MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JohnBooty | 2025-11-29 18:11:15+00:00
the optimal amount to spend on software optimization is at least a substantial fraction of your hardware budget.

This has been a banging-head-against-wall sort of struggle every place I've worked on software, without AI even coming into the picture.

At one startup they were spending millions of dollars on AWS and complaining loudly to us about AWS spend and yet... god forbid the engineering team devote any resources to optimization passes instead of rolling out more poorly considered features, and hiring more engineers, because the existing engineers are struggling to be productive because everything is so unoptimized, and also because they have to spend a bunch of their time interviewing and training new hires.
by Johnny555 | 2025-11-29 18:12:09+00:00
>For me, that means topping up with a supplement. The UK government advises everyone in the country to take a 10-microgram vitamin D supplement over autumn and winter

My last blood test showed I was slightly deficient in vitamin D - my doctor recommended a 50 microgram (2000 IU) supplement. My next test to see how well it' working isn't for a few more months.
by bee_rider | 2025-11-29 18:12:37+00:00
The concept of the professional has been basically obliterated in our society. Instead we have people doing engineering, science, and doctoring as, just, jobs. Individual contributors of various flavors to be shuffled around by middle management.

Without professions, there are no more professional communities really, no more professional standards to uphold, no reason to get in the way of somebody’s publications.
by pdimitar | 2025-11-29 18:13:44+00:00
If the current technology does not allow them to sincerely say "I don't know, I am now checking it out" then they are not AGI, was my original point.

I am aware that the LLM companies are starting to integrate this quality -- and I strongly approve. But again, not being self-critical and as such lacking self-awareness is one of the qualities that I would ascribe to an AGI.
by Isamu | 2025-11-29 18:13:55+00:00
>The LLM is not doing semantics; the humans who generated the corpus are doing the thinking.

Agreed, this bears repeating. This point is not obvious to someone interacting with the LLM. Because it is able to mash up custom responses doesn’t make it a thinking machine, the thinking was done ahead of time as is the case when you read a book. What passes for intelligence here is the mash-up, a smooth blending of digested text, which was selected by statistical relevance.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-29 18:14:09+00:00
> those that lead to undefined behavior but aren't security-critical.

Once again C++ people imagining into existence Undefined Behaviour which isn't Security Critical as if somehow that's a thing.

Mostly I read the link because I was intrigued as to how this counted as "at scale" and it turns out that's misleading, the article's main body is about the (at scale) deployment at Google, not the actual hardening work itself which wasn't in some special way "at scale".
by ThrowawayB7 | 2025-11-29 18:14:50+00:00
> "If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better."

People here on HN are willing pay Google (monthly even!) to remove ads from YouTube. People here are willing to pay for RHEL Workstation or Ubuntu Pro Desktop for enterprise deployments. Yet people here are unwilling to pay Microsoft for the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want. Their problems are self-inflicted.
by bayindirh | 2025-11-29 18:16:04+00:00
> The article glides over the fact that FMVSS 226 is a performance standard, not a materials mandate.

Nope. The article states the following just after the table:

> It's true that not all automakers have switched over to laminated glass for the side windows; the FMVSS 226 law stipulates that you can get around it if you install elaborate side airbags that also prevent ejection.
by bArray | 2025-11-29 18:16:15+00:00
> Big tech failed us.

Uses Go, a language written by and maintained by Google [1]. Uses co-pilot written by GitHub for development [4].

Mu is £11 a month and you cannot see any screenshot of what you are getting [2], the same price you could buy a cheap VPS for [3]. The two authors of the project are asim and co-pilot. The commits have meaningless messages [4].

I would run a million miles away from this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)

[2] https://github.com/asim/mu

[3] https://www.racknerd.com/BlackFriday/

[4] https://github.com/asim/mu/commits/main/
by gogyjay | 2025-11-29 18:16:56+00:00
Over the past months I’ve been restoring and organizing real phone ringtones and system sounds from hundreds of mobile devices — classic Nokias, Sony Ericsson phones, LG, Samsung, Motorola, obscure Chinese models, early Androids, and many forgotten brands.

