MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-06 20:33:55+00:00
The question I’m trying to answer is why are keeping metrics important at all?

From my experience working on and being the third highest contributor to what was a very popular open source “AWS Solution” in its niche, we kept metrics because we had to justify why it should it exist and why should we keep getting resources for it. This is the same reason that the Google Staff engineer that was in the linked article did it for his project.

The next reason is that to get promoted and to have something to put on your promo doc, you need to show “impact”.

But when you are at a staff level and no longer chasing promotions, it becomes perfunctory. You do it just because you are suppose to and do the bare minimum to check it off the list and stay in compliance. But everyone if any importance knows you.

That’s true at BigTech to my 1000+ company. No one from the C suite is wondering who employees #13545 is or what I have accomplished whether or not I go into details.

However I do make sure I get peer feedback from everyone that I work with officially or if I go the extra mile for them. I asked my manager do I need to record my goals for the year. He kind of shrugged and asked me was I trying to get promoted to a director or something (a manager role would be a horizontal move). I said “no”. he said not really.

I keep a personal career document just in case I need to prepare to interview because I stay ready to interview - I have for almost 20 years. I have been working for 30.

Then back to my minor criticism. It’s not like at a staff level once you have accomplished a lot and built up a network, you are going to be blindly submitting your resume to a job you found on Indeed. At that point your resume is just something to put in the ATS as part of the hiring process. But no one in the hiring prices is going to look at it. They are already targeting you to work there.

I had a director who was a former coworker at a well known non tech company basically offer to create a job just for me because he needed someone who he could trust. I’m not special, I just have a decent network and made a positive impression on a few people
by crazygringo | 2025-12-06 20:34:38+00:00
I don't understand. No matter what fancy things you do with superscripts and subscripts, you're not going to be able to do even basic things you need for equations like use a fraction bar, or parentheses that grow in height to match the content inside them.

At a fundamental level, Unicode is for characters, not layout. Unicode may abuse the ZWJ for emoji, but it still ultimately results in a single emoji character, not a layout of characters. So I don't really understand what you're asking for.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-06 20:34:58+00:00
Not really. Organs from people who have died are almost always nonviable. So when it comes to vehicle collision victims, only people who are slowly dieing of internal hemorrhaging are used. Sudden heart failure organs are bad for two reasons: first, if the heart actually fails, you have minutes before organs are nonviable. Second, the medication that's used for trying to keep the heart beating will actually accelerate death, including organ death, if it doesn't work.

Most organs come from from people, usually braindead, who are definitely going to die, but you have days or at least hours before the body actually loses the fight. And even then the extraction process needs to be started quickly, because in the process of dieing the body will, as it's losing blood, ie. power and oxygen, one-by-one cut off blood flow from organs to try to keep the heart, lungs and brain alive. Most organs that have had their blood flow cut off by the body can't be transplanted, so extraction needs to happen before that point.

So that was probably the case here.
by jerf | 2025-12-06 20:34:58+00:00
Erlang is, by my accounting, not even a functional langauge at all. It takes more than just having immutable values to be functional, and forcing users to leave varibles as immutable was a mistake, which Elixir fixes. Erlang code in practice is just imperative code written with immutable values, and like a lot of other modern languages, occasional callouts to things borrowed from functional programming like "map", but it is not a functional language in the modern sense.

If you go to learn Haskell, you will find that it has a lot to say about functional programming that Erlang did not teach you. You will also find that you've already gotten over one of the major hurdles to writing Haskell, which is writing with immutable values, which significantly reduces the difficult of swallowing the entire language at once and makes it relatively easier. I know it's a relatively easy path because it's the one I took.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-06 20:35:29+00:00
> the commoditization of human attention

It isn’t commoditised. It’s priced to a tee. If you can afford to keep your attention, you do.

