MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BrenBarn | 2025-11-19 08:14:32+00:00
Very cool. I often wish for the ability to do something like this but with slightly friendlier GUI tools. In particular I long for a visual tool that has all the power and convenience of a spreadsheet, but supports other backends (like an SQL db or some directory-tree structure like in this post), with well-defined mechanisms for smoothly translating between them. I've looked at a few of the "database management" tools like DBeaver but it's hard to find anything that's as fluid as a spreadsheet.
by palmotea | 2025-11-19 08:15:15+00:00
> In particular, the machine had an uptime of approximately 35 years including two significant retrofits to newer technology culminating in the current Lucent-dressed 7 R/E configuration...

Pretty impressive. It makes me sad that the trend is to move away from rock-solid stuff towards more and more unreliable and unpredictable stuff (e.g. LLMs that need constant human monitoring because they mess up so much).
by piva00 | 2025-11-19 08:15:56+00:00
It had the potential to be a great replacement if it just worked™ like SMS/MMS (well, MMS was also quite fickle back in the days), given it's so brittle across devices even on the same OS, with little means of troubleshooting by end-users and even less from non-tech savvy users, it's kinda dead in the water.
by olirex99 | 2025-11-19 08:16:37+00:00
I am pursuing a PhD in indoor localization, and UWB is still far superior. That is the reason why major phone companies still include a UWB chip and are not switching to BLE 6.0.

I have compared them, and because BLE is a narrowband signal, it is highly susceptible to Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) conditions compared to UWB.

I also attended a prototype presentation by a large European silicon company. I noticed that even in their demo, BLE did not achieve 30 cm accuracy, but rather hovered around 1 m.

I have only tested PBR and RTT ranging with a simple Kalman Filter, so maybe someone has found a clever combination of these data sources (I hope).
by bluecalm | 2025-11-19 08:16:38+00:00
>>Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete.

GCC and now Clang has beaten Intel compiler (and others). Nginx has beaten/replaced commercial web servers. Stockfish has beaten commercial chess engines and Lichess is much better than commercial chess sites.

Just 3 examples that came to my mind reading your comment.
by lordkrandel | 2025-11-19 08:17:44+00:00
Legacy means that you can't change the software because that would impact existing agreements, generate an unsustainable amount of work, break compliance. So for these reasons, you resort on workarounds or cut away a business required feature or a due technical refactor or maintenance that would make sense in terms of RoI. If senior developers make PRs and they get closed, that's a big red flag. The cumulation of things you cannot do because it would break "traditions" becomes your inherited legacy.
by pabs3 | 2025-11-19 08:18:39+00:00
If you are rich, start funding work on important projects, like NLnet and Sovereign Tech do. Personally I would start with funding GPL compliance actions by Software Freedom Conservancy, the FSF LibrePhone work (and all other firmware reverse engineering efforts), Bootstrappable/Reproducible Builds, distributed code review, privacy fixes, embedded code copy removal, building from source, dynamic linking (esp for Rust), static analysis tools and libre machine learning training. These all need hackers with time on their hands too of course.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/ https://librephone.fsf.org/ https://bootstrappable.org/ https://reproducible-builds.org/ https://github.com/crev-dev/ https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues https://wiki.debian.org/EmbeddedCopies https://wiki.debian.org/AutoGeneratedFiles https://wiki.debian.org/StaticLinking#Rust https://github.com/collab-qa/check-all-the-things https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy/
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-19 08:19:27+00:00
> Private companies are inherently less social since they don’t allow ordinary people to participate in growth.

Consider two possibilities. The first is, if you want to make money in an industry, you start a company in it. Lots of people start companies because lots of people want to make money and then there are lots of companies, causing the profits to be widely distributed.

The second is, if you want to make money in an industry, you buy shares of an existing company. You have to buy them from whoever currently owns it, so the ones who got in early become billionaires, meanwhile even if an ordinary person were to invest their entire net worth they wouldn't even own 1% of the company so they have so little influence over it that it isn't even worth their time to vote their shares, and therefore have no influence over it at all. But you still make some profit while not having to actually do the work of building a company, so more people do that instead of entering the market themselves and then there are fewer companies that are each bigger.