Since no complete archive ever existed, I recreated everything manually from firmware dumps, backup files, leaked service packs, and old devices.

The result:

65,000+ normalized and cleaned sounds

170+ brands (grouped by brand → model → sound)

Startup tones, shutdown jingles, UI sounds, alerts, classic melodies

Everything playable in the browser

Multilingual interface

If you know rare devices with unique tones — I’d love to add them.
by sndean | 2025-11-29 18:17:31+00:00
The smartest thing to do would be to check your car’s windows for any indication (the AAA report, page 19, cited in the article has examples) of whether they’re laminated or tempered. AFAICT, whether my new-ish Subaru Ascent’s windows are laminated depends on location (front or rear) and installation differs between the Ascent trims. Best to check for your specific car and where you’re likeliest to be sitting.
by femiagbabiaka | 2025-11-29 18:17:53+00:00
I think there is a funny bit of mental gymnastics that goes on here sometimes, definitely. LLM skeptics (which I'm not saying the Pangram folks are in particular) would say: "LLMs are unreliable and therefore useless, it's producing slop at great cost to the environment and other people." But if a study comes out that confirms their biases and uses an LLM in the process, or if they themselves use an LLM to identify -- or in many cases just validate their preconceived notion -- that something was drafted using an LLM, then all the sudden things are above board.
by alberth | 2025-11-29 18:18:32+00:00
Is this accurate?

Doesn’t that strategy only work in games like Clue, where everyone is trying to uncover the same hidden character?

In Guess Who, you’re identifying your opponent’s character, not a shared one, so any misdirection only hurts you … because it doesn’t generate extra signal for your opponent, so there’s no strategic benefit to misleading them.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-11-29 18:19:00+00:00
AI has left the lab the conferences and journals are all second class citizens to corporate labs at this point. So many technology people wanted to return to the “Bell Labs” model of monopolist controlled innovation, well, you got it.

I’ve been to CVPR, NeurIPS and AGI conferences over the last decade and they used to be where progress in AI was displayed.

No longer. Progress is all in your github and increasingly only dominated by the “new” AI companies (Deepmind, OAI, Anthropic, Alibaba etc…)

No major landscape shifting breakthroughs have come out of CSAIL, BAIR, NYU, TuM etc in ~the last 5 years.

I’d expect this will continue as the only thing that matters at this point is architecture data and compute.
by didibus | 2025-11-29 18:19:58+00:00
I think the issue is that the OP wasn’t giving an opinion. They stated things as facts. When you say “x is y” you’re making a truth claim, and people are going to challenge it if it sounds wrong or depends on context.

A lot of folks flip to “it’s just my opinion” only after they get pushback, but if you present something as a fact, it’s fair game to question it.

Like if someone says “apples taste bitter and have no flavor” that reads like a universal claim, so yeah people will argue. If you say “I find apples bitter and lacking flavor” that’s obviously personal taste and nobody is going to demand proof.

Nobody is asking for IMO everywhere. Just don’t frame opinions as facts or the other way around.
by johnfn | 2025-11-29 18:20:52+00:00
If you are just working on a small website and you don't care about SEO or supporting more than, I dunno, a thousand users, then sure. But if you ever expect to do more than that, I might call you naive, yeah. One big thing: what if you want to support SSR, which I think is a pretty basic requirement these days? I'd submit that supporting SSR will take you a bit more than 50 lines.
by knollimar | 2025-11-29 18:21:55+00:00
I write some software to automate some engineering processes in construction.

I'd say it comes from some of (order of most to least imo, but I'm only mid level so take what I say accordingly):

* physical processes have a fuzzy good enough. The bridge stands with thrice its expected max load. It is good enough.

* most software doesn't have life safety behind it. In construction, life safety systems receive orders of magnitude more scrutiny.

