MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 18:24:13+00:00
Western Europe is fine, for seniors as well as newcomers, based on my own experience and friends & acquaintances. Then based on more acquaintances South America and Asia seems OK too. But again, ensure you actually understand the context here.

What does "heinous" actually mean here? I've repeated it before, but I guess one more time can't hurt: I'm not saying it isn't difficult to find a job as a developer today compared to a decade ago, but what I am saying is that it's a thing across all sectors and developers aren't hit by it worse than any other sector. Hiring freezes has been happening in not just technology companies, but across the board.
by ryandrake | 2025-11-26 18:24:26+00:00
> It’s utterly baffling that a multi-billion dollar video empire doesn’t provide much of an option to their users in terms of settings.

In a better world with an actual open web, we would not have to rely on the graces of the hosting company to offer us a better UI. Our browsers would act as true "User Agents" and render the web page in a way that is best for the user.

Browsers should be able to by default pick and choose what elements of a web page get rendered, without having to reach for extensions. Browsers should be able to render things in a different order, and easily allow the user to override things like styling, size and so on. Browsers should provide this kind of flexibility by default! They should not just be canvases following orders, for the web developer to program against the user's interests.

Instead, we just punted, and handed over all of the control to the web developer. Now they decide what gets shown and not shown. They decide the layout. They decide everything!
by swiftcoder | 2025-11-26 18:25:18+00:00
> It limits, radically, the percent of engineers you can hire (to those who understand this and are willing to work this way), and it slows deployment radically.

We could also invest in tooling to make this kind of thing easier. Unclear why humans need to hand-normalise the database schema - isn't this exactly the kind of thing compilers are good at?
by jimbohn | 2025-11-26 18:25:39+00:00
Note that this isn't "neutral" as in "I like chocolate" vs "You don't like chocolate". Sometimes being "neutral" is pretty damning, more so if you are providing a "neutral" ground for sanctioned individuals or people waiting the $CURRENT_GENOCIDAL_WAR out. I agree with you about not likely being there an A->B->C->D conclusion, but it's a signal about the preferences or lack thereof of the ownership of the company. But really, they can do whatever they prefer.
by toast0 | 2025-11-26 18:25:49+00:00
People did both. And you want load balancing for operations/redundancy anyway.

Or because once you get the max requests per sec out of a machine, you can often get a second machine to double rps for much cheaper than a machine that can do double the rps.

In the 20-30 year old time frame, easy to obtain servers are one to two cores, often one core per socket. SMP scalability was not a given; you could certainly run on SMP and get benefits, but depending on your load you might not get anywhere close to 2x the throughput.

A single core webserver serving static files isn't going to be much faster than 1 ms per file, so you're around 1k rps. And that's assuming you files are all cached. If you do dynamic pages, they're more likely to start closer to 10 ms, and can easily be much longer, so 100 rps is a good target.

But, if your pages are sizable, you can easily run out of bandwidth and then everything gets slow and you can hit too much concurrency and things get worse. A T3 was a very good connection back then, and it was 45 mbps. 1000 rps of 50k images is going to fill up your T3.

Load balancing, done right, is very scalable for typical http loads where client sends little and server sends lots. Direct Server Return means the load balancer only sees the traffic from the client, which significantly reduces the effort for the load balancer. Of course, you can't do a lot of fancy things with DSR, but that means your balancers aren't overloaded with fancy things. If your DSR load balancer fails, you can fail over to DNS round robin.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-11-26 18:25:52+00:00
Look nobody is forcing you to stay on emacs. But most of us aren't experiencing editor freezing even on big projects. I'm working in a monolith of multiple languages and can get LSP for all the ones we use just fine.

To use your own argument, every other person has a better experience than you. Shifting the blame to the editor is silly ;)
by Topfi | 2025-11-26 18:26:04+00:00
> [...] quickly pushed it to the market first to get patents and get all the profits [...]

