MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmooss | 2025-11-25 19:47:49+00:00
The HPS site contradicts Rogan's claim (as far as I understand Rogan's claim); it's written by an expert in this field:

I agree that 91 cancers of 220 cast members sounds like a lot. It suggests a cancer rate of 91/200 × 100 = 41.3%. But is that abnormally high? Statistics on cancer occurrence in the United States suggest that the lifetime risk of cancer for males is about 39.7% and 36.7% for females, not greatly different than the rates among the cast. As we mature, the odds of dying of cancer increase from about 25% to 50%. Whenever a cancer survey is made among a small group (say, 100 persons or less), there are variations in the observed cancer rates, either larger or smaller. Moreover, it has also been reported that many cast members were heavy smokers, increasing their risk over the average. I believe that given the available information, there is no compelling evidence that the cancer rate among the cast was higher than national rates.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-25 19:48:17+00:00
branding works as long as you let the actual people behind the curtain do the work (even if results are nowhere near the hype). DOGE actively kicked out those people (the USDS) and started pushing buttons everywhere. Your brand fails if it ends up doing the exact opposite of what you say to the point where people feel it in their day-to-day.

Anyone who has even more delays when working with government stuff has DOGE in part to thank. Be it healthcare, social security, taxes, etc. We will all feel this for years to come.
by dwattttt | 2025-11-25 19:49:10+00:00
That "things were better in the old days, all this safety culture is pointless" overlooks the tragedies we became inured to back in those days?

I cannot count the number of times I've heard "we never bothered with that" with things like refrigerating leftovers, and its unspoken rider of "and it was fine" is never followed up with "look how foodborne illnesses are rising, or at least not dropping". Very curious.
by hi_hi | 2025-11-25 19:49:39+00:00
This is a noble and ambitious goal. I feel qualified to provide some pointers, not because I have been instrumental in delivering hugely successful projects, but because I have been involved, in various ways, in many, many failed projects. Take what you will from that :-)

- Define "success" early on. This usually doesn't mean meeting a deadline on time and budget. That is actually the start of the real goal. The real success should be determined months or years later, once the software and processes have been used in a production business environment.

- Pay attention to Conways Law. Fight this at your peril.

- Beware of the risk of key people. This means if there is a single person who knows everything, you have a risk if they leave or get sick. Redundancy needs to be built into the team, not just the hardware/architecture.

- No one cares about preventing fires from starting. They do care about fighting fires late in the project and looking like a hero. Sometimes you just need to let things burn.

- Be prepared to say "no", alot. (This is probably the most important one, and the hardest.)

- Define ownership early. If no one is clearly responsible for the key deliverables, you are doomed.

- Consider the human aspect as equally as the technical. People don't like change. You will be introducing alot of change. Balancing this needs to be built into the project at every stage.

- Plan for the worst, hope for the best. Don't assume things will work the way you want them to. Test _everything_, always.

[Edit. Adding some items.]
by ACS_Solver | 2025-11-25 19:49:40+00:00
Yes, Perforce handles large files, and large folders of files, very well. It's quite efficient with deltas in binary files. It's also very useful that Perforce expects clients to check out only a part of the depot. There are folders with raw assets like uncompressed sound, layered graphics and all that, I don't check out any of that, I only check out the necessary in-engine assets.

For code, I prefer git as I said, but in a game's depot most files are not code, and Perforce is built around handling those other assets well.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-25 19:51:11+00:00
I would guess:

- Christiane Amanpour

- Erin Burnett

- John Oliver (HBO is under WBD too)

- Abby Phillip

- Brianna Keilar

- Fareed Zakaria

But not:

- (others not as liberal or are sufficiently pro-Israel)

- Bill Maher (HBO; already kissed the ring)
by crote | 2025-11-25 19:51:26+00:00
We're basically at a point where running those older machines is more expensive, once you factor in power use.