The problem is we’ve let sociopaths like Zuckerberg and Mosseri convince us that we’re born into their servitude. That the natural order for our kids is for their attention to be stolen. That their parents have to then pay and work to buy it back.
by mjd | 2025-12-06 20:35:56+00:00
I had an interesting conversation with someone many years ago, possibly Brent Yorgey. We were thinking of arrays in quite different ways. To me, it was a data structure, with a specific memory layout: a contiguous block of memory containing a sequence of objects of all of the same size, specifically to support constant-time indexing. To him, it was an API, a mapping from non-negative numbers to values, and the underlying implementation could have been a hash table or whatever.

I think we're seeing a similar disconnect here. Some people think a string is a contiguous block of bytes, perhaps with a sentinel value on the end (C string) or a fixed-size count on the front. Others think of it as an API for storing text. These used to overlap, but in recent decades they have diverged substantially. The argument here is about the meaning of the word, not the technical reality of the thing it refers to, so it has no objective resolution.
by chihuahua | 2025-12-06 20:37:37+00:00
I had an interesting experience starting a job at ZipRecruiter, and finding that up to that point (2022), most of their code had been written in Perl. Their CTO had just gotten fed up with Perl and decreed that from now on, all new projects should be written in Go. I was the first one on my team to write code in Go.

There were various greybeards who kept telling me that Perl was a perfectly fine language and was fast enough for most purposes. I didn't argue with them and just backed away slowly.

Regarding Perl as a language, it seemed fine in the 1990s as a slightly more advanced alternative to Unix shells. But for me, what made it a failure as a language is that in order to have an array of hashes, or a hash of arrays, you needed to use references. That may have been a nice hack to enable some things in the 1990s, but even in 2005 that sounds pretty primitive and outdated to me. Plus the reliance on using magical variables consisting of $ and every non-letter ASCII character for all kinds of random stuff, like $_ and $# and so on. That may have been cool in 1992, but it's not 1992 any more.

Overall, Perl was pretty neat for little scripts up to 20 lines, but a bad idea for building an entire company on (like ZipRecruiter.) That's more of an indictment of ZipRecruiter than Perl.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-06 20:37:46+00:00
This is a perfectly fine blog post, but is about something so basic I don't understand why it's submitted to HN.

Yes, ffprobe and mediainfo are the two common tools for this. This just feels like something that belongs as the answer to an everyday StackOverflow question. I don't understand what it's doing on the front page of HN.
by OutOfHere | 2025-12-06 20:38:15+00:00
Don't confuse silicon oxide with a PFAS. It is quite the negligent and hazardous fallacy to put them in the same bucket. One has been around for billions of years. The other hardly has any research, and will take at least a decade more of data and research before we know what's it is capable of.

You are in no way smart enough to understand and consider all the pathways, uptake mechanisms, and consequences that are affected by the PFAS compound across all of biological life. Knowing just one or two over just a few years does not make you competent in it or qualified to make a broad safety comment.
by lxgr | 2025-12-06 20:38:16+00:00
> If everything goes offline for one hour per year at the same time, then a person is blocked and unproductive for an hour per year.

The consequence of some services being offline is much, much worse than a person (or a billion) being bored in front of a screen.

Sure, it’s arguably not Cloudflares fault that these services are cloud-dependent in the first place, but even if service just degrades somewhat gracefully in an ideal case, that’s a lot of global clustering of a lot of exceptional system behavior.

Or another analogy: Every person probably passes out for a few minutes in their live at one point or another. Yet I wouldn’t want to imagine what happens if everybody got that over with at the very same time without warning…
by OptionOfT | 2025-12-06 20:38:29+00:00
I actually think it works when you are in the ecosystem fulltime for a good while.

But having to interact with it once in a while is always a hurdle. The same with bash. Do I use [ or [[? Where does the semi-colon go? if then fi, but while do done (and not elihw). -eq or =? Functions have () but no parameters.

I'm sure those things make sense when all you write is Bash / Perl, but it's daunting.

Now, Python can get pretty far out there too with Meta-programming, and JavaScript can get confusing with prototyping. And Ruby (especially RoR) takes the crown, where they resolve variables at the moment the line executes. Makes debugging blocks really hard.