The second one leads to market consolidation and concentration of wealth and power, so which one is actually less social?
by kqr | 2025-11-19 08:20:51+00:00
Super interesting! You can click the "live" link in the header to see how they performed over time. The (geometric) average result at the end seems to be that the LLMs are down 35 % from their initial capital – and they got there in just 96 model-days. That's a daily return of -0.6 %, or a yearly return of -81 %, i.e. practically wiping out the starting capital.

Although I lack the maths to determine it numerically (depends on volatility etc.), it looks to me as though all six are overbetting and would be ruined in the long run. It would have been interesting to compare against a constant fraction portfolio that maintains 1/6 in each asset, as closely as possible while optimising for fees. (Or even better, Cover's universal portfolio, seeded with joint returns from the recent past.)

I couldn't resist starting to look into it. With no costs and no leverage, the hourly rebalanced portfolio just barely outperforms 4/6 coins in the period: https://i.xkqr.org/cfportfolio-vs-6.png. I suspect costs would eat up many of the benefits of rebalancing at this timescale.

This is not too surprising, given the similiarity of coin returns. The mean pairwise correlation is 0.8, the lowest is 0.68. Not particularly good for diversification returns. https://i.xkqr.org/coinscatter.png

> difficulty executing against self-authored plans as state evolves

This is indeed also what I've found trying to make LLMs play text adventures. Even when given a fair bit of help in the prompt, they lose track of the overall goal and find some niche corner to explore very patiently, but ultimately fruitlessly.
by omnimus | 2025-11-19 08:21:06+00:00
This tactic is not surprising. Monotype has been bought by Palo Alto private equity firm HGGC in 2019. Since then they have been trying to corner the market.

They buy absolutely every independent type design company they can (actually they just buy the IP if possible). They likely own every typeface/foundry you can think of. They own myfonts.com too. Somewhere there is a long term business plan to leverage all that IP in future so i would watch out.

Personally will absolutely not touch anything from Monotype/HGGC. Solutions? Besides the obvious open source SIL licensed typefaces. There are bunch of smaller high quality type companies that stayed independent even though they for sure got offers from HGGC by now. Mostly swiss/european companies likes of Grilli type, Lineto, Dinamo, Klim type, Florian Karsten, Swiss typefaces… companies with often just few employees. I find it better and safer long term when licensing creative work from some real humans and not corporation that uses AI shakedowns to waste everyones time.
Show HN: I built a simple website directory and it just passed 400 submissions
by toutoulliou | 2025-11-19 08:21:06+00:00
My project ShowMySites.com just reached a nice milestone: 400 websites have now been added to the directory.

ShowMySites is a simple and lightweight website directory where anyone can submit their site. You need to create an account or sign in with Google, but the service itself is completely free and has no hidden fees or spammy stuff.

If you want to try it or add your own website, you can check it out here: https://www.showmysites.com/

Feedback from the HN community is always welcome!
by mroche | 2025-11-19 08:21:38+00:00
> on the most demanding real-world production workloads (think Pixar/Weta), which for now it hasn't been.

Super small nit (or info tidbit), but it doesn't take away from your overall message regarding production and scene scale.

Pixar does not and has not used Maya as the primary studio application, it's really only used for asset modeling and some minor shading tasks like UV generation and some Ptex painting. The actual studio app is Presto, which is an in-house tool Pixar has developed over the years since its earliest productions. All other DCCs are team/task specific.

Dreamworks is similar with their tool, Presto, IIRC. Walt Disney Animation Studio (WDAS) does use Maya as the core app last I saw, but I don't know if they've made any headway with evaluating Presto since 2019...
by mrkeen | 2025-11-19 08:21:40+00:00
> Think about how you would model a laundry mat. It isn't enough to say you could use optimistic locks for access to the machines.

One machine? Too easy, I want multiple machines!