Even then, people using ancient fifth-hand machines are almost certainly still going to run x86 - which means they'll have no trouble running Rust as 32-bit x86 is a supported target. Their bigger issue is going to be plain old C apps dropping 32-bit support!

"Retro" in this case genuinely means "horribly outdated". We're talking about systems with CPUs in the hundreds of MHz with probably fewer than a gigabyte in memory. You might do some basic word processing using Windows 95, but running anything even remotely resembling a modern OS is completely impossible. And considering their age and rarity, I'd be very impressed if anyone in a poor country managed to get their hands on it.
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-25 19:51:39+00:00
I agree.

I thought of the predator prey frame shortly after posting my last comment.

Maybe it boils down to game theory and cooperation vs competition, and the free energy principle. Competition (favoring deception) puts pressure on cooperation (favoring truth). Simultaneously life gets better at deceiving and at communicating the truth. They are not mutually exclusive.

When entities are locked into long term cooperation, they have a strong bias to communicate truth with each other. When entities are locked into long term competition, they have a strong bias to deceive each other.

Evolution seems to be this dance of cooperation and competition.

When a person is born, overwhelmingly what's going on between cells inside their body is cooperation. When they die, overwhelmingly what happens between cells is competition.

So one way that AI could increase access to truth, is if most relationships between people and AI are locked into long term cooperation. Not like today where it's lots of people using one model from a tech co, but something more like most people running their own on their own hardware.

I've heard people say we are in the "post truth era" and something in my gut just won't accept that. I think what's going on is the power structures we exist in are dying, which is biasing people and institutions to compete more than cooperate, and therefore deceive more than tell the truth. This is temporary, and eventually the system (and power structures) will reconfigure and bias back to cooperation, because this oscillation back and forth is just what happens over history, with a long term trend of favoring cooperation.

So to summarize... Complexity arises from oscillations between competition and cooperation, competition favors deception and cooperation favors telling the truth. Over the long-term cooperation increases. Therefore, over the long-term truth communication increases more than deception.
by oconnor663 | 2025-11-25 19:51:50+00:00
> to rewrite some feature for a tiny security benefit

For what it's worth, the zero->one introduction of a new language into a big codebase always comes with a lot of build changes, downstream impact, debate, etc. It's good for that first feature to be some relatively trivial thing, so that it doesn't make the changes any bigger than they have to be, and so that it can be delayed or reverted as needed without causing extra trouble. Once everything lands, then you can add whatever bigger features you like without disrupting things.

No comment on the rest of the thread...
by farrelle25 | 2025-11-25 19:51:59+00:00
> Software projects fail because humans fail. Humans are the drivers of everything in our world.

Ah finally - I've had to scroll halfway down to find a key reason big software projects fail.

<rant>

I started programming in 1990 with PL/1 on IBM mainframes and for 35 years have dipped in and out of the software world. Every project I've seen fail was mainly down to people - egos, clashes, laziness, disinterest, inability to interact with end users, rudeness, lack of motivation, toxic team culture etc etc. It was rarely (never?) a major technical hurdle that scuppered a project. It was people and personalities, clashes and confusion.

</rant>

Of course the converse is also true - big software projects I've seen succeed were down to a few inspired leaders and/or engineers who set the tone. People with emotional intelligence, tact, clear vision, ability to really gather requirements and work with the end users. Leaders who treated their staff with dignity and respect. Of course, most of these projects were bland corporate business data ones... so not technically very challenging. But still big enough software projects.

Gez... don't know why I'm getting so emotional (!) But the hard-core sofware engineering world is all about people at the end of the day.
by grvdrm | 2025-11-25 19:53:06+00:00
I like that. Appreciate your words and likewise.

Great way to put it: "skill"

Learned/experience/must practice the skill of getting comfortable!

Tell me more about retreat? In overall terms? Worth it? Worth doing again?

