MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mh- | 2025-12-05 15:13:12+00:00
One of the last times I commented in a thread like this, someone looked at my profile (which has my real name), found me on LinkedIn, and then posted my employer's name in a reply to me, calling out an alleged conflict of interest (you can find it in my comment history and make a decision on that for yourself, if you're curious).

It's not worth the internet points for any of us to post details beyond what we do.
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-12-05 15:13:19+00:00
The fat tailed sheep have been domesticated for several thousand years, possibly originating in Mesopotamia. They are still cultivated in Turkey and other parts of the Middle East, IIRC.

I was always curious how long it takes that type of mutation to become a distinct strain (e.g. how many generations from the first sheep herder that saw a sheep with a fat tail and decided, either consciously or otherwise, to breed it and continue to select offspring with fat tails until it no longer required selective propagation to persist).
by Miraste | 2025-12-05 15:13:31+00:00
More than one failure. They had a project to make a custom chip for model training a few years ago, and they scrapped it. Now they have another one, which entered testing in March. I don't think it's going well, because testing should have wrapped up recently, right before the news that they're in serious talks to buy a lot of TPUs from Google. On the other side of the stack, Llama 4 was a disaster and they haven't shipped anything since.

They have the money and talent to do it. As you point out, they do have major successes in areas that take real engineering. But they also have a lot of failures. It will depend how the internal politics play out, I imagine.
by jandrusk | 2025-12-05 15:13:32+00:00
This is going to be an off the wall statement given this audience, but WWE signed an exclusive deal with NetFlix for 10 years I think in an effort to counter their main competitor AEW, which signed a deal with HBO Max shortly before that. Now they'll both potentially be on the same platform, which WWE will hate as it will be interesting in having two competitive pro wrestling promotions on the same platform.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-05 15:14:18+00:00
Sorry to be doubting, but are you sure?

I got curious, and looked at the DOM, and seems the editor when empty is just one line of the full page, which if you click anywhere else (like what I did initially, in the middle of the page) the editor can't be focused. Are you sure you clicked in the middle of the page?

Looks like this for me: https://i.imgur.com/DOdiN4o.png

Unless you click that specific rectangle, the editor doesn't focus, isn't it the same in Safari?
by btreecat | 2025-12-05 15:14:29+00:00
In my most recent role, everyone interviewing me gave me a thumbs up. Except one engineer.

I remembered our conversation well, because it left me a little confused. We were talking about handling large volumes of messages. And when I said "well it really depends on the volume, you could be fine with batch processing in many cases" he jumped on it like I had never heard of a queue.

Then I offered as part of my design (and from my XP in more than 10yrs of working in products with petabyte datastores) that dealing with so many services connecting to the Data store directly could run into scale issues. He flat out rejected the claim (because that didn't fit the current system design).

Guess what we're discussing now and have spun up a whole team to complete? Forcing every micro service to use a single API rather than elasticsearch directly, because of scale.
by cb321 | 2025-12-05 15:15:06+00:00
There is no direct argument/guidence that I saw for "when to use them", but masked arrays { https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/maskedarray.html } (an alternative to sentinels in array processing sub-languages) have been in NumPy (following its antecedents) from its start. I'm guessing you could do a code-search for its imports and find arguments pro & con in various places surrounding that.

From memory, I have heard "infecting all downstream" as both "a feature" and "a problem". Experience with numpy programs did lead to sentinels in the https://github.com/c-blake/nio Nim package, though.

Another way to try to investigate popularity here is to see how much code uses signaling NaN vs. quiet NaN and/or arguments pro/con those things / floating point exceptions in general.

I imagine all of it comes down to questions of how locally can/should code be forced to confront problems, much like arguments about try/except/catch kinds of exception handling systems vs. other alternatives. In the age of SIMD there can be performance angles to these questions and essentially "batching factors" for error handling that relate to all the other batching factors going on.

Today's version of this wiki page also includes a discussion of Integer Nan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaN . It notes that the R language uses the minimal signed value (i.e. 0x80000000) of integers for NA.