Beyond what others have commented already, especially on obesity and cardiovascular disease, I have to correct this specifically, because it is a very common and honestly understandable misunderstanding people have about these drugs.

While only having appeared in the public consciousness comparatively recently, this class of drugs has been in use for two decades at this stage [0], showcasing a very solid safety profile with well established side-effects [1].

Continued research is important, as is proper prescription and use under the care of a Medical Professional up-to-date on current day evidence based practices (as is the case with all interventions), but to have a proper discussion about these, we shouldn't spread myths such as this being "quickly pushed" out, as these have undergone the clinical trials and regulations established across multiple agencies from multiple governments [2].

Again, it is understandable why these are considered rather new or appeared suddenly, especially if one doesn't take a look into their approval, but I don't see any evidence for them being rushed out or anything of the sort.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK572151/

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5397288/

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6667915/
by syllogism | 2025-11-26 18:26:09+00:00
Well, if you take "review the LLM output" in its most general way, I guess you can class everything under that. But I think it's worth talking about the problem in a bit more detail than that, because someone can easily say "Oh I definitely review the LLM output!" and still be pushing work onto other people.

The fact is that no matter whether we review the LLM output or not, no matter whether we write the code entirely by hand or not, there's always going to be the possibility of errors. So it's not some bright-line thing. If you're relatively lazier and relatively less thoughtful in the way you work, you'll make more errors and more significant errors. You'll look like you're doing the work, but your teammates have to do more to make up for the problems.

Having to work around problems your coworkers introduced is nothing new, but LLMs make it worse in a few ways I think. One is just, that old joke about there being four kinds of people: lazy and stupid, industrious and stupid, smart and lazy, and industrious and smart. It's always been the "industrious and stupid" people that kill you, so LLMs are an obvious problem there.

Second there's what I call the six-fingered hands thing. LLMs make mistakes a human wouldn't, which means the problem won't be in your hypothesis-space when you're debugging.

Third, it's very useful to have unfinished work look unfinished. It lets you know what to expect. If there's voluminous docs and tests and the functionality either doesn't work at all or doesn't even make sense when you think about it, that's going to make you waste time.

Finally, at the most basic level, we expect there to be some sort of plan behind our coworkers' work. We expect that someone's thought about this and that the stuff they're doing is fundamentally going to be responsive to the requirements. If someone's phoning it in with an LLM, problems can stay hidden for a long time.
by zamadatix | 2025-11-26 18:26:47+00:00
I think you're measuring the moat of developing the first LLMs but the moat to care about is what it'll take to clone the final profit generating product. Sometimes the OG tech leader is also the long term winner, many times they are not. Until you know what the actual giant profit generator is (e.g. for Google it was ads) then it's not really possible to say how much of a moat will be kept around it. Right now, the giant profit generator is not seeming to be the number of tokens generated itself - that is really coming at a massive loss.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-11-26 18:27:17+00:00
It’s miracle drug, I’ve been on it for a few years now, it would have been sooner but usage data wasn’t available at the scale I needed before the ozempic craze. I have hEDS and part of that is ME/CFS and uncontrollable weight gain, so naturally I was looking for help with weight loss with the understanding that drugs that help with weight loss could be treating an underlying mechanisms that was causing the weight gain. Low Dose Naltrexone is another drug that also helps with weight loss and hEDS, so I was looking for more of the same. I still don’t know the underlying mechanisms but my autoimmune conditions have largely been resolved. Like cheap solar electricity, I see GLP1s as basically an absolute win. Of course people shouldn’t abuse the drug and they should also change their habits.
by echelon | 2025-11-26 18:27:27+00:00
> I’ve been seeing you blazing this trail since the incident and it feels a short sighted and reductive.

Why is it inappropriate to be able to statically label the behavior?

Maybe I don't want my failure behavior dictated by a downstream dependency or distracted engineer.

The subject of how to fail is a big topic and is completely orthogonal to the topic of how can we know about this and shape our outcomes.

I would rather the policy be encoded with first class tools rather than engineering guidelines and runbooks. Let me have some additional control at what looks like to me not a great expense.