The less magic in code the better.
by kingofmen | 2025-12-06 20:39:19+00:00
It appears to me that comrade LeGuin is being rather willfully ignorant here. The detailed implementation of the algorithm is not public, but the basic concept - download every webpage, index by keywords, rank by number of links - is well known and had been well known for some time even in 2010. LeGuin could have, well, googled it. But then she wouldn't have gotten an anti-capitalist essay out of her ignorance.
by cyberax | 2025-12-06 20:41:07+00:00
The question is in the amount of them. PFOA and PFOS were literally dumped in kiloton quantities into the environment without much thought about their toxicity. They were used in firefighting foam that was just flushed into the sewer.

So yeah, removing that source of pollution is good. At the same time, the effects of even the worst offender (PFOS) are at most mild. Wildlife and epidemiological studies found significant effects only in areas that are at least billions of times more contaminated with PFAS than can ever accumulate in the environment if the waste streams are managed properly.
by alexandretrotel | 2025-12-06 20:42:09+00:00
Hi HN,

I used the Todo Tree extension in VSCode for a long time, and really liked having all my TODO/FIXME comments organized as a tree.

I switched to Zed (editor), and couldn’t find an equivalent tool, so I decided to write a small Rust library that does just that.

The crate scans a project for TODO/FIXME (or custom tags) and builds a hierarchical tree (folders/files/tags).

It’s editor-agnostic and fast enough for large repos.

If you have thoughts, ideas, or want to build an integration for your editor, I’d love feedback.
by Aloha | 2025-12-06 20:42:39+00:00
Commonly called masking - learning the 'rules of the road' for peopling - the hardest thing that young folks with autism or ADHD need to learn is that you must learn how to do this, the world will not (often or always) change to accommodate you - but once you do it, you can appear more or less normal most of the time.
by trunnell | 2025-12-06 20:42:46+00:00
Yeah, it's ok, can't win 'em all. Lots of negativity in this thread. Maybe people have a gut feeling that "Netflix buying WB" fits into the preexisting narrative about media consolidation, and they're reacting negatively to media consolidation being a problem. I think that's more of a problem in the news media than in entertainment media. In entertainment, the bigger story is the tech-centered transitions, esp. to internet distribution. I don't think the consolidation narrative is a perfect fit in this case; this is a pretty different type of consolidation than the others in recent memory.

I think this is about Netflix's model reflecting a fundamental technology shift; any company not participating fully in that shift will be operating less and less efficiently compared to those that are. Look at the inside history of HBO's attempts to build a streaming platform; in the early 2010s their leadership knew they probably should, but were their hearts in it? Did they have executives with competence in this area? No, they outsourced it and mismanaged it. Repeatedly. But like you said, my view includes being a former Netflix employee so maybe I'm biased.

I don't have current information on whether or to what degree studio production capacity is a constraint. Content spending was publicly projected to grow, so studio capacity had to grow, which is why Netflix decided to build giant new studio facilities in New Mexico and New Jersey. Those were referenced in the Q&A Netflix held Friday morning [1]. Wild guess: Netflix's own studios run at full capacity, which is why they're continuing to expand them. I'd love to know if WB studios run at capacity.

> I assumed their interest was strictly a content play and the extra studio space might actually be an anchor they were willing to drag along to get the content/IP.

Doubt it. Like I said, I'm not an insider on that question and I'm 6 years out of date. But if I had to guess, it would be that WB studio capacity will be a highly productive asset for Netflix -- most likely, it will be more valuable connected to Netflix's global distribution model that it was when operated under WB's model.

[1] Q&A transcript https://s22.q4cdn.com/959853165/files/doc_events/2025/Dec/05...
by taeric | 2025-12-06 20:42:54+00:00
Licensing being a giant mess for media is not exactly news? Netflix reportedly got some really good deals early on, but of the kind that nobody was willing to do again.

They didn't have the luxury of first sale to protect their market, though. Which is a very sharp contrast to how they ran the DVD side of things.

So, it isn't that they were wasting money on licensing. Licensing kept getting more and more expensive. Not fully for nefarious reasons, but that doesn't change that it was so.
by OsrsNeedsf2P | 2025-12-06 20:43:18+00:00
> Lest alone to use a distro with opaque financing sources that fully endorses government developed/sponsored platforms such as Signal and Tor.

