MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Scribesley | 2025-12-04 19:50:00+00:00
Nope. Distraction, half-truths, and omission, sadly, probably in response to this investigative journalism: https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2025/09/15...

Before takeoff, on the runway, you smell that toxic gas building up in the cabin? Yeah, probably not good for you.

Got sick after a flight? "Catch a microbe" from a neighbor? Doubtful. You're just releasing the exhaust poisons you breathed in the cabin (through mucous, etc).

Northwestern, take note!
by crote | 2025-12-04 19:50:17+00:00
> To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems.

To me, any software engineer who tries Haskell, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems.

To me, any software engineer who tries Emacs, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems.

To me, any software engineer who tries FreeBSD, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems.

We're getting paid to solve the problem, not to play with the shiniest newest tools. If it gets the job done, it gets the job done.
by notnullorvoid | 2025-12-04 19:50:20+00:00
It's not a perfect analogy, but none of my comments are directed at the use of JS for a game, it's a fine choice. It's the use of Next.js that's the issue, it's a framework for server side rendering of HTML. It serves no benefit if your goal is to make a 3D game, it only adds overhead. If he had not been using it he would have realised there's a few bundlers out there that are far better than what Next.js dev server provided at the time.
by somat | 2025-12-04 19:50:27+00:00
What is wrong with stock buybacks?

Genuine question, I don't understand the economics of the stock market and as such I participate very little (probably to my detriment) I sort of figure the original theory went like this.

"We have an idea to run a for profit endeavor but do not have money to set it up. If you buy from us a portion of our future profit we will have the immediate funds to set up the business and you will get a payout for the indefinite future."

And the stock market is for third party buying and selling of these "shares of profit"

Under these conditions are not all stocks a sort of millstone of perpetual debt for the company and it would behoove them to remove that debt, that is, buyback the stock. Naively I assume this is a good thing.
by quitit | 2025-12-04 19:50:35+00:00
Yeah we also need to get out of the dichotomous thinking that companies are either all good or all bad.

Companies will do things that represent their interests, sometimes their goals align well with their customers, or the greater good, and sometimes they do unpopular things where they believe the profitability will outweigh the blowback.*

It's a lesson in not being too attached or needlessly loyal - our connection to a business is not a personal one.

*The Epic example is useful because their actions represent a steady pattern of deceptive conduct.
by sokoloff | 2025-12-04 19:50:41+00:00
> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.

Were you a solo founder of 5 companies? I literally cannot fathom that you worked at 5 even very modest-sized tech companies and never experienced a colleague with some level of what we’d call neurodivergent.

I can’t validate that the rate is 38%, but I find it hard to believe it’s under 5% and if it’s 5%, you’d be hard-pressed to avoid crossing paths across 5 companies and 15 years.
by Lendal | 2025-12-04 19:50:42+00:00
Thanks for that insight. I previously had only a vague notion of why disorder is used. One of the main reasons I don't want to have an official diagnosis is because the word disorder has such a negative connotation. I really don't want any disorders, so if I just ignore it, try not to think about it, maybe it will go away, and then I won't have a disorder.
by kergonath | 2025-12-04 19:50:58+00:00
> For as long as I can remember, before M1, Macs were always behind in the CPU department. PC's had much better value if you cared about CPU performance.

But not if you cared about battery life, because that was the tradeoff Apple was making. Which worked great until about 2015-2016. The parts they were using were not Intel’s priority and it went south basically after Broadwell, IIRC. I also suppose that Apple stopped investing heavily into a dead-end platform while they were working on the M1 generation some time before it was announced.
by rdtsc | 2025-12-04 19:51:03+00:00
The fact that this shows higher numbers than the community college kids ("...have far lower rates of disabled students...") is interesting too. Yeah, one can argue that Stanford maybe is just so accommodating that it just serves as a great attractor for people with disability. I somehow doubt that.

I wouldn't be surprised that this is part of some coaching program too. It seems too random for folks to just "stumble" on a hack. There are few of these outfits which advertise that they can "get your kid accepted into colleges" if you buy their services.

> But the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note.

If we take honesty out of the equation, what's the downside for not declaring a disability, if it's not that hard to get a note from a doctor? You get better housing, and more time on tests. I am surprised the number is not higher, actually like 75% or something.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-04 19:51:06+00:00
Sounds like you're using cron as a complex job queue! A lot of teams get there eventually, and either 1) keep hacking on cron/jenkins/etc to make this work, 2) invent their own queueing tool (NIH syndrome; been done many times before, there is nothing new to make here), or 3) use a purpose-built solution for this. Airflow is the old-and-busted solution; the new hotness is newer generations of the same concept (Prefect/Dagster, Luigi, Temporal). But often sticking to your existing thing is cheaper; depends how much custom engineering you want to invest.