It doesn't feel "safe" to me to assume the engineer meant to do exactly this and all of the upstream systems accounted for it. I would rather the code explicitly declare this in a policy we can enforce, in an AST we can shallowly reason about.
by lazarko | 2025-11-26 18:27:54+00:00
We turned cortical tricks into tiny (~1M param) adapters that plug into various neural network architecture models, CLIP, GPT, CNN, etc.. It evolutionarily navigates astronomical searche space of configs in ~1,000 cheap experiments and delivers noticeable (i.e. +8%) accuracy. No retraining the backbone. No crazy compute. Pure neuroscience cheating codes. Pay only if it beats your baseline—no improvement, no payment. Would love brutal feedback from the HN ML crowd — especially if anyone wants to throw their weird VLM at it and see what the brain stuff does
by pbaehr | 2025-11-26 18:28:23+00:00
I feel like this is a good educational goal but a very poor execution.

We're meant to assume correct sentences were written by humans and AI adds glaring factual errors. I don't think it is possible at this point to tell a single human written sentence from an AI written sentence with no other context and it's dangerous to pretend it is this easy.

Several of the AI images included obvious mistakes a human wouldn't have made, but some of them also just seemed like entirely plausible digital illustrations.

Oversimplifying generative AI identification risks overconfidence that makes you even easier to fool.

Loosely related anecdote: A few months ago I showed an illustration of an extinct (bizarre looking) fish to a group of children (ages 10-13ish). They immediately started yelling that it was AI. I'm glad they are learning that images can be fake, but I actually had to explain that "Yes, I know this is not a photo. This animal is long extinct and this is what we think it looked like so a person drew it. No one is trying to fool you."
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 18:28:29+00:00
I guess ultimately our perspectives shape how we see current situations.

When I write that, I write that with the history and experience of doing other things. Deadlines, lack of respect from stakeholders, egoists and changing requirements just don't sound so bad when you compare to "Ah yeah resident 41 broke their leg completely and we need to clean up their entire apartment from the pools of blood and pus + work with the ambulance crew to get them to the hospital".

I guess it's kind of a PTSD of sorts or something, as soldiers describe the same thing coming home to a "normal life" after spending time in a battle-zone. Everything just seems so trivial compared to the situations you've faced before.
Show HN: HiFidelity – A native offline music player for macOS
by rathod0045 | 2025-11-26 18:28:46+00:00
I’ve always navigated my music collection visually by album art, not filenames. But most macOS players either ignore artwork or treat it like an afterthought, and the native Music app still can’t play formats like FLAC. I wanted a fast, modern player that could handle real audio libraries and showcase artwork properly. So I built HiFidelity. It uses the BASS audio engine for low-latency, high-fidelity playback across many formats, and TagLib for accurate metadata + embedded artwork extraction. The goal was to create a lightweight, native macOS player that feels instant, supports diverse audio formats, and makes browsing by artwork as natural as listening.
by The_President | 2025-11-26 18:28:50+00:00
It’s a complete suite for property management companies that enables an org to manage and report on vast portfolios of thousands of units. Provides functions to local property managers such as contracts and evictions, rent collection, and purchase order management for vendors. Regionally it provides metrics and pricing controls. Other competitors like Yardi exist and provide similar toolkits, but RP is gigantic enough to get the bulk of attention.
by o11c | 2025-11-26 18:29:09+00:00
That's like saying "my car has most of its components working", when it has no engine, only 12V battery power.

For me personally, the first dealbreaker I keep hitting is the fact that input-method-adjacent keyboard logic is quite broken (necessary if you ever want to use a language other than English, even temporarily).

There are also, of course, the innumerable minor bugs that will be fixed from one release to the next (but also replaced by other bugs). The number of these decay exponentially and it will probably be a decade or so before Wayland sessions becomes as stable as X11 in this regard.