Also - did it include any substances? Not judging one way or another but I know that some psychedelic concepts align with some retreats.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-11-25 19:53:24+00:00
This would make sense if we defined them by inheriting `HTMLComponent` (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement) and registered them with the DOM using `document.createComponent` (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/cr...).
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-11-25 19:53:45+00:00
Webhooks are not a struggle conceptually. They are a struggle operationally IMO.

In amy case why does a dev need to understand a (yet another) poor DX complex API (stripe) in addition to the other 20 they need to deal with. What is wrong with taking something off the plate. It is like daying dont use high level languages, use Rust, don't use a library to make http calls roll your own etc.
by simonw | 2025-11-25 19:54:10+00:00
Antigravity was also vulnerable to the classic Markdown image exfiltration bug, which was reported to them a few days ago and flagged as "intended behavior"

I'm hoping they've changed their mind on that but I've not checked to see if they've fixed it yet.

https://x.com/p1njc70r/status/1991231714027532526
by tacostakohashi | 2025-11-25 19:54:36+00:00
I find one 4K is good. I wouldn't bother with anything not 4K these days.

I was reminiscing about how much dual monitors used to be a pretty standard thing, and definitely pretty helpful when economical monitors maxed out at 1920x1080, but seems much less prevalent these days. Not too surprising I guess considering the costs, space consumption, hardware, cables, etc etc.
by acro-v | 2025-11-25 19:54:55+00:00
I actually had the same pain point - so to address - built a code generator specifically around the "undo" functionality: it takes snapshots before making any updates, and then you can "restore" right from a tool with a single command: no need for manual git invocation. Literally, just a single "restore" command:

https://github.com/acrotron/aye-chat
by red-iron-pine | 2025-11-25 19:55:21+00:00
none of the countries that Putin could and would invade, e.g. Finland, the Baltics, Poland, have nukes.

It would depend on the UK, France, and the US to back them with nuclear weapons. Would the UK electorate be willing to trade their existence -- potential nuclear holocaust -- for Latvia?

And the US is under Putin's puppet, so they're not launching nukes.

Would Britain and France go to war over an invasion of Poland? They did once, and didn't have a great time...
by game_the0ry | 2025-11-25 19:55:29+00:00
^ This. Not at FAANG, but I am too familiar with this.

This is why software projects fail. We lowly developers always take the blame and management skates. The lack of accountability among decision makers is why things like the UK Post Office scandals happen.

Heads need to be put on pikes. Start with John Roberts, Adam Crozier, Moya Greene, and Paula Vennells.
by skwee357 | 2025-11-25 19:55:46+00:00
I feel like fullstack engineer was a BigTech manufactured title designed to save costs compared to hiring two experienced engineers, one in frontend and one in backend, but ended up leaving the fullstack engineers in a limbo state where they are neither good at frontend, nor good at backend, hence they require a bunch of (VC funded) tools to "simplify" their development life.
by agreeahmed | 2025-11-25 19:55:51+00:00
Today our ideal customer is someone starting a project on day one who wants an easy pathway to 1) get stood up ASAP, and 2) start iterating on pricing as they learn what customers really care about. What we found when talking with dozens of builders was that the DX is indeed much better than e.g. Adyen, Braintree, etc. But their DX is far from the counterpart best in class devtools in auth, hosting, or databases.

To be clear, what Stripe has built is a towering accomplishment. But a lot of why innovation in payments DX has been slower than other parts of the stack is that since Stripe, there haven't really been many others who have attempted to tackle the *entire* job to be done.
Show HN: An AI interface to understand anything, better than NotebookLM
by kanodiaayush | 2025-11-25 19:56:35+00:00
I'm building out Kerns, an AI environment for research. You can seed a space with a topic and multiple source documents, and complete your research completely in one space. There's a powerful chat agent which can reason across tool calls, and give cited answers. These citations take to a reader where you can dive deeper. Further, you can read/listen to original source docs at various levels of summary per chapter. As you chat, a tree builds out which helps you keep track of long chats across sessions, and consolidate your understanding at a glance. You can also do deep research in the app, and we're building out a background agent which sends you constant updates on your topic of interest. Finally, there's interactive mindmaps for exploration.