Fwiw, I do believe you can do this in GHA, but you may need to call their API from your workflow. In addition, their replacement for Groovy is to run an action which lets you embed Javascript/Typescript and call their SDK. It sucks, but so does Groovy! ;-)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-04 19:51:26+00:00
A high end CPU (e.g. Threadripper) is 350W. A high end GPU (e.g. RTX 5090) is 575W. That's over 900W. You're past the point of die area and now you're trying to get enough airflow in a finite amount of space without needing five pounds of copper or 10000RPM fans.

Separate packages get you more space, separate fans, separate power connectors, etc.

In theory you could do the split in a different way, i.e. do SMP with APUs like the MI300X, and then you have multiple sockets with multiple heatsinks but they're all APUs. But you can see the size of the heatsink on that thing, and it's really a GPU they integrated some CPU cores into rather than the other way around. The power budget is heavily disproportionately the GPU. And it's Enterprise Priced so they get to take the "nobody here cares about copper or decibels" trade offs that aren't available to mortals.
by dkarl | 2025-12-04 19:51:29+00:00
My current employer had me answer the question of whether I'm "disabled." I've never answered "yes" to this question since I've never been diagnosed with any form of neurodivergence, though therapists have suggested that there's a good chance I'd be diagnosed if I saw a specialist. But this time I noticed that my employer's definition of "disabled" included not only neurodivergence but also depression, which I do have a diagnosis for. So... now I'm disabled.

I have no idea what use the label is when it's so broadly defined. It doesn't give my employer any information that would help them support me in any way. Fingers crossed there is some benefit to it.
by jsheard | 2025-12-04 19:51:31+00:00
Apple's RAM is on-package, not on-die. The memory is still a separate die which they buy from the same suppliers as everyone else.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Mac_Mini...

That whole square is the M1 package, Apple's custom die is under the heatspreader on the left, and the two blocks on the right are LPDDR packages stacked on top of the main package.

https://wccftech.com/apple-m2-ultra-soc-delidded-package-siz...

Scaled up, the M2 Ultra is the same deal just with two compute dies and 8 separate memory packages.
by Eric_WVGG | 2025-12-04 19:51:44+00:00
Not me. It’s wildly unusual for Apple to raise their prices on basically anything… in fact I'm not sure if its ever happened. *

It’s been pointed out by others that price is part of Apple's marketing strategy. You can see that in the trash can Mac Pro, which logically should have gotten cheaper over the ridiculous six years it was on sale with near-unchanged specs. But the marketing message was, "we're selling a $3000 computer."

Those fat margins leave them with a nice buffer. Competing products will get more expensive; Apple's will sit still and look even better by comparison.

We are fortunate that Apple picked last year to make 16gb the new floor, though! And I don't think we're going to see base SSDs get any more generous for a very, very long time.

* okay I do remember that Macbook Airs could be had for $999 for a few years, that disappeared for a while, then came back
by RomanPushkin | 2025-12-04 19:51:52+00:00
> In the West there is nothing close to that.

Well, actually, the whole cancel culture dynamic is a softer alternative to what you just described. And it doesn’t even require you to be the actor — it can be your spouse, your child, whoever. One tweet and you can lose your job, your house, your marriage, especially in an economy like this it hits hard. It really is the same idea: "your whole life, and often your family’s life, can be destroyed in an instant." You won’t go to jail, but your life can still become miserable.

Of course, the big difference is jail time — and that matters. I'm familiar with cases where a 30-year-old woman was sentenced to more than 10 years just for donating $20 to Ukrainian forces (she was traveling to her mom's funeral and got caught).

And at the end of the day, all of this is politics. If you're smart enough and in Russia or China, you can learn to navigate it. But there's never a guarantee. You can still end up as "лёд под ногами майора" ("ice under the major's feet"), as the famous Russian punk rock singer put it.
by pixl97 | 2025-12-04 19:52:20+00:00
This is somewhat correct, and somewhat not correct.

The 'system' needs the following.

People that are unaware of the system, that do the work, think it's a mediocrity, and don't play the game.

Less people that play the game and reap all the rewards for doing the work without actually doing the work.

The problem is once too many people play the game instead of doing the work the entire system falls apart.
by kkylin | 2025-12-04 19:52:32+00:00
That's exactly right. A couple more things:

- Differenting a function composed of simpler pieces always "converges" (the process terminates). One just applies the chain rule. Among other things, this is why automatic differentiation is a thing.

