MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pbiggar | 2025-12-09 14:10:17+00:00
Yes you can donate (why did you add the word "directly"?). It just passes through intermediary organizations, such as the Friends of the IDF. There are even non profits that pay for "lone soldiers" -- international mercenaries -- to take part in the genocide in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of "lone soldiers" took part, I believe something like 20,000 came from the US alone.
by Nemi | 2025-12-09 14:10:35+00:00
Slightly off topic, or at least tangential, Zapier has one of the most user-unfriendly interfaces I have seen in a while. When you log in, they have a left hand toolbar that runs down vertically, and it is icon only. I understand why they do this, being on the left hand side you don't want to take up much space. But unlike other user interfaces that employ this type of toolbar, you CAN'T see what each item is by expanding the toolbar or even hovering over the item! The only way to see what each one is is to click on it. This is a pinnacle of terrible UX. I love Zapier, but it makes me question their product offering if they can get this so wrong.
by wkjagt | 2025-12-09 14:10:46+00:00
Are you commenting on the title? If yes, I was about to do the same. I've seen this more often lately on HN and don't understand the reason. The actual title doesn't have a question mark, so the poster decided to add one and I have no idea why. Actual title: "Cassette tapes are making a comeback. Yes, really"
by logicallee | 2025-12-09 14:10:51+00:00
you can train an LLM in the browser, see this demonstration:

https://taonexus.com/mini-transformer-in-js.html

It's a very simple neural network with two attention heads that runs right in the browser in pure Javascript, you can view source on this implementation.

Even after training for a hundred epochs it really doesn't work very well (you can test it in the Inference tab after training it), but it doesn't use any libraries, so you can see the math itself in action in the source code.
by paddleon | 2025-12-09 14:11:36+00:00
> Not really understanding the negativity here.

In the last year or so HN seems to have attracted a lot of people (plus some bots) who seem to have been socialized on Reddit.

I don't know if these people are ignorant of what a good discussion forum can be (because they've never experienced one) or just don't care, but I do wish we could see more reflection on the second-order impacts of posting, and a move away from the reflexive negativity that mimics the outer face of good criticism while totally missing the thought and expertise good criticism requires.
by jollyllama | 2025-12-09 14:12:39+00:00
Between yours and GP's comments, I find echoes of my experience:

> Most of software work is maintaining "legacy" code, that is older systems that have been around for a long time and get a lot of use.

> Granted that's because the program is incredibly poorly written

LLMs can't fix big, shitty legacy codebases. That is where most maintenance work (in terms of hours) is, and where it will remain.

I would take it one step further and argue that LLMs and vibe-coding will compound into more big, shitty legacy codebases over time, and therefore, in the long arc, nothing will really change.
by pseudalopex | 2025-12-09 14:13:10+00:00
> A Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative investigation found that some grocery prices differed by as much as 23 percent per item from one Instacart customer to the next.

And this may expand to physical shopping.

> Until recently, the Carrot Tags website informed prospective retailer customers that the technology could be used to test prices on in-store customers. “Fully unlock the potential of ESLs’ instant and accurate pricing changes with dynamic price and promotion optimization strategies at the shelf,” the site said.

There is a video for people who would prefer it.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osxr7xSxsGo
by ndriscoll | 2025-12-09 14:13:24+00:00
I find the author's paragraph about small companies weird: other pages on their site indicate they are at a small 60 person professional services company. Their boss probably doesn't have a yacht. My boss doesn't at a large corporation, and I'm pretty sure his boss and his boss don't either.