There is also the whole database NULL question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_(SQL)

To be clear, I am not taking some specific position, but I think all these topics inform answers to your question. I think it's something with trade-offs that people have a tendency to over-simplify based on a limited view.
by oldandboring | 2025-12-05 15:15:34+00:00
As I'm sure you're aware, glyphosate is usually only appropriate as a weed killer on your property if you're looking to kill all vegetation in/around where you spray it. For example if you wanted to "nuke" your lawn by killing all the grass and starting over with new grass. It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.

If you've got some dandelions or thistle, and it's not out of control, the nice safe way is to pull them up by hand or, if they're between pavement cracks, pour boiling water on them.

Broadleaf weeds growing in your lawn that aren't easily hand-pulled can be killed with a selective herbicide like 2,4-d. Tough underground vine-style weeds like creeping charlie or wild violet will need a selective called triclopyr. Crabgrass is best killed by a selective called quinclorac. Yellow nutsedge requires a selective called sulfrentrazone or another called halosulfuron.

Selectively kill the weed infestations as best you can, get rid of the bad ones before they go to seed, and focus on the health of your grass -- in most parts of your lawn, healthy grass will out-compete weeds.
by ptx | 2025-12-05 15:15:34+00:00
What I would really like is a Git equivalent to Mercurial's "fold" operation. I usually make a bunch of commits as I work, just as checkpoints, which I then want to turn into a single final commit when it's done, which could be quite some time later, e.g. "started on thing", "broke it", "broke it more", "Add thing to improve foo of bar".

Mercurial's "histedit" command offers two operations to combine the commits: "fold" and "roll", where "fold" brings the earlier commit into the later commit and "roll" does the reverse. The "fold" operation does exactly what I want in this case: It brings all the changes into the final commit from when I actually finished it, using the commit date of that commit.

Git's "rebase -i" command offers "squash" and "fixup" and "fixup -c" and "fixup -C", but they all do the same thing as "roll", i.e. they keep the earliest commit's date, the date when I started working on the thing and not the date when I finished working on it. (So I then cut and paste the correct date and update the commit afterwards. This may not be the best way to do it.)
by ghaff | 2025-12-05 15:15:52+00:00
I'm actually a little surprised that, some discounts for annual subscriptions notwithstanding, the streaming services haven't done more to discourage short-term jump on/jump off subscriptions.

But they have the data and I don't. I assume there's enough stickiness and inertia that most people are not canceling and restarting services all the time. I know I don't. I just decide I don't care enough about most content (and don't really watch much video or binge watch anyway).
by zug_zug | 2025-12-05 15:15:55+00:00
Tl; dr:

One of the cornerstone studies claiming glyphosate was safe is now suspected to have been written entirely ghost-written by Monsanto.

A recent analysis (2025) shows that this paper has been cited more than 99.9% of all glyphosate-related research — i.e. it disproportionately shaped scientific and public perceptions of glyphosate’s safety for decades.

[ https://undark.org/2025/08/15/opinion-ghostwritten-paper-gly... ]
by jt2190 | 2025-12-05 15:16:27+00:00
> I also think they tend to be the older ones among us who have seen what happens when it all goes wrong, and the stack comes tumbling down…

To the great surprise of my younger self I have never seen “it all come crashing down” and I honestly believe this is extremely rare in practice (i.e. the U.K post saga), something that senior devs like to imagine will happen but probably won’t, and is used to scare management and junior devs into doing “something” which may or may not make things better.

Almost universally I’ve seen the software slowly improved via a stream of urgent bug fixes with a sprinkle of targeted rewrites. The ease of these bug fixes and targeted rewrites essentially depends on whether there is a solid software design underneath: Poor designs tend to be unfixable and have complex layers of patches to make the system work well enough most of the time; good designs tend to require less maintenance overall. Both produce working software, just with different “pain” levels.
by Backslasher | 2025-12-05 15:16:46+00:00
To me, since the DB is there to serve the app (which is there to serve the user), the lookup/enum decision mostly depends on whether the list is defined before build time (> enum) or after (> lookup). US states are probably a solid "before", so you get the added value of easily materializing a validator in the app code. Children IDs sound a bit more dynamic.
by latexr | 2025-12-05 15:17:36+00:00
> I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it.