My goal is to have one place to do understand any topic which minimizes manual context engineering, and jumping around between chat/notes/readers.

Please let me know if you try it and have feedback!
by ktpsns | 2025-11-25 19:56:47+00:00
You won't be excluded, just being forced to buy and operate a shitty second device with their OS just to do online banking, etc.

I have hope in open OS such as Linux and the BSDs that they also survive the upcoming hardware lockdowns. Just look how they reverse engineered the MacBook chips. Took a long time but worked out. It remains a constant fight against big tech.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-25 19:56:52+00:00
I'll repeat it here but:

60% of government spending is in 3 categories. Anyone who is touting a need to balance the budget and is not taking moves to hit on these 3 (Medicare, Social Security, National Defesnse) is not seriously interested in balancing the budget.

DOGE did try to "fix" Social Security and caused chaos instead (and a severe example of Chesterson's Fence). They didn't touch healtchare, and Musk instead bolstered more contracts from the IMC point of view.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-25 19:56:57+00:00
Check out old Pride events (or any older Japanese MMA.) Everybody is quiet (with a few isolated shouts of encouragement) until someone does something heroic, and then there's a polite and energetic round of applause. The only reason that Zuffa UFC sounds like it does is because they intentionally tried to steal audiences from US professional wrestling. They also spent years standing people up almost immediately when they were jiu-jitsuing each other because the wrestling audience would just start booing aggressively after about a minute, the result being that the UFC were very kickboxer and greco-roman focused and some real killers had all their weapons taken away from them by UFC's application of their "Unified Rules."

Japanese MMA was founded and branded by people who were saying that Japanese professional wrestling was too theatrical, and Zuffa UFC was branded by people who were saying that professional wrestling wasn't violent enough (if anything, they were competing with "backyard" wrestling.) UFC has improved since, but imo that's because it became a monopoly and had to absorb all the other MMA audiences (and fighters), and the wrestling fans who didn't get bored with MMA eventually got less stupid.

> to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.

I also don't think there's any safe assumption of how Colosseum crowds behaved other than how contemporary narratives say they did. I agree that life and death brings an atmosphere of seriousness that wouldn't often exist at the Circus.
by ajkjk | 2025-11-25 19:57:06+00:00
My hunch is that software engineers are averse to unions because they correctly perceive that unions are a wide angle away from the type of professional organization that would be most beneficial to them. The industry is sufficiently different that the normal union model is just not very good and has a 'square leg round hole' feeling.

For instance by and large the role of organizing to not to get more money but rather to reduce indignities... Wasted work, lack of forethought, bad management, arbitrary layoffs, etc. So it is much more about governing management with good practices than about keeping wages up; at least for now wages are generally high anyway.

there are also reasons to dedend jobs/wages in the face of e.g. outsourcing... But it's almost like a separate problem. Maybe there needs to be both a union and a uncoupled professional standard or something?
by marssaxman | 2025-11-25 19:57:40+00:00
I generally also choose to keep such complaints private, and I'm not sure what whim motivated me to speak up this time. Rather to my surprise, this trivial gripe has been voted up more than almost anything else I've written here over the last sixteen years. It would seem that there actually is, in some contexts, somehow, at least some appetite for grammatical pedantry!
by xx_ns | 2025-11-25 19:58:10+00:00
Just a little play on the recent HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46016902

Project that I did a few years ago. You might also be interested in the retrospective where I detail what all went wrong: https://blog.nns.ee/2025/04/01/modem-blog-retrospective/
by nsagent | 2025-11-25 19:58:18+00:00
It's clear Claude adapted code directly from the OxCaml implementation (the PR author said he pointed Claude at that code [1] and then provides a ChatGPT analysis [2] that really highlights the plagiarism, but ultimately comes to the conclusion that it isn't plagiarized).