Their resume indicates they have 1 year of experience. The unwritten rules about leveling up I think generally amount to reaching a first level "senior" (~5 YoE) where you can be expected to do things like figure out how to do a task and coordinate with others on your own instead of needing a mentor/lead to guide you all the time. Like it's more learning how to work with some technical stuff thrown in. I've been pretty direct with my managers throughout my 30s that I've got other priorities in life now (kids), and I'm not looking to grow and be more ambitious and all that, and I haven't found that to be an issue. Your manager is a person (for now. Good luck to gen alpha). They get it. Caveat: you still need to care, understand what you're doing at work, and do a good job. Don't phone it in, but you don't need to be chasing promotions either once you have some basic competence. I still get good performance reviews. We just have an understanding that I'm not looking at "the next step" or working toward any career goal.

Maybe the author's problem is that their workplace is basically a small body shop and isn't helping them grow? I don't know; never heard of them. They may want to find a more product development oriented company/team (so not just short term projects/contracts), perhaps like you say medium or large so there's more room for mentorship.

I see one of the projects was working on some thing used by a bunch of bike shops. That sounds like serving a direct need some small business had? One way to be both happier and better in your work is to understand why you're doing it. Why did a customer spend a not insignificant amount of money to have this thing developed? Why would someone spend their money to pay you to help them? Try to always have a good understanding of that wherever you are.
by limagnolia | 2025-12-09 14:13:55+00:00
I understand that- the key is "varying degrees". This article documents several cases across multiple states that go well beyond reasonable. I've learned to be careful to look at the dates on sale tags.

Another thing many grocery chains do is list a price that is only for folks who sign up for the stores tracking program, rather than the price that folk who don't want to jump through whoops and sing the song and dance pay. (They put that price in the fine print).
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-09 14:15:21+00:00
Just read an article on a cell component (a "vault") discovered in the 1980s by a grad student. It's found by the hundreds to thousands in most eukaryote cells. We still have no idea what it does.

The article was all about the quest to discover its use in the cell. It mentioned the lab director who shared credit with its discoverer about 10x as much as the grad student. She was a brief mention in the middle, and again at the end where it noted she went on to discover yet another fundamental part of complex cells.

Nancy Kedersha is the discoverer. Nancy Kedersha. Nancy Kedersha. Nancy Kedersha.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-09 14:15:28+00:00
I can't say I'm shocked. Disappointed, maybe, but it's hardly surprising to see the sociopathic nature in the people fighting tooth and nail for the validation of venture capitalists who will not be happy until they own every single cent on earth.

There are good people everywhere, but bring good and ethical stands in the way of making money, so most of the good people lose out in the end.

AI is the perfect technology for those who see people as complaining cogs in an economic machine. The current AI bubble is the first major advancement where these people go mask off; when people unapologetically started trying to replace basic art and culture with "efficient" machines, people started noticing.
by VikingCoder | 2025-12-09 14:15:51+00:00
In grad school, I wrote an ant simulator. There was a 2D grid of squares. I put ant food all over it, in hard-coded locations. Then I had a neural network for an ant. The inputs were "is there any food to the left? to the diagonal left? straight ahead? to the diagonal right? to the right?" The outputs were "turn left, move forward, turn right."

Then I had a multi-layer network - I don't remember how many layers.

Then I was using a simple Genetic Algorithm to try to set the weights.

Essentially, it was like breeding up a winner for the snake game - but you always know where all of the food is, and the ant always started in the same square. I was trying to maximize the score for how many food items the ant would eventually find.

In retrospect, it was pretty stupid. Too much of it was hard-coded, and I didn't have near enough middle layers to do anything really interesting. And I was essentially coming up with a way to not have to do back-propagation.

At the time, I convinced myself I was selecting for instinctive knowledge...

And I was very excited by research that said that, rather than having one pool of 10,000 ants...

It was better to have 10 islands of 1,000 ants, and to occasionally let genetic information travel from one island to another island. The research claimed the overall system would converge faster.

I thought that was super cool, and made me excited that easy parallelism would be rewarded.

I daydream about all of that, still.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-09 14:16:22+00:00
> In July 2023, David Grusch sat before Congress and testified under oath. A decorated Air Force veteran and former member of the Department of Defense’s UAP task force, Grusch had impeccable credentials. He had been detailed to the National Reconnaissance Office and had served as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s representative to the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force. His job had been to investigate these phenomena at the highest levels of the intelligence community.

