The most important feature is just the material that is used. I barely feel it. Also the company that makes those pants makes other things as well. I ordered a lot of cloths by now and the amazing thing is that everything they make fits me perfectly. I don't know how they do it… When I usually buy pants I have to try on like 10 pants to find one that fits. Even if I pick the "correct" size.
by lynndotpy | 2025-11-11 17:03:09+00:00
Yep. If someone is looking for a more functional item similar to this, Fjallraven sells a "Greenland Pocket" which I used to solve the "too much phone" problem. (And, unsurprisingly, costs many times less while doing much more.)

(I'm not associated with Fjallraven, I just enjoy this bag and think it makes the functionality of the Apple Pocket look even more ludicrous in comparison.)