* physical projects don't have more than 20 different interdependencies; there's an upper limit on arbitrary complexity

* physical projects usually have clearish deadlines (they lie, but by a constant factor)

* The industries are old enough that they check juniors before they give them big decisions.

* Similarly, there exists PE accountability in construction
by asim | 2025-11-29 18:22:06+00:00
I guess I should be more specific about why "big tech failed us". They essentially control all the dominant social platforms. While they have great developer tools like Go, GitHub (owned by Microsoft), the consumer products have been a point of exploitation. I think it's OK to both admire yet be critical and to try hold systems and people to a higher standard when they have such an impact on everyones lives.

To address some of your other comments on commits/copilot. Commit messages are about as meaningful as email subject titles. At a certain point they really don't offer much value when you have powerful search tools. Essentially the source of truth is the current codebase. Maybe the commit message is going to provide insight into what was happening at that time, but when you're coding with AI toolings it feels almost irrelevant if not dated. If anything it should autocommit with a useful message if its that much of an issue. Second to that, Yes I use copilot, why, because hand coding is 10x slower. I lay the foundations by hand but then started to rely on copilot for a lot of changes beyond that. Again going back to the point, yes big tech failed us, but on social and consumer. The dev tooling and technology is fine, but the addictive and exploitive nature of the consumer tooling is not.

In all honesty, thank you for highlighting the depths of the warts on the project. It's always good for people to see the truth.

Note on £11/month. It's free to use. Membership is just for those who want to support it and help with roadmap, get access to features, etc but point taken about the screenshot.
by kingofmen | 2025-11-29 18:22:16+00:00
I'm having some trouble with this part of the explanation:

> From the figure, one can easily see that the triangles ABC and BDE are congruent.

I must confess I do not easily see this. It's been a long time since I did any geometry, could someone help me out? I'm probably forgetting some trivial fact about triangles.
by zarzavat | 2025-11-29 18:22:58+00:00
Your echo chamber is probably full of virgins. Try a different one.

Puritanism follows a bathtub curve. The most judgmental people are the very young who lack experience in the world, and the old whose experience comes from a different age.

Those zoomers who complain about age gaps will grow up, realise that they quite enjoy such relationships, and laugh at gen alpha for being so puritanical.
by kakacik | 2025-11-29 18:23:07+00:00
Hiking in the hills / mountains is one of the healthiest sports there is, unless you already have messed up legs. Or other mountain sports, but at least those I do have additional risks of injury or death that most folks would find unacceptable.

Not everybody has easy access to mountains, but then we all forge our paths through life and at least at certain points of life we have some wiggle room to choose where to spend the rest of it. Polluted big cities may (or may not) bring more wealth but there is a cost.

I look from my balcony on a large forest which is natural reserve, begins right in front of us. On the other side of the village there is a 15km band of vineyards on steep hills. I go up and end up in wild hills fully covered in pine forests and actually OK for winter sports (planning to do skitour there tomorrow morning). I go the other side and its 100km wide lake with crystal clear water, highly swimmable in summer. Highway is few km away, 100m lower.

Coming to city makes me realize the various not OK smells I didn't sense when I was living there. Not regretting the move (but sure as hell hoping some part of work will remain WFH so its not just kids reaping benefits of living on a more healthy and overall better place)
by suspended_state | 2025-11-29 18:23:30+00:00
Reading through the article, it says:

> Shinwell also consulted AI regarding the copyright, which told him that “I conclude that no code was copied from oxcaml” and gave reasons. Unconvinced, maintainer Gabriel Scherer said “the fact that the tool that produced the code attributes its copyright to a real human is a clear sign that something is an issue.”

This is inaccurate, Mark Shinwell didn't participate to the discussion, and if he somehow consulted AI, it is not mentioned anywhere in the discussion. Actually, the AI analysis was performed by the PR submitter.

The topic of the article has been discussed in another HN submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274
by builtawall | 2025-11-29 18:23:34+00:00
It was amazing how fast the anti-globalization/anti-corporate attitudes evaporated away in the wake of 9/11.