- If you have an analytic function (a function expressible locally as a power series), a surprisingly useful trick is to turn differentiation into integration via the Cauchy integral formula. Provided a good contour can be found, this gives a nice way to evaluate derivatives numerically.
by ok_dad | 2025-12-04 19:52:33+00:00
It's a way to separate us so that we can fight about it and not focus on the important aspect which is to provide everyone the help they need and deserve to make a successful life for themselves. Some may need more help than others, and so the powers that be who want to keep all that profit for themselves target those who need more help with dumb articles like this one which spread FUD.
by jjk166 | 2025-12-04 19:52:39+00:00
Comparing leadership to parenting right out the gate tells me all I need to know about this person's management ability.

Your direct reports are not children. You are not raising them out of an altruistic drive to guide the next generation. You are a part of a team of grown adults. You are not above the team, you have a roll on the team. It is an important roll: as a leader you provide high level direction so people are working towards the appropriate goal and confident it is achievable. Likely you are also acting as a manager, coordinating resources and resolving internal and external stakeholder conflicts. This makes the team more efficient, it's important.

But the people you are leading are the ones actually doing the work. They are likely more skilled at their particular role than you, and knowledgeable about much more. You are not leading them because you are better, you are leading them because that's how you can best contribute to the team.

Leadership has absolutely nothing to do with coaching, connecting, teaching, explaining, linking, growth inducing, or training their subordinates. Zero. Zip. Nada. It is the role of more senior practitioners to mentor their more junior colleagues. Leaders often are drawn from more senior ranks, so it's not uncommon for a person in a leadership role to also be in a mentoring role, but they are two separate and unrelated positions. If anything, the most important skill of a good leader is effectively soliciting the right information and wisdom from the right team members so they can most effectively leverage their team's expertise.

You shouldn't be teaching everyone how to communicate with the customer well, you should be identifying the person who is already great at such communication and making sure the rest of the team is giving them what they need to communicate effectively. The person who is great at such communication should be the one teaching that communication to their peers, and not through coaching but by showing everyone how it's done.

A leadership style of getting your direct reports to do your job for you is transparent in the sense that your subordinates will see right through you.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-12-04 19:52:43+00:00
These are random little examples that might work in theory. Sure, a car can idle for an hour without coolant probably in the winter, possibly.

I can't be driven on the street in any meaningful way anywhere but a Minnesota winter.

If you can't drive to work 20 miles away in 75 degree weather without coolant, than no a car can't run without coolant.

And no it can't run without oil in any meaningful way on the street for more than maybe 15 minutes.. so again, no Honda Toyotas are no built so well that they run without oil.
by teknopaul | 2025-12-04 19:52:51+00:00
I don't understand how yous can be ignorant of this. In the USofA you get advertised at continuously by drug companies.

Do you really think they spend that money advertising, and that you can then not buy the products?!?

Sure, you need a corrupt doctor. But the amount of advertising tells you exactly the amount of corrupt doctors that can act as drug dealers for you.

If someone is advertising something at you, it's because you can get it and you are potential market.

Not rocket science.

Somehow the whole country has collective blindness to this fact that is scarily obvious to anyone from outside the USofA that drops by.

Drugs adverts for prescription drugs should be illegal: because there is no legal justification for them.
Ask HN: Why are streaming apps so bad (insiders only)?
by tonymet | 2025-12-04 19:53:12+00:00
A sincere question to the many actual & former employees on this forum. And before you get suspicious, yes I understand TVs are underpowered. There are still great streaming apps which perform adequately.

Horrendous quality issues I've seen:

* Deliberately not reusing rendered Activities (e.g. hitting the back button re-draws and re-requests content with painful latency).

* Not cleaning up Ads resources when the ad terminates, so playback drops frames and audio

* Not minding viewed ads, so viewers are punished with duplicate ads plays if they close or skip by accident (Netflix is mindful of this)

* exhausting massive memory -- clear memory leaks and waste

* humiliating UIs for search , playback , scrubbing , etc

* audio/video streams out of sync (e.g. Hulu trailers)

Sure teams are time and budget constrained I get that. But I'm curious about actual stories of corner cutting leading to such painful UIs. It's especially bizarre given that people pay a monthly subscription, so c-sat is rather important.

Known violators are : Kanopy (which bills Public Libraries a hefty subscription), Peacock , HboMax and nearly every other streaming app.

Netflix and Amazon prime are better about performance.
by Bender | 2025-12-04 19:53:12+00:00
I stand by my repeated statements of how this could have been solved simply using an RTA header [1] on the server side and require the most common user agents to look for that header putting the onus on parents where it currently legally resides. It's not perfect, nothing is nor ever will be but using the header solution is entirely private, does not store or leak data and puts the decision into the device owners rather than creating perverse incentives to track everyone. It may actually protect most small children whereas today teens quickly find a work-around and then teach smaller children how to work around these centralized gate-keepers. The current solutions are just about tracking people by real identity and incentivizing teens to commit identity crimes.