Either that highlights someone who is incompetent or they are willfully being blasé. Neither bodes well for contributing code while respecting copyright (though mixing and matching code on your own private repo that isn't distributed in source or binary form seems reasonable to me).

[1]: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35573...

[2]: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35566...
by drmath | 2025-11-25 19:58:37+00:00
One source of trouble here is that the agent's view of the web page is so different from the human's. We could reduce the incidence of these problems by making them more similar.

Agents often have some DOM-to-markdown tool they use to read web pages. If you use the same tool (via a "reader mode") to view the web page, you'd be assured the thing you're telling the agent to read is the same thing you're reading. Cursor / Antigravity / etc. could have an integrated web browser to support this.

That would make what the human sees closer to what the agent sees. We could also go the other way by having the agent's web browsing tool return web page screenshots instead of DOM / HTML / Markdown.
by skwee357 | 2025-11-25 19:58:40+00:00
I think Stipe is one of the best designed APIs I ever had to work with.

But to reply to your point, there is no way out of this. You either understand the tools you work with, or you end up vendor locked to tools like vercel/next (the target audience of OPs tool, as it seems), which promise simplification, but end up being their own monsters.
by everdrive | 2025-11-25 19:58:46+00:00
An interesting tidbit in the nature vs. nurture debate is that nature and nurture interplay in ways you might not expect. For instance, height is approximately 90% heritable in the United States -- but this does not mean that in a vacuum height is mostly genetic. It means that in the United States nutrition has mostly been solved (and yes, even the "food insecure" in the US rarely lack for the actual calories which would impact their height -- food insecurity causes other problems) and therefore the only real differences that can remain are the genetic differences.

It might be useful to look at any twin study through this lens; if we know for sure the genes are the same and nature is off the table, how much variance remains?
by isodev | 2025-11-25 19:59:09+00:00
Remember around the early 2000s, every company had a toolbar you could install in your browser? They’d do search, news, IM, plugins, all kinds of things… on many occasions they’d try to squeeze entire websites into these things. You could install more than one toolbar. Some were malware, but there were toolbars that promised security and privacy too (though probably still malware by today’s standards).

Well, if you’ve seen one of those screenshots where 80% of the screen was toolbars and only a fraction left for the viewport … that’s a bit how I feel now when I look at the landscape of browsers today.

Browsers… everywhere, each one trying to grab your attention long enough so you give them clicks, cookies, “anonymised” search queries and who knows what else…

There are no more browsers that fight for the user.
by int_19h | 2025-11-25 19:59:25+00:00
> Compared to the JS ecosystem and number of users both Python and Rust are puny

This is just plainly false in case of Python.

> also the the NPM ecosystem also allowed by default for a lot of post-install actions since they wanted to enable a smooth experience with compiling and installing native modules (Not entirely sure how Cargo and PIP handles native library dependencies).

Rust is already "native" so Cargo doesn't need to do anything.

Python has the logic to do native builds baked into pip and friends, so a Python package can just specify what to build in the manifest. But it also allows for precompiled wheels, and most popular packages do them for all major OSes, so users rarely need to actually build stuff in practice.
by corpMaverick | 2025-11-25 19:59:33+00:00
I agree with you on "don't do big software project" Specially do not fast scale them out to hundreds of people. You have to scale them more organically ensuring that every person added is a net gain. They think that adding more people will reduce the time.

I am surprised on the lack of creativity when doing these projects. Why don't they start 5 small projects building the same thing and let them work for a year. At the end of the year you cancel one of the projects, increasing the funding in the other four. You can do that every year based on the results. It may look like a waste but it will significantly increase your chances of succeeding.
by duffyjp | 2025-11-25 19:59:38+00:00
I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time.

The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.

Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.