I want to reserve this machine and that machine. And this is happening while someone else wants to grab that machine and this machine. It costs money to grab a machine, so I'll insert a coin into this machine, and then insert a coin into that machine. The other guy grabbed that machine before me, so am I locked out? It turns out he only had one coin, not two: not only did this mean he untook that machine, but the coin he spent flew out of the machine and back into his pocket. While that was going on, I took a nap - instead of busily waiting for that machines - and the laundromat operator woke me up when it was time to try to grab both machines again.

myActions :: Wallets -> Machines -> STM () myActions wallets machines = do bookMachine "this machine" bookMachine "that machine" where bookMachine :: Machine -> STM () bookMachine m = do reserveMachine machines m spendCoin spendCoin :: STM () spendCoin = do decrement wallets newBalance <- getBalance wallets when (newBalance < 0) (throwSTM "Ran out of money")
Tell HN: Cursor exposes side projects to your employer
by throwawaybbbbbb | 2025-11-19 08:21:41+00:00
I went to see my Cursor (the AI IDE) analytics and clicked a banner advertising their new company-level analytics dashboard. It now has a section “AI Edits by repository” that includes all the repositories used with Cursor, including your personal side projects. [0] I suspect they scrape the name of the repository from the list of GIT remotes, without explicit consent or notice.

If you're using Cursor with a company (teams, enterprise) subscription, information of all your code commits is sent to their API. This telemetry cannot be disabled and is available in a highly granular format in their API. [1]

The dashboard includes also includes information on when you were writing code. [2] The data is available in a highly granular format in their API. [3]

[0]: https://cursor.com/docs/account/teams/analytics#repository-insights [1]: https://cursor.com/docs/account/teams/ai-code-tracking-api#get-ai-commit-metrics-json-paginated [2] https://cursor.com/docs/account/teams/analytics#daily-usage [3] https://cursor.com/docs/account/teams/ai-code-tracking-api#get-ai-code-change-metrics-json-paginated
by IshKebab | 2025-11-19 08:21:53+00:00
Yeah it's saccharine. Reminds me quite a lot of Americans who work for tips (e.g. waiters) - disconcertingly friendly.

Someone gave me a great tip though - at least for ChatGPT there's a setting where you can change its personality to "robot". I guess that affects the system prompt in some way but it basically fixes the issue.
by byroot | 2025-11-19 08:21:55+00:00
> They aren't interned frozen strings

Doesn't matter. The parent claim was:

> You'd just have a broken VM if you used mutable strings for metaprogramming in Ruby

From day one it was possible to freeze strings used in metaprograming. I mean Ruby Hashes do that to strings keys.

> Ruby 3.4 making it unnecessary because it is on by default.

That's incorrect: https://byroot.github.io/ruby/performance/2025/10/28/string-...
by oblio | 2025-11-19 08:22:30+00:00
> As a lead I spent most time

> mentoring

Clarifying either business or technical requirements for newer or junior hires.

> reviewing code

See mentoring.

> or in meetings

So clarifying requirements from/for other teams, including scope, purely financial or technical concerns, etc.

Rephrase "clarifying requirements" to "human oriented aspects of software engineering".

Plus, based on the graphics debugger part of your comment, you're a game developer (or at least adjacent). That's a different world. Most software developers are line of business developers (pharmaceutical, healthcare, automotive, etc) or generalists in big tech companies that have to navigate very complex social environments. In both places, developers that are just heads down in code tend not to do well long term.
by yellowapple | 2025-11-19 08:24:25+00:00
More critically: just because a company is worth $1 trillion doesn't mean it has anywhere close to $1 billion in cash at all, let alone able to be earmarked to a given project (at the presumed exclusion of other projects).