100,000 mostly normal people traveled to Quebec City to protest the FTAA in April 2001.

By the end of that year that kind of thing was anti-patriotic, and very much a taboo subject, at least in the mainstream culture.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-11-29 18:24:02+00:00
Very often paperwork is the necessary process. I’ve seen multiple engineering teams who used to accept essentially any customer escalation, for example, until they found themselves essentially being DDoSed by poorly explained tickets filed at much too high of a priority. Now they have forms that customer-facing folks have to fill out explaining in detail what’s going wrong, why an escalation is required, and naming the senior person who’s accountable for the accuracy of that form.

Is it slow and annoying to jump through these hoops? Without a doubt! I’ve also seen people on the other side of the process who are very frustrated that they can’t just escalate when they know devs would want to hear about it. But it’s not acceptable for people to get woken up every week because the new support engineer filed a customer error as a global outage, and smart people tried and failed to put a stop through it through training. I don’t know what the alternative could be.
by Verdex | 2025-11-29 18:24:25+00:00
> IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI.

Yeah, I've had the same thought for a while now. You don't sell investors on an endeavor for 10s of billions of dollars with the endgame being "sell ads". If that was the endgame then there are a lot less resource and capital intensive ways to get to it.

Given all of the discourse of "you need this new tech in your life to continue to participate in society", I would not have expected them to need to stand on the roadside trying to get people to buy low cost fireworks. It smacks of going through the sofa for loose change so you can make rent.

And if they had something impressive coming down the pipeline I would think they could get someone to spot them a few billions yet, unless the billionaire/megacorp economy is really that tapped out.
by withinboredom | 2025-11-29 18:25:00+00:00
It’s like being invited to a party in someone’s house. One person starts smoking in the house. Sure, one person is no big deal. Then another person lights up because someone else did, and hey, they don’t have to live there tomorrow. Before you know it, 5–10% of people are smoking and making it stink for everyone, but it’s fine. They’ll stop eventually, and it’s not like you have to live there.

Unless someone stands up and says "no smoking in the house" ... people are going to keep smoking.
by qilo | 2025-11-29 18:25:04+00:00
Someone has hijacked the name "uBlock Origin" (for an extension) in the Chrome Web Store. When you search for "uBlock Origin", you’re shown a fake extension (1,000 users) with a "Featured" badge instead of the real one (17,000,000 users) at https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin/cjpal...
by bee_rider | 2025-11-29 18:25:55+00:00
IMO it would take some real study to come to a conclusion there. My opinion is mostly borrowed from the ACOUP guy: societies that are relatively developed in comparison to their neighbors rack up a lot of W’s. This is just unsurprising and not narratively dramatic so the opposite gets over-emphasized.

https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
by tim333 | 2025-11-29 18:26:02+00:00
I tried Google and it pointed me to a ycombinator video about Starcloud https://youtu.be/hKw6cRKcqzY They launched a satellite with one H100 in on Nov 2nd.

>I mean, when you tell people that within 10 years it could be the case that most new data centers are being built in space, that sounds wacky to a lot of people, but not to YC. (8:00)
by anonymouskimmer | 2025-11-29 18:26:22+00:00
Importantly everyone is popping a fever reducer only after the fever has already started. Here, with the avian flus, the fever effectively never gets a chance to start.

And it's one thing to pop a fever reducer when you already have antibodies from prior exposure or immunization (which vulnerable groups tend to be in large enough numbers). It's another thing to pop it when you don't.
by tpmoney | 2025-11-29 18:26:29+00:00
And people not wanting others to indirectly force them to subsidize their employers by devoting unpaid portions of their limited living space, utility bills and personal equipment to their work is also a "critical fight". Remote work inherently blurs the line between "company property" and "personal property" in ways that can impose heavy burdens on employees. Confidentiality and privacy requirements might require employees to allow spyware laden devices on their personal home networks. It might require them to create secure, isolated parts of their house that lock out other family members. It might require them to allow surveillance devices into their homes. Even if your employer buys you a secure safe or locking cabinet to keep confidential materials in, you still have to devote some of your limited floor space to having that item in your space, and you become liable for ensuring that item is secured in ways that you don't have to worry about when confidential materials are stored at a central office. Everything in life is a trade off and remote work is no different in that respect.
by ozim | 2025-11-29 18:27:15+00:00
That’s why we have daily and other “ceremonies”.