So you're against Signal, Tor, and Graphene, and suggest to instead use.. Lineage?

Don't get me wrong, I love Lineage, it was my first custom ROM, but this seems a little tinfoil
by testdelacc1 | 2025-12-06 20:43:20+00:00
The article mentions where Xi Jinping was.

> China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was the little-known party chief of a city in the coastal province of Fujian during the unrest in 1989. But the PLA’s crushing of that unrest, and the failure of the Soviet army to do the same in Moscow in 1991, leading to the Soviet Union’s collapse, clearly left a deep impression. He has often referred to a critical lesson from it all: the PLA must remain the party’s army and it must be kept under control. It all helps explain Mr Xi’s relentless “anti-corruption” drives among the high command.

Xi was 36 years old in 1989, older than almost all of the current Politburo members. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had very minor roles at that time. Xi’s role was at least partly because he was a princeling - his father was a comrade of Mao Zedong from the old days.
by emtel | 2025-12-06 20:43:28+00:00
I think the burden to show that AI is not thinking lies on the skeptics. There are two broad categories of arguments that skeptics use to show this, and they are both pretty bad.

The first category is what I'd call "the simplifying metaphor", in which it is claimed that AIs are actually "just" something very simple, and therefore do not think.

- "AIs just pick the most likely next token"

- "AI is just a blurry jpeg of the web" (Ted Chiang)

- "AIs are just stochastic parrots"

The problem with all of these is that "just" is doing an awful lot of work. For instance, if AIs "just" pick the most likely next token, it is going to matter a lot _how_ they do that. And one way they could do that is... by thinking.

There are many different stochastic processes that you could use to try to build a chat bot. LLMs are the only one so far that actually works well, and any serious critique has to explain why LLMs work better than (say) Markov chains despite "just" doing the same fundamental thing.

The second category of argument is "AIs are dumb". Here, skeptics claim that because AI fail at task X, they aren't thinking, because any agent capable of thought would be able to do task X. For instance, AIs hallucinate, or AIs fail to follow explicit instructions, and so on.

But this line of argument is also very poor, because we clearly don't want to define "thinking" as "a process by which an agent avoids all mistakes". That would exclude humans as well. It seems we need a theory that splits the universe of intellectual tasks into "those that require thinking" and "those that don't", and then we need to show that AI is good only at the latter, while humans are good at both. But unless I missed it no such theory is forthcoming.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-06 20:43:46+00:00
Either abroad or early career cadre in prefectures well outside of Beijing. What's more interesting is where were their parents doing during the Massacre.

I recommend reading Yashen Huang's "Rise and Fall of the E.A.S.T." [0] - it has a good overview of the cadre during Tiannamen - along with the dated but very comprehensive Tiannamen Papers [1]

[0] - https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300274912/the-rise-and-f...

[1] - https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/liang-zhang/the-tia...
by OptionOfT | 2025-12-06 20:44:39+00:00
I got a dermal graft in my hip. Unlike kidneys this is not really a live donation. The grafts are radiated to remove all DNA, so only the structure remains. The purpose of the transplant is to bridge torn tissue, and make the building blocks available to your body to rebuild the bridge (as I've been told).

I hope that radiation killed all (if any) viruses...
by nis0s | 2025-12-06 20:44:48+00:00
It’s the same thing as any condition which deviates from the set of characteristics considered “normal” for a given population.

Eczema is a skin condition which happens to some people, it’s not something that happens in most people. But we can see evidence of varying degrees of severity of skin damage due to eczema. This condition can happen for any number of reasons, immunological, endocrinological, or some combination of factors. There are different types of eczema, but for ease for conversation with anyone other than a doctor, you just say you have eczema.

Same for mental conditions, they have their underlying causes, and some representative characteristics we found on average and grouped them as classes for ease of diagnosis and treatment.

I understand the folly of mischaracterizing, so it doesn’t make sense for researchers or medical professionals to not care about the categorical distinctions.