There are quite a few cases where applications auto-detect that Wayland is running and as a result run in degraded mode, intentionally or unintentionally. I remember some bug with menus not working properly ...

And scaling, often touted as one of Wayland's features, often works better under X11!
by lxgr | 2025-11-26 18:29:09+00:00
The decline in accountability has been in progress for decades, so LLMs can obviously not have caused it.

They might of course accelerate it if used unwisely, but the solution to that is arguably to use them wisely, not to completely shun them because "think of the craft and the jobs".

And yes, in some contexts, using them wisely might well mean not using them at all. I'd just be surprised if that were a reasonable default position in many domains in 5-10 years.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-11-26 18:29:28+00:00
> It also estimates that LLM companies will capture 2% of the digital advertising market, which seems kind of low to me.

I'm not super bullish on "AI" in general (despite, or maybe because of working in this space the last few years), but strongly agree that the advertising revenue that LLM providers will capture can be potentially huge.

Even if LLMs never deliver on their big technical promises, I know so many casual users of LLMs that basically have replaced their own thought process with "AI". But this is an insane opportunity for marketing/advertising that stands to be a much of a sea change in the space as Google was (if not more so).

People trust LLMs with tons of personal information, and then also trust it to advise them. Give this behavior a few more years to continue to normalize and product recommendations from AI will be as trusted as those from a close friends. This is the holy grail of marketing.

I was having dinner with some friends and one asked "Why doesn't Claude link to Amazon when recommending a book? Couldn't they make a ton in affiliate links?" My response was that I suspect Anthropic would rather pass on that easy revenue to build trust so that one day they can recommend and sell the book to you.

And, because everything about LLMs is closed and private, I suspect we won't even know when this is happening. There's a world where you ask an LLM for a recipe, it provides all the ingredients for your meal from paid sponsors, then schedules to have them delivered to your door bypassing Amazon all together.

All of this can be achieved with just adding layers on to what AI already is today.
by filoleg | 2025-11-26 18:29:45+00:00
Thank you for the response!

To be clear, I didn't mean for my original comment to be a dig at Orion at all. I am just genuinely excited for it, but an extension ecosystem is something I value a lot in a browser. So I was a little bit miffled, when the original post namedropped extensions, but didn't provide any details beyond that.

However, thanks for clarifying the current state of affairs in terms of extensions, and I am eagerly looking forward to checking out the docs.
by hodgesrm | 2025-11-26 18:29:48+00:00
> I base my paragraph on their choice of abandoning PostgreSQL and adopting ClickHouse(Bocharov 2018). The whole post is a great overview on trying to process data fast, without a single line on how to garantee its logical correctness/consistency in the face of changes.

I'm completely mystified how the author concludes that the switch from PostgreSQL to ClickHouse shows the root of this problem.

1. If the point is that PostgreSQL is somehow more less prone to error, it's not in this case. You can make the same mistake if you leave off the table_schema in information_schema.columns queries.

2. If the point is that Cloudflare should have somehow discovered this error through normalization and/or formal methods, perhaps he could demonstrate exactly how this would have (a) worked, (b) been less costly than finding and fixing the query through a better review process or testing, and (c) avoided generating other errors as a side effect.

I'm particularly mystified how lack of normalization is at fault. ClickHouse system.columns is normalized. And if you normalized the query result to remove duplicates that would just result in other kinds of bugs as in 2c above.

Edit: fix typo
by kccqzy | 2025-11-26 18:29:48+00:00
I wrote my own date calculation functions a while ago. And during that, I had an aha moment to treat March 1 as the beginning of the year during internal calculations[0]. I thought it was a stroke of genius. It turns out this article says that’s the traditional way.

[0]: https://github.com/kccqzy/smartcal/blob/9cfddf7e85c2c65aa6de...
by vlejd | 2025-11-26 18:30:02+00:00
Interestingly enough, we found that cublas is not that well optimized for some less common consumer GPUs, specifically 3090. We saw that is didn't really achieve it's full potential for a lot of different matrix shapes, probably because of poor tuning. Interestingly enough, out kernel does not have any parameters, and it was able to outperform cublas even in setting where it has no right to do so.