And if you watch his testimony, you will notice that he says he hasn’t actually witnessed anything firsthand. All of it is a line of telephone hearsay.

Not to be believed.
by bluGill | 2025-12-09 14:16:25+00:00
The cost depends greatly on details. If you are returning an error and handling it in the next function down, then error codes are better. However if you have to unwind several levels of stack then exceptions are faster (assuming a modern optimized implementation - in many cases the compiler is locked into an ABI that cannot be optimized...)

> unwinding the stack can't be guaranteed to be safe.

While this is true, it is a bad argument. If unwinding the stack isn't safe then you likely have lots of issues because you forgot about some code real code path that can also have the effect of skipping the area where you do the needed cleanup. In effect cleaning up to make unwinding safe will also have the effect of making your code better in the other cases too.

This argument also fails in a different way: if your stack is safe to unwind that means it is easy to test all the code paths that unwind. Testing error paths is often hard and so skipped - which means exception safe code is more likely to be correct because the code paths are run all the time.
by throw0101d | 2025-12-09 14:16:37+00:00
> Heck, I work at a much smaller particle accelerator (https://ifmif.org) and have met the CERN guys, and they were the first to say that for our needs, OpenStack is absolutely overkill.

I currently work in AI/ML HPC, and we use Proxmox for our non-compute infrastructure (LDAP, SMTP, SSH jump boxes). I used to work in cancer with HPC, and we used OpenStack for several dozen hypervisors to run a lot of infra/services instances/VM.

I think that there are two things determine which system should be looked at first: scale and (multi-)tenancy. More than one (maybe two) dozen hypervisors, I could really see scaling/management issues with Proxmox; I personally wouldn't want to do it (though I'm sure many have). Next, if you have a number internal groups that need allocated/limited resource assignments, then OpenStack tenants are a good way to do this (especially if there are chargebacks, or just general tracking/accounting).
by efields | 2025-12-09 14:16:46+00:00
I maintain a few rails apps and Claude Code has written 95% of the code for the last 4 months. I deploy regularly.

I make my own PRs then have Copilot review them. Sometimes it finds criticisms, and I copy and paste that chunk of critique into Claude Code, and it fixes it.

Treat the LLMs like junior devs that can lookup answers supernaturally fast. You still need to be mindful of their work. Doubtful even. Test, test, test.
by liampulles | 2025-12-09 14:16:58+00:00
WASM development is really for a "level lower" than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript development. I know this because, being curious about it myself, I tried a year ago to make use of a WASM runtime in Go to run a piece of WASM code (I think I wrote something in V and compiled it to WASM).

It becomes a huge pain in the bum as soon as you have to deal with moving anything more than trivial types around, because you have to manually allocate memory for the WASM runtime and move bytes around. The byte representation needs to be understandable by the source language for your WASM code (the v language in my case). This is why these WASM runtimes use ints in their README examples, it would look and be horrendously complex otherwise.

If one is looking to use WASM for something for plugin development in the backend, I would try and look for something that is not WASM generic, but works with the source language, and where the WASM aspect is an under-the-hood detail.
by beepbooptheory | 2025-12-09 14:17:10+00:00
My sympathies go out to the friend's coworkers. They are probably wading through a bunch of stuff right now, but given the context you have given us, its probably not "scrum meetings"..

I don't even care about the llm, I just want the confidence you have to assess that any given thing will take N weeks. You say 1-2 weeks.. thats like a big range! Something that "would" take 1 week takes ~2 hours, something that "would" take 2 weeks also takes ~2 hours. How does that even make sense? I wonder how long something that would of taken three weeks would take?