Granted, a project like this probably doesn't strictly need all $1 billion all at once, but I'd argue it's better to get whatever necessary funding upfront instead of risking having sunk a partial investment without being able to obtain the rest should the company's financial situation change.
by arghwhat | 2025-11-19 08:24:29+00:00
I think the "horizontal cutoff style" you're referring to is the American DOT beam pattern (two horizontal lines at different height) as opposed to the European ECE beam pattern (which goes up towards the edge of the road to illuminate signs and such). I would assume this follows the normal regional model variations, although Tesla seems to have notoriously misaligned headlights - some suggest it's a bug causing it to reset occasionally?

The screens are a good point, but nothing about LED headlights require a single bright point. That's done for style and cost saving - old reflector headlights had to be big, so small looks "modern", and small means less material.

Cramming it all into one tiny spot just means cooking the LEDs, which are much better suited for either larger lens assemblies or multiple smaller lens assemblies to distribute the load, both of which increase the size of the light source and massively decrease the blinding and glare it causes. You could easily cut the glare to, idk, a quarter by just changing the geometry a bit while maintaining the same light output.
by tarsinge | 2025-11-19 08:24:37+00:00
I’m not a native English speaker and I have a hard time figuring out what is behind the term "mechanics" here. What I find online seems to point to working in a garage and knowing how to do repairs, not being a line worker or technician in a factory doing maintenance on machinery like you say. In the article it’s confusing, they talk about servicing and trades school, so not really factory work. Maybe I’m lost in translation but it looks like even English speakers are not using a vague term to talk about different things here? What does is 120k job really about, working in a Ford garage fixing cars or being a factory technician?
by rewgs | 2025-11-19 08:25:16+00:00
I think that that kind of domain knowledge and getting your hands dirty is more necessary when you're actually having to solve real problems that real people pay real money for -- money that isn't able to be borrowed for free.

It's no coincidence that the clueless MBA who takes pride in knowing nothing about the business they're apart of proliferated during economic "spring time" -- low interest rates, genuine technological breakthroughs to capitalize on, early mover advantage, etc. When everyone is swimming in money, it's easier to get a slice without adequately proving why you deserve it.

Now we're in "winter." Interest rates are high, innovation is debatably slowing, and the previous early movers are having to prove their staying power.

All that to say: the bright side, I hope, of this pretty shitty time is that hopefully we don't _need_ to "put all this nerd talk into terms that someone in the average C-suite could understand," because hopefully the kinds of executives who are simultaneously building and running _tech companies_ and who are allergic to "nerd talk" will very simply fail to compete.

That's the free market (myth as it may often be in practice) at work -- those who are totally uninterested in the subject matter of their own companies aren't rewarded for their ignorance.
by hnarn | 2025-11-19 08:25:29+00:00
> That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.

> The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.

I'm no FAANG 10x engineer, and I appreciate things can be obvious in hindsight, but I'm somewhat surprised that engineering at the level of Cloudflare does not:

1. Push out files A/B to ensure the old file is not removed.

2. Handle the failure of loading the file (for whatever reason) by automatically reloading the old file instead and logging the error.

This seems like pretty basic SRE stuff.
by BeFlatXIII | 2025-11-19 08:27:19+00:00
I'll echo Sohcahtoa's sibling comment to yours, but with a different pair of species: horses and donkeys (mules count as donkeys for this one).

Donkeys have a reputation for being stupid and stubborn because they're smarter than horses. Too independent for easy training, and will refuse an idiotic command.
by tom_alexander | 2025-11-19 08:27:24+00:00
> create groups, name them, invite and kick out other kids at will, and send messages + audio/video.

All of that has been (and still is) available on everyone's phones since the dawn of time except for "name them": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service

- create group: send an MMS message to whoever you want in the "group". Now you have a group chat. - invite people: send a new MMS message including all past participants and the one additional participant. - kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all past participants except for the person you want to remove. - send messages + audio/video: MMS supports all of this.
by globular-toast | 2025-11-19 08:27:54+00:00
"<some stupid shit you later changed your mind about>"

-- you, probably

Also, if you're not sceptical about it, you should be able to explain to someone like Stallman (as someone apparently later did) why it's still bad for children. If you can't then you're just as "stupid", the only difference is you happen to conform to the current accepted belief on this particular matter.
by oblio | 2025-11-19 08:28:45+00:00
> I mean, the big studios use Maya like fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Windows - doesn't mean Linux isn't battle proven.