Regarding patterns, we tested mainly random matrices and ones created by Wanda pruning. 2:4 sparsity (commonly used structure) will have same results as random matrix (probably even better). Interestingly enough, block sparsity could have very close to a worst case scenario with our format, because it promotes disproportional long sequences of zeroes.

Regarding other usecases, we are looking into it, but most common ones we found are usually for much smaller sparsity <1%. If you know about some other use case that is in the 30-90 range, let us know.
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-26 18:30:26+00:00
> not sure why the attach rpi for every mac mini, wouldn't it be cheaper to have one rpi and 9 mac minis connectd to 10 port switch?

Simple... they're (likely) running something on the Raspberry Pi's that sets them up as USB gadgets, aka the Mac Mini "sees" a virtual keyboard and mouse. That's enough to manage remote provisioning.

To replicate that they'd need a KVM switch which doesn't have some weird edge case in how exactly it does USB-C switching, and it needs to be remotely controlled. A Pi is cheaper plus the failure modes of a Pi are more understood than the failure mode of some weird ass KVM switch someone cobbled together in China.
by ibrahima | 2025-11-26 18:30:40+00:00
That's basically MOOCs, but those kinda fizzled out. It's tough to actually stay focused for a full-length university-level course outside of a university environment IMO, especially if you're working and have a family, etc.

(I mean, I have no idea how Coursera/edX/etc are doing behind the scenes, but it doesn't seem like people talk about them the way they used to ~10 years ago.)
by 12_throw_away | 2025-11-26 18:30:49+00:00
> There's no reason to use [panics] as the language provides lots of safer alternatives.

Dunno ... I think runtime assertions and the ability to crash a misbehaving program are a pretty important part of the toolset. If rust required `Result`s to be wired up up and down the entire call tree for the privilege of using a runtime assertion, I think it would be a lot less popular, and probably less safe in practice.

> Alternatively, and perhaps even better, Rust needs a way to mark functions that can panic for any reason other than malloc failures.

I 100% agree that a mechanism to prove that code can or cannot panic would be great, but why would malloc be special here? Folks who are serious about preventing panics will generally use `no-std` in order to prevent malloc in the first place.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-11-26 18:31:23+00:00
How deep do you go? Being forced to label any function that allocates memory with ”panic”?

Right now you all the instances where the code can panic are labeled. Grep for unwrap, panic, expect etc.

In all my years of professional Rust development I’ve never seen a potential panic pass code review without a discussion. Unless it was trivial like trying to build an invalid Regex from a static string.
by creakingstairs | 2025-11-26 18:31:27+00:00
People are knee-jerking at “anti-feminism” part of Lee which I admit would look pretty off-putting to anyone who is not familiar with what’s going in South Korea.

“Feminism” in Korea has taken on a different meaning sadly. I’ve commented in HN before at how abhorrent women’s right has been in Korea, especially up to my mother’s generation. It really has drastically improved last 20 years. However, many young men feel like the pendulum has swung too much to the other direction. Society still expects men to do “manly things” (mandatory army service, physical labour etc) but girls around their age get policy benefits instead. I’m not going to into whether this feeling is justified or not. But wanted to point out most don’t want women’s right to regress to their mom’s generation. They just want to feel like they are treated equally in society.
by dpark | 2025-11-26 18:31:37+00:00
> as soon as they become the cause of an outage they have invalidated their whole reason for existence

This is a bar no engineering effort has ever met. “If you ever fail, even for a moment, there’s no reason for you to even exist.”

There have been 6 fatal passenger airplane crashes in the US this year alone. NASA only built 6 shuttles and 2 of those exploded, killing their crews. And these were life-preserving systems that failed.

Discussions around software engineering quality always seem to veer into spaces where we assign almost mythic properties to other engineering efforts in an attempt to paint software engineering as lazy or careless.