Seems to me your problem lies in this part:

> giant collection

Don’t add so much that you can’t deal with it. Concentrate on infrequently updated sources. Any news website, for example, is too much and shouldn’t be in your reader. A small creator or YouTube channel from whom you want to see (almost) everything does go in.

If you ever feel overwhelmed, you have too many feeds and should remove every single one you don’t feel is absolutely valuable. Exceptions can be made if e.g. you were on vacation and never checked the reader. In that case, mark as read instead of removing.

If you ever find yourself regularly skipping the content from a feed without reading, remove it then and there. If you’re not consuming at least 80% (made up number, adapt to yourself) of posts, it does not belong in your feed reader.
by gf000 | 2025-12-05 15:18:01+00:00
Compared to what? Because compared to go which has not one but 2 nulls, and an even more anemic type system it is surely much better.

> the type system definitely doesn’t help you write correct programs.

It surely helps significantly. You are just looking for even more from the type system, but that's another (fair) statement to make.
by parpfish | 2025-12-05 15:18:21+00:00
One weird thing about software jobs as opposed to other crafts is the persistence of the workpiece.

A furniture maker builds a chair, ships it out, and they don’t see it again. Pride in their craft is all about joy of mastery and building a good external reputation.

In most software jobs, the thing you build today sticks around and you’ll be dealing with it next month. Pride in your craft can be self serving because building something well makes life easier for future-you
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-05 15:18:25+00:00
Imperative: Tell the computer how to do something, by instructing it what to do.

Declarative: Tell the computer what you want the result to be like, and the computer figures out how to do it.

for_each in Terraform is very much declarative, just like modules. Compare how you'd do the same thing with JS or any other (imperative) language you know, and I think it must be clear what the difference between the two is.
by tecleandor | 2025-12-05 15:18:27+00:00
Probably because of the PoE. That discards SFP+, and makes difficult PoE over copper, as you'd probably need 802.3bt PoE++ (that probably most of the Unifi devices aren't compatible with), or a very short cable to avoid interference.

10Gb interfaces also tend to run quite hot and be a bit power hungry.

This is a device that needs to be in a location with good 5G reception, so it makes sense to be PoE powered so you can put it near a window or in the location that gets the best reception, and only run a long ethernet cable. And, although I don't like it too much, 2.5G or 5G NBASE-T is the nearest thing that covers 5G speeds.

The 2Gb downlink speed is the 5G downlink, the max for the whole 5G connection, so 2.5Gb ethernet is enough for that.
by jinzo | 2025-12-05 15:19:36+00:00
I am a problem, but on the other spectrum - OEMs ain't getting the repair €€€ because people like me repair stuff (but a different approach than Vanja).

Then, almost no manufacturer that sells in the EU knows how to do this (Renault is almost the only one that doesen't have pyrofuses in the battery, almost everyone else has). The catch is, the routed power is not problematic, the problem is when something gets squished and redirects that routed power to somewhere else. Which tends to happen in a metal tincan.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-05 15:19:43+00:00
> why not just use jj

1. It's very new; I haven't had time to learn it properly yet.

2. It's very new and tooling doesn't support it well, e.g. VSCode. There aren't many GUIs yet.

3. I tried it once co-locating with Git and you definitely can't use both at the same time, even if it can use a `.git` directory. It ended up in a huge mess.

I'm definitely in favour of better-than-Git alternatives but I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone to switch to JJ right now. It isn't so much better that abandoning the de facto standard is obviously worth it yet. (In contrast to things like the iPhone, Rust, SSDs, etc.).