But if I get $1 for every comment nagging about daily standups I would be rich.

I guess the ones nagging about daily rather be interrupted every 30 mins.

Sometimes there is this guy like we had a guy who would come over at me before I took my jacket off in office with “quick question” - FFS we have daily for that.

Want to have a cake and wish happy birthday, just got back from vacay and want tell all amazing stories? FFS do it after daily not when you come in and with every person separately.

You have a question/celebration/fluff - do it after daily meeting.
by ipsento606 | 2025-11-29 18:27:42+00:00
I would say something like 95% of the code I have been paid to write as a software engineer has 0% test coverage. Like, literally, not a single test on the entire project. Across many different companies and several countries, frontend and backend.

I wonder if I'm an anomaly, or if it's actually more common that one might assume?
by o11c | 2025-11-29 18:28:29+00:00
Let's suppose arithmetic is a solved problem and only consider manufacturing and distribution.

The major barrier to self-managed dosing, even if you want to do it properly, is that there's a huge difference between one pill and two pills. And trying to cut pills in half (if even possible for a particular pill structure) often makes very uneven halves (which is a problem for day-to-day variation even if a consistent "10% more than half" dose would be fine).

I have seen dose differences of ~10% to be ignored between brands or over time, so that's probably safe-ish to ignore (certainly much better than the current 50%-if-lucky-else-100%). But counting out 10 pills is certainly a pain; realistically, aiming for a 5-pill typical dose would be more reasonable.

My impression from looking at OTC costs is that the bottle costs more than anything, so manufacturing probably isn't the bottleneck. A side-effect of the current "one pill" mindset, in conjunction with expiration dates, is that low-dose pills are generally not available in higher counts, but there's nothing fundamental about this.

Are there any "delayed/gradual release" concerns that get worse for many small pills rather than one large one? If so, is it really more significant than the wrong-dose problem?
by didibus | 2025-11-29 18:28:30+00:00
A lot of people formed their view of remote work during Covid, but that wasn’t real remote work. Companies had no idea what they were doing, everyone scrambled, nothing in the culture or processes actually changed.

And it wasn’t just working from home, it was lockdown. Total isolation. Of course people missed human contact and blamed it on remote work.

Even the "productivity" data people cite is skewed, because most of it compares lockdown productivity to normal-life office productivity, which isn’t a fair comparison at all.
by MZUHB | 2025-11-29 18:28:59+00:00
I've been using this note web app for a while, and they recently released a small but impactful feature that automatically removes em dashes. I dunno about y'all, but I use a lot of AI-generated text for social media, client messages, and emails. Em dashes straight up mean that text is AI-generated, so I'd manually remove them before but still end up missing some. Now I don't have to worry about that at all. Sharing this cause this might help others going through the same em dash disaster xD
by fjfaase | 2025-11-29 18:29:26+00:00
This is very true. I once had to implement a form with a table that looked a bit similar to three already existing forms that were implemented with some shared classes. I studied it and concluded that it was just too different to make use of the shared code and simply copied parts of the shared code. Took me about a day to get it working. Then another developer, who had worked on these three other forms saw what I had done and decided to integrate the four forms. Took him almost three weeks to get it working. I did not protest or made any remark about it, because I had done similar things in the past and sometimes 'wasted' time by trying to find the most beautifull abstaction, while at other times it did work out great. The intuition of when to avoid duplication or not, like so many other thing, only comes through making lots of mistakes. Luckily this other developer solved some bugs in the process, so the final result was an improvement.