However, as far as the normal public is concerned, someone’s problem is their problem, and they don’t owe you a detailed explanation of their condition, or a doctors note because you’ve been socially offended (I understand maybe that’s not the point in either of your posts, but I thought I should say it now that it occurred to me in the flow of this post).
by chihuahua | 2025-12-06 20:45:27+00:00
That quote is not very convincing to me. Both parts of it are questionable.

Just being able to play chess is not a very high bar at all. Most 6-year-olds can learn it in an hour. Are the Chess hustlers at Washington Square Park all Gentlemen?

I don't see being able to play Chess well as any kind of deficiency. It could be that it's just someone's hobby. It doesn't have to mean they spiraled into madness, Bobby Fisher style.

(I can play chess, but not well, so I personally don't care about either half of that quote as it applies to me)
by Esophagus4 | 2025-12-06 20:45:27+00:00
This seems like a bad faith comment.

If you truly wanted data, you could so easily Google (as I did), and find the below sources that back up the comment you're responding to. There are myriad papers and sources.

But I think your comment doesn't seek insight so much as it seeks to discredit and dismiss... in, frankly, a pretty lazy attempt. If you're going to be dismissive, put some effort in, man! ;)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10710064/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5976254/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5137920/

https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/02/11/chronic-stress-predispo...
by DonkRonk | 2025-12-06 20:46:22+00:00
I've been working on a domain-specific compression algorithm for hierarchical 3D geometry. Today I'm sharing benchmark results that honestly surprised even me.

*The benchmark:*

- DRGFC-3D v1.3.0 (Rust) vs ZSTD v0.25.0 - Test data: Hierarchical geometric structures (OBJ format) - Platform: Windows, multi-core CPU

*Results:*

| File Size | DRGFC-3D | ZSTD Ultra | Advantage | |-----------|----------|------------|-----------| | 67 KB | 33× | 7.5× | 4.4× | | 14 MB | 734× | 6.4× | 114× | | 29 MB | 561× | 5.4× | 104× | | 60 MB | 589× | 5.5× | 108× |

*Aggregate: 103.56 MB → 179.66 KB (590× ratio), 106× better than ZSTD*

Compression time for 60MB: 1.5s (DRGFC-3D) vs 157.9s (ZSTD level 22)

The approach leverages domain-specific understanding of geometric structure rather than treating data as raw bytes. Currently optimized for hierarchical/instanced geometry.

Built in Rust with Python bindings. Patent pending.

Feedback welcome, especially from folks working with large-scale 3D data.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-06 20:46:59+00:00
> His family had seen some hardships in the political game

Yes under Mao, but after Deng came to power the family regained significant political power.

Xi's father Xi Zhongxun was one of the Eight Elders [0] during the Deng era, and supported the Tiannamen crackdown. He was the Chairman of the Internal and Judicial Affairs Committee until 1993, and while the Chairman of the NPCSC (Wan Li) was in the US during the crackdown. He was also in charge of Guangdong after the Gang of Four were purged [1] and was the party leader who created what became the Shenzhen SEZ. And Xi Jinping's early mentor Geng Biao was the general who purged the Gang of Four [2] and worked with the US to modernize China's military capabilities [3].

The Geng Biao connection is a major reason why PLA Modernization is such a personal ambition of Xi's today - it was what gave him a major leg up in his career, and allowed him to differentiate himself from other Princelings and the Youth League cadre during his climb up the party ladder as well as during the succession showdown against Bo Xilai.

[0] - https://www.scmp.com/article/662093/eight-immortals-who-jock...

[1] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/07/16/x...

[2] - https://www3.nd.edu/~pmoody/Text%20Pages%20-%20Peter%20Moody...

[3] - https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v13...
by twentyfiveoh1 | 2025-12-06 20:47:28+00:00
early pearl was just about having an awesome tool at your disposal. There was minimal code written in a team environment.

People were still amazed that you could do X in 1 line rather than 100 lines. Some people couldn't have done those 100 lines.

So the idea of recipes/spells/hacks was an intentional parallel.

It became a cultural thing. New people wanted to be respected for compact code that impressed people the same way they were impressed.