Also I really wish they would focus on some of the bigger pain points of Git. I can deal with rebasing and whatnot. Sometimes it's painful but it's usually not that bad.

What I can't deal with are submodules and LFS. Both are awful and fixing them properly requires fundamental changes to the VCS which aren't going to happen in Git. JJ has an opportunity to do that. Imagine if JJ could say "we have submodules but they aren't awful!" or "you can check in large files!". Those are the sort of huge advantages that would mean you can say "why not just use JJ".
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-05 15:19:48+00:00
What you're describing is the stereotype for "rich west europe" engineering culture.

Every now and then you see it leak out into some other environment, like Toyota and their pull-apart ball joints that "aren't an issue" because "the user will just service it on schedule" where it reliably causes problems in all sorts of dumb ways (because like anything else, designing stuff to within an inch of it's life takes practice).

Now, don't get me wrong, this European approach creates a lot of cool highly performant products, but it's stuff that tends to fall on it's face real good if you violate any of the assumptions made when designing it and the approach is naturally suited to some products more than others.
by danans | 2025-12-05 15:20:16+00:00
> Look at the farms that still have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

Those are usually large plantations, and the people who owned them weren't just farmers but vast landholders with very low paid labor working the farm (at one time usually enslaved). I doubt they were representative of the typical turn of the 20th century farm.

If we're speaking from vibes rather than statistics, I'd argue most 19th century farmhouses I've seen are pretty modest. Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.
by coredog64 | 2025-12-05 15:20:20+00:00
> but limiting H1B is likely bad for the US

Assumes facts not in evidence.

It's clear at this point that there are massive abuses in the H-1B program, and remedying those abuses will absolutely mean limiting the H-1B. And that's before we even start to review the program vs. unemployment rates for native American STEM graduates.
by denys_potapov | 2025-12-05 15:20:22+00:00
Cool. Recursion in python is common bottleneck in competitive programming. Will give it a try. I created a similar tool for recursion [1]. But ended with rewriting AST and emulating stack. Pros - no need for accumulator, cons - almost unusable in real world.

[1] https://dev.to/denyspotapov/callonce-python-macro-for-unlimi...
by chipotle_coyote | 2025-12-05 15:20:42+00:00
I think you're right, but I've always been a bit skeptical of that vision -- it implicitly relies on the assumption that "THE streaming service" will choose to make as much content available as technically and legally possible; they're imagining something like "Spotify but for movies and TV shows". But I was always worried about "Apple's App Store but for movies and TV shows": one company with ultimate gatekeeper status over what you can and can't legally watch. (The movie and television business is not like the music business; the financial incentives don't, as far as I can tell, support the same kind of distribution models.)

I'm not particularly thrilled about this kind of consolidation, but given that Warner was going to be bought by somebody, Netflix may be one of the least worst outcomes.
Ask HN: Why not make intelligence attractive, *literally*, in online dating?
by amichail | 2025-12-05 15:20:49+00:00
Consider an online dating site that automatically alters photos to make men more muscular and women more beautiful but ONLY for those with a verified record of achievement requiring high intelligence.

The higher the level of intelligence required for the achievement, the stronger the alteration. All of it would be done automatically. No user edits allowed.

Everyone on the site would understand that these modifications are part of the experience.

Is this a good idea? Would you use this online dating site?
by techblueberry | 2025-12-05 15:21:47+00:00
One thing that bugs me about discussions about the way we talk about capitalism and the free market, is that it seems pretty clear that there is a difference between well/heavily regulated capitalism, and excessively free market capitalism. From the article:

“ Why did they break down? Well, in 2019, I started tracing the collapse of the industry to the end of the regulations that prohibited vertical integration of TV and film. These were known as financial syndication rules in TV and the Paramount decrees in movies. In this framework, TV networks couldn’t make their own prime time shows, but had to buy them from others. Similarly movie theaters and studios had to be separated. These rules created an open market for content, and linked consumer preferences with quality content.”