Do you still charge your clients the same?
by Aldipower | 2025-12-09 14:17:20+00:00
Yeah, mostly DDA, and some songs are live mixed on the console, this is DAA then? Anyway.. :-)

I think the real shift to digital was around 1994-95 when professional digital recording equipment became somewhat affordable even for smaller studios. My Roland DM-80 4-track digital hard disk recorder, you also find on the albums webpage, was more then 20.000$ back in 1991, so most studio easily stood with 16-tracks on analogue tape.
by rootsudo | 2025-12-09 14:18:00+00:00
I find it a bit of a course - Grandia, released on sega saturn, remastered due to the saturn failure.

Grandia 2, released on Dreamcast, released on PS2 due to Dreamcast failure. Same issues for the remakes, the ps2 works great but when compared to the dreamcast there is obvious music/graphics artifacts.
by Bluestrike2 | 2025-12-09 14:18:17+00:00
Fair enough. I fully recognize just how easily it gets abused, and "used with purpose" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in my original comment. That said, if someone's going to engage in sentence sprawl, I'd much rather an em dash get abused in the process than some of the alternatives. Bad em dashes are at least less ambiguous than a chain of a commas mashing meaning into mush, and they provide an obvious visual break that jumps out at the reader.

Em dashes are strong; they can take the abuse. While I'm right there with you on dreaming of a renaissance in quality writing, that's likely more fantastical than my own hopes that we'd see a resurgence in quality em dash usage. At this point, I'd probably settle for outright stagnation in writing ability.
by angiolillo | 2025-12-09 14:19:15+00:00
> There are thousands of blind people on the net. Can't you hire one of them to test for you?

Testing is a professional skill -- not all blind people are good at accessibility testing, just as not all sighted people are good at GUI testing.

My team has carved out an accessibility budget so that every couple years we can hire an accessibility consultancy (which employs a couple blind testers) for a few tens of hours of work to review one of our application workflows. Based on the issues they identify we attempt to write tests to prevent those classes of issues across the whole application suite, but our budget means that less than one percent of our UI has ever been functionally tested for accessibility.

It comes down to cost/benefit. Good testers are expensive, good accessibility testers doubly-so. And while I personally think there's a moral imperative and maybe a marketing angle, improving accessibility truthfully doesn't seem to meaningfully improve sales. But if the testing costs came down by a couple orders of magnitude it would be a complete game-changer.
by kachapopopow | 2025-12-09 14:19:23+00:00
honestly, my usage of AI is constantly evolving and sometimes I have days where I just don't use it at all, but it also allows me to do things I could never make myself do like realigning icons for 400+ models and also allows me to understand just enough of a subject to leave it behind and continue on my own.

AI has also probably saved me 100 hours of repetitive work at this point and completely elimitated the need to rely on other people working on time consuming configuration tasks and back-and-forward which used to stall work for me since I am the kind of person who will work for 20 hours until something is finished without losing that much in productivity.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-12-09 14:20:07+00:00
One would argue in a capitalist society like ours, fucking with someone's job at industrial scale isn't awfully dissimilar from threatening their life, it's just less direct. Plenty more people currently are feeling the effects of worsening job markets than have been involved in a hostage situation, but the negative end results are still the same.

One would argue also if you don't see this, it's because you'd prefer not to.

If we had at least a somewhat functioning safety net, or UBI, or both, you'd at least have an argument to be made, but we don't. AI and it's associated companies' business model is, if not killing people, certainly attempting to make lots of lives worse at scale. I wouldn't work for one for all the money in the world.
by glenstein | 2025-12-09 14:20:33+00:00
Honestly I can't tell if your incredulity is at the method of analysis for being tragically mistaken or superficial in some way, at the seemingly dehumanizing comparison of beloved human demonstrations of skill (chess, writing) to lowest common denominator labor, or the tone of passive indifference to computers taking over everything.