[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-12-04 19:53:41+00:00
K8S doesn't scale nearly as well due to etcd and latency sensitivity. Multi-site K8S is messy. The whole K8S model is overly-complex for what almost any org actually needs. Proxmox, Incus, and Nomad are much better designed for ease of use and large scale.

That said, I still run K8S in my homelab. It's an (unfortunately) important skill to maintain, and operators for Ceph and databases are worth the up-front trouble for ease of management and consumption.
by stephantul | 2025-12-04 19:53:49+00:00
I don’t really believe this is a paradigm shift with regards to train/test splits.

Before LLMs you would do a lot of these things, it’s just become a lot easier to get started and not train. What the author describes is very similar to the standard ml product loop in companies, including it being very difficult to “beat” the incumbent model because it has been overfit on the test set that is used compare the incumbent to your own model.
by weehobbes | 2025-12-04 19:54:47+00:00
That's a much bigger meta question, like what's even the point of putting timing constraints on any test?

Logistically, my kid has to go a testing center at the school during his free period and/or lunch periods for his extra time. I can imagine that if everyone got extra time, it would be a logistical nightmare.

But I think the reality is that our educational system had just decided that faster is better and that speed is a legitimate way to grade and rank students. Which is stupid.
by aeturnum | 2025-12-04 19:54:48+00:00
It is interesting to consider that disability may enable much higher academic performance as long as people get the proper accommodations. After all, wouldn't it be interesting if people we think of as disabled can - under the correct conditions - be more productive than 'able' people. An individuals' capability is generally pretty circumstantial and I think we should be open to asking questions about how optimal our current social structure is for productivity and capacity going forward. We may need to imagine new ways of living and structuring work and society to reach even higher levels of productivity.
by instig007 | 2025-12-04 19:55:03+00:00
> but the reason Unison is a new language is exactly to avoid the limitations of such frameworks

by introducing another set of limitations that Unison docs don't state upfront, because it will affect their progression as the business.

> namely that they _can't_ send arbitrary code and data around like Unison can.

> You should totally write up a tutorial demoing the development of the same application using each. Folks would love that.

You should add "out of the box", and that "like Unison can" isn't the only way to implement a distributed runtime. This leads to another logical question: why should I "totally write up" the Unison way of things? At this point I'm not even sure that 99.999% of workloads need distributed runtimes of any kind, let alone the Unison one.
by mberning | 2025-12-04 19:55:37+00:00
This is super common in affluent school districts. Bulldozer parents with lots of time and resources eventually get their kid some diagnosis that confers benefits in their schooling. Be it additional time on assignments, one on one tutoring, or whatever. They carry these diagnoses, habits, and expectations to college.

To be clear I am not making light of or dismissing legitimate issues. Simply pointing out that there are some that take advantage of the systems that exist.

You actually are starting to see this in the corporate world. People with a laundry list of diagnoses and other statuses that make them very tricky to let go for performance reasons.
by Animats | 2025-12-04 19:56:07+00:00
Is that something a Stanford student would want on their permanent record? Employers or the government might be able to obtain that information. You could be flagged for life as a reject.

Under the Trump administration, accommodations for mentally disabled people are no longer enforced. Most of the enforcers were laid off. The new policy is “encouraging civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.” [1]

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/endi...
by codeddesign | 2025-12-04 19:56:24+00:00
If companies were looking for talent, 80% of H1B’s wouldn’t be from India, but from a much more diverse set of countries. The fact is that India culture is much more so subservient, willing to work more for less pay, won’t unionize, don’t follow major US/Euro holidays, don’t care about work/life balance..etc. Like it or not, it’s nothing more than exploitation as cattle to increase bottom line and sold as increased output.
by rdtsc | 2025-12-04 19:56:27+00:00
I was just using it as an example of doing the absolute minimum. They could write a dumb Javascript debugger or something with minimal effort.

But yeah, IANAL either and just guessing, I just know Oracle is shady and if you challenge them legally they'll throw their weight around. And not sure if responding to a challenge with a new "product" is enough to reset the clock on it. Hopefully a the judge will see through their tricks.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-04 19:56:33+00:00
> you need to have support needs to be diagnosed with autism. You don't get a diagnosis for being quirky and a little weird.

The problem is the people who actually have support needs are often not in a stable job with great insurance, and then they don't have access to the "get an official diagnosis" machinery. At which point you have to choose between respecting a self-diagnosis even if they're often wrong, or not respecting it even if they're often right.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-12-04 19:56:40+00:00
> And those companies all realized they can make billions more dollars making RAM just for AI datacenter products, and neglect the rest of the market.

I wouldn't ascribe that much intent. More simply, datacenter builders have bought up the entire supply (and likely future production for some time), hence the supply shortfall.

This is a very simple supply-and-demand situation, nothing nefarious about it.