Those are different niches. Not even Apple has managed to budge Window out of corporate environments, though it is a lot more present than 20 years ago.

I imagine it's similar with Blender and Maya: do they fill the exact same space? Or is Blender adopted by different types of companies (probably smaller)?
by isoprophlex | 2025-11-19 08:28:56+00:00
> broccoli headed kids

now that there's a prime quality rare insult

anyway i totally agree with your reasoning. one might as well ask "why is MS Teams so bad? it's bloated, slow, buggy, nasty to use from a UX pov... yet it's everywhere"

this shitware -- ms teams, llm slopguns, whatever -- never had to work, they just have to sell.
by IshKebab | 2025-11-19 08:29:43+00:00
> should be that CI isn’t doing anything you can’t do on developer machines

You should aim for this but there are some things that CI can do that you can't do on your own machine, for example running jobs on multiple operating systems/architectures. You also need to use CI to block PRs from merging until it passes, and for merge queues/trains to prevent races.
by throwaway290 | 2025-11-19 08:30:08+00:00
how many people here are professional trader firms trading someone else's money. if I broke my children do not eat.

you could say for half of all threads here, don't talk about it, it's all just doomshilling, just shut up and make a bet on polymarket and make some quick buck instead. but to me it sounds like it's censoring people. these talks is why a forum exists.

sure I also agree that some comments like "ah stock is overpriced" doesn't give much useful info. feels like a low effort manipulation somebody would say publicly if he was a trading firm and wanted to get stock lower to buy some. but I would say "why?" not "shut up and go gamble on it".
by c22 | 2025-11-19 08:31:16+00:00
I have the inverted belief that most people are actually doing all right most of the time, but it's the squeaky wheels that stand out from the crowd and draw my attention all day long. There's just too many man-hours elapsed per day for a true minority to keep it stumbling along as gracefully as it does. We all have our bad days.

I've spent a lot of time cleaning up and observing a small strip of sidewalk in front of a retail establishment in a city and I've come to believe in a variation of the broken windows theory. If I let the sidewalk become too messy, or if I remove the trash but not the dead leaves in the fall then more trash will appear at a seemingly exponential rate. If I do a thorough job cleaning the entire area and removing all debris, however, it stays tidy for many hours, sometimes even days. I don't believe for one second that keeping the area tidy prevents people from littering there. I think the people who would drop their candy wrapper are going to do it anyway, but I think there are many people who, while walking through my tidy section of sidewalk, bend over and pick up the candy wrapper when they see it. I just think they don't bother when there's two or three candy wrappers, thus causing the observed effect.
by ezekiel68 | 2025-11-19 08:32:01+00:00
You don't actually need nanosecond latency to trade effectively in futures markets but it does help to be able to evaluate and make decisions in the single-digit milliseconds range. Almost no generative model is able to perform inference at this latency threshold.

A threshold in the single-digit milliseconds range allows the rapid detection of price reversals (signaling the need to exit a position with least loss) in even the most liquid of real futures contracts (not counting rare "flash crash" events).
by cube00 | 2025-11-19 08:32:03+00:00
> Not panicking code is tedious to write.

Using the question mark operator [1] and even adding in some anyhow::context goes a long way to being able to fail fast and return an Err rather then panicking.

Sure you need to handle Results all the way up the stack but it forces you to think about how those nested parts of your app will fail as you travel back up the stack.

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/std/result/questio...
by oblio | 2025-11-19 08:33:48+00:00
Office as a whole wipes the floor with LibreOffice. Cleaner interface, generally more stable, especially on Windows, Excel is and remains a powerhouse, etc. Word and PowerPoint are also very solid. Outlook is meh.

If anything, OnlyOffice is incredibly polished. I don't know how they did it but it seems to work better and have a much cleaner UI than LibreOffice even though it's much newer.