I feel like most of the stories of giant corporations, less choice, less competition lower quality and higher prices are often traced back tot he deregulation of something that used to be considered common sense capitalism, for instance, stock buybacks were illegal until 1982.

I don’t know exactly what it is, but the free Market needs to focus on product innovations and not business model innovations; at least not over optimizing here.

Or it’s not even business model but like business structure innovations.
by jinzo | 2025-12-05 15:21:57+00:00
We don't have the full picture. Like I mentioned too many times in this thread, I know EV Clinic head boss Vanja likes to overreact and twists stuff to fit into his narrative. Not saying this one was not a fender bender, but I take all his stuff with a grain of salt. Mostly because I worked with him AND work on the same stuff he does - and it usually doesen't match up to what I'm seeing to the degree he 'dramaticizes'.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-05 15:22:04+00:00
> If I don't understant the business model and how much I could be locked-in, I don't even bother wasting 1 minute on the product

Personally I do it the other way around, first I try it out and see if it's useful, then I'd figure out if I'm willing to accept the tradeoffs of pricing/lock-in.

If you do it the way you suggest, wouldn't that mean you can't actually understand if the business model is fine because of the benefits you get? Seems backwards to me.
by 9rx | 2025-12-05 15:22:09+00:00
> Those are usually large plantations

There are no plantations around here. This was cattle and grain country in that time. Farmers got rich because all of sudden their manual labour capacity was multiplied by machines. The story is quite similar to those who used software to multiply their output in our time, and similarly many tech fortunes have built mansions just the same.

> Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.

Well, they weren't palaces. You're absolutely right that they don't look like mansions by today's standards, but they were considered as such at the time. Many were coming from tiny, one room log cabins (stuffed to the brim with their eight children). They were gigantic, luxurious upgrades at the time. But progress marches forward, as always.
by steego | 2025-12-05 15:22:10+00:00
I am.

While I’m not the kind of person who races to test the most triggering racial slurs, I’m actually glad Anon Pond Heron did because I thought his behavior was informative, especially as you could watch him slowly type out the beginnings of a slur.

I actually think these types of CRDTs can be enhanced with a handful of simple mechanisms to ensure a higher quality chat experience.
by ezst | 2025-12-05 15:22:16+00:00
I think if fits well in this comparison, because Scala-native:

- has the ergonomics, abstractions, expressiveness and conveniences of a high-level language with pointer-level semantics if/when needed (essentially covering the abstraction vs. cost spectrum of all those languages)

- can be used with or without GC (same)

- has the libraries and tooling to tackle massively concurrent/parallel workloads with ease (the niche that Go carved for itself)

- offers the same memory safety guarantees as Rust, and possibly more in the future with capture-checking (a more general concept than borrow-checking to guarantee resources scoping at compile-time)
by mapt | 2025-12-05 15:22:17+00:00
The entire job of a codec is subjectively authentic, but lossy compression. AI is our best and in some ways easiest method of lossy compression. All lossy compression produces artifacts; JPEG macroblocks are effectively a hallucination, albeit one that is immediately identifiable because it fails to simulate anything else we're familiar with.

AI compression doesn't have to be the level of compression that exists in image generation prompts, though. A SORA prompt might be 500 bits (~1 bit per character natural English), while a decompressed 4K frame that you're trying to bring to 16K level of simulated detail starts out at 199 million bits. It can be a much finer level of compression.
by amiga386 | 2025-12-05 15:22:36+00:00
> And in the case of many others, it makes a very significant difference.

This is very true, but we're talking about an entertainment provider's choice of codec for streaming to millions of subscribers.

A security recording device's choice of codec ought to be very different, perhaps even regulated to exclude codecs which could "hallucinate" high-definition detail not present in the raw camera data, and the limitations of the recording media need to be understood by law enforcement. We've had similar problems since the introduction of tape recorders, VHS and so on, they always need to be worked out. Even the phantom of Helibronn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn) turned out to be DNA contamination of swabs by someone who worked for the swab manufacturer.