I think the comparisons are useful enough as metaphors, though I wonder at analysis, because it sounds like if someone took a Yudkowsky idea and talked about it like a human, which might make a bad assumption go down more smooth than it should. But I don't know.
by RHSeeger | 2025-12-09 14:20:38+00:00
I want to start by saying that I agree with what you're trying to accomplish here. And I agree with some of the ways you go about it. I'm trying to find the right words to covey what I mean here, but... the best I can come with is... what I'm saying here isn't "you're wrong because", it's "what you're doing seems to miss some situations; here's what I do that helps for those".

> The "doesn't include non-active projects objections is easy", please check the Example 1 test again, there's a line for that:

You're correct; I totally missed that.

> In either case it is up to you to make sure that the projects are representative.

That's fair, but that's also the point you're trying to address / make more robust by how you're trying to write tests (what the article is about). Specifically

- The article is about: How to make sure you're tests are robust against test fixtures changing

- That comment says: It's up to you to make sure your test fixtures don't change in a way that breaks your tests

> You can write a test that is equally powerful as if you restricted your fixtures just to those example projects and then made an absolute comparison. You're not loosing any testing power. Expect you're making the test easier to maintain.

By restricting your fixtures to just the projects (that are relevant to the test), you're making _the tests_ easier to maintain; not just the one test but the test harness as a whole. What I mean is that you're reducing "action at a distance". When you modify the data for your test, you don't need to worry about what other tests, somewhere else, might also be impacted.

Plus you do gain testing power, because you can test more things. For example, you can confirm it returns _every_ active project.

All that being said, what I'm talking about relies on creating the test data local to the tests. And doing that has a cost (time, generally). So there's a tradeoff there.
by Symmetry | 2025-12-09 14:20:41+00:00
> Are you ok with having a codebase that is effectively a black box?

When was the last time you looked at the machine code your compiler was giving you? For me, doing embedded development on an architecture without a mature compiler the answer is last Friday but I expect that the vast majority of readers here never look at their machine code. We have abstraction layers that we've come to trust because they work in practice. To do our work we're dependent on the companies that develop our compilers where we can at least see the output, but also companies that make our CPUs which we couldn't debug without a huge amount of specialized equipment. So I expect that mostly people will be ok with it.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-09 14:20:58+00:00
I don't know how they can be trivially improved.

I vaguely recall seeing some product with toolbar icons that attempted to depict a cell as part of a row, or column, with an "x" in the corner to indicate delete. I could never decipher them. It was all too small. Plus the "x" looked just like the "+" at a glance since it was so small. Even though every icon was distinct and meaningful, each icon was also ultimately a complicated jumble that took longer to decipher than just reading the label next to it.

So when you say "They can be trivially improved with about 1 millisecond of conscious thought," I completely disagree. It's actually really hard and there's a good reason they choose not to. And maybe don't be so insulting?
by billy99k | 2025-12-09 14:21:19+00:00
You only care because it's Trump. Before Musk took over Twitter, the US government was not only censoring American citizens by colluding with all of the major social media companies, but allowing foreign dictators to censor their own citizens abroad.

I'm really tired when the online community completely ignores atrocities because they don't ever want to make their own side look bad, but talk about the end of the world when it's someone they don't like.
by cestith | 2025-12-09 14:21:35+00:00
I think it’s largely because of eBooks, and the proliferation of lower-effort eBooks on the market. The latter is increasing because people use LLMs to write them. To actually make money on tech books, you kind of have to be a juggernaut or have some runaway hit titles. Once isn’t enough, either, because someone’s always putting out something newer on the same topic or people are moving to a different stack altogether.
by sestep | 2025-12-09 14:21:35+00:00
Interesting; I've been using WebAssembly as a compilation target for various projects for the past four years, and have been fairly happy with the state of documentation. I've never heard of that book you mentioned (I should check it out!), and instead I just read the spec directly: https://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/

Or occasionally I Google specific Wasm instructions and find .wat examples for them on MDN.

I'm sure you're right that the documentation is years behind that of HTML and CSS, but is there some specific aspect of Wasm documentation that you find lacking that isn't covered by the spec?