MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by analogpixel | 2025-12-29 01:16:01+00:00
you are correct, "$OS is wonderful because I can run $myapp" ; that's why I choose an OS, because it can run $myapp. Why would I want to run an os that doesn't run $myapp?

back in the day, I used Linux for everything, I spent hours just screwing around with Linux, and then for some reason I switched to MacOS and almost over night I went from just screwing around with settings all the time to actually doing something with the computer.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-12-29 01:16:09+00:00
> a pivotal time in IBM's history.

Gerstner changed the culture, but there was perhaps no greater and more startling visible change than:

"IBM withdrew from the retail desktop PC market entirely, which had become unprofitable due to price pressures in the early 2000s. Three years after Gerstner's 2002 retirement, IBM sold the PC division to Lenovo." [1]

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Gerstner
by jaredcwhite | 2025-12-29 01:16:39+00:00
This essay falls under a growing category I call "start off sounding like you agree with critics of GenAI, then subtly attempt to undercut all of the power of their arguments."

The best way to engage with these sorts of articles is to completely ignore all stated advice and move on. There is no "separation of moving things on the job vs. moving things at the gym" when it comes to creative craft, the entire analogy is completely absurd.
by solarkraft | 2025-12-29 01:16:42+00:00
I think it’s so smart of them to do this to improve UX, which I really care about. You can just tell they had a creative workshop around optimizing camera startup time (which is super important to optimize and one of the many reasons I own an iPhone!).

I’m happy to see them being so open about it in the privacy report. It shows that it’s a real priority for them: It would’ve been easier to hide this as an implementation detail and not have people wonder about it. Another big reason to own an iPhone.

However, it is yet another example of them making full use of owning the platform in ways I assume other players can’t. The Apple camera app will always start faster than others, which is a loss for customization and competition.
by cyrill_makarov | 2025-12-29 01:17:52+00:00
Finnish Train Introduced A Bug In My App

And I was only able to solve it because of a real engineering degree

Ariana's architecture is not the most trivial one. Our backend service spawns VPS' on Hetzner Cloud (what we call Agent Machines), establishes temporary SSH connection with these machines to make the necessary installations and configuration on each machine. After that, all communication with the same machine happens trough HTTP: healthchecks, CRUDs, everything.

I was on a train going from Tampere to Rovaniemi (Arctic Circle) in Finland. Instead of making a wishlist for Santa, I was working on Ariana in the train and therefore, I was running our backend *locally*. I needed my backend to:

1. Spawn Machine (was working fine)
2. SSH to the machine, install stuff, start a server, self-healthcheck (was also working fine)
3. poll the machine's status with HTTP (started to fail suddenly after some minutes of journey)

I SSH'd manually into the servers. The services were running. Health checks passing. Logs showing everything was fine on their end. The machines were alive and well, happily waiting for requests that, from their perspective, never arrived.

I armed myself with Claude Code and for 4 hours we were trying to fix that. We redesigned the firewall configuration of the server altogether, changed opened ports, added 15 new env variables. Changed a lot of code of course, because every small detail counts. We tried everything. At some point, I've got a message I never had from Claude:

"This is strange" he says...

Everything seemed to be properly configured.

I gave up on using Claude and took control over the code by myself, and started brainstorming. After some time, I figured out that I was using train's free wifi network. And you know what? This network just blocked all outbound HTTP to my machines at Hetzner. Why? Why SSH was still working fine? No idea why. HTTP and HTTPS connections to other services are working fine, this was something specific. Exactly the same configuration on Scaleway worked fine.

I switched to my mobile network sharing, and the bug just disappeared

Claude never once suggested "try a different network connection."
And I don't say this to criticize the tool—I use it constantly, and it's genuinely useful. But this moment crystallized something important for me about the current state of AI in software engineering. It never steps outside the frame.

The Lessons:

1. Next time I'm on a Finnish train, I'm bringing a book. Maybe something recommended by one of our investors.
2. CS degree + Critical thinking > AI agent. And moments like this remind me of the value of human in software engineering.

Software engineering isn't just about solving problems. It's about _framing_ problems. And knowing which questions to ask, knowing when to zoom out, knowing when to try the stupidly simple thing that's still a deeply human skill.
by shagie | 2025-12-29 01:18:07+00:00
> A fun tangent on the "green cast" mentioned in the post: the reason the Bayer pattern is RGGB (50% green) isn't just about color balance, but spatial resolution. The human eye is most sensitive to green light, so that channel effectively carries the majority of the luminance (brightness/detail) data.

From the classic file format "ppm" (portable pixel map) the ppm to pgm (portable grayscale map)

https://linux.die.net/man/1/ppmtopgm

The quantization formula ppmtopgm uses is g = .299 r + .587 g + .114 b.

You'll note the relatively high value of green there, making up nearly 60% of the luminosity of the resulting grayscale image.

I also love the quote in there...

Quote

Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colors from our sight
Red is gray, and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is a quantization error.

(context for the original - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNC54BKv3mc )
by zmgsabst | 2025-12-29 01:18:16+00:00
I don’t think human slop is more useful than LLM slop.

A human writing twelve polemic questions, many of which only make sense within their ideological worldview or contain factual errors, because they wanted to vent their anger on the internet has been considered substandard slop since before LLMs were a thing.

Perhaps instead of frothing out rage slop, your views would be more persuasive if you showed the superiority of human authors to LLMs?

…because posts like this do the opposite, making it seem like bloggers are upset LLMs are honing in on their slop pitching grift.

Edit:

For fun, I had ChatGPT rewrite his post and elaborate on the topic. I think it did a better job explaining the concerns than most LLM critics.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6951dec4-2ab0-8000-a42f-df5f282d7a...
by 999900000999 | 2025-12-29 01:18:31+00:00
One word.

Headers.

That's just the start. The C++ build system and package managers are the stuff if nightmares. Modern languages are significantly easier to use.

Don't get me wrong, if you offer a job with a 200k base salary and give me 6 months to learn C++ I'll do it. But I won't enjoy it, and I definitely won't do it as a hobby.
by GoatInGrey | 2025-12-29 01:18:59+00:00
Unless you can get the blastocyst and fetus to take supplements, any treatment would be attempting to undo the effects that have already taken place.

For now, your best options are ESDM, occupational therapy, modified CBT, ABA, or neurofeedback, depending on your circumstances and presentation. Except for neurofeedback, these are behavioral approaches, so the architectural and neural activity variations aren't directly addressed.
by jaredcwhite | 2025-12-29 01:19:43+00:00
In fact it's an excellent shorthand. I make it a point to look up what all the AI boosters endlessly posting puff pieces on LinkedIn actually do for a living, and almost without exception it's someone who is directly attempting to profit off of exponential slop machine growth. Or as I like to say:

"The future of money is gold obtained from prospecting." –VP of Shovels, ShovelsCorp.
by make3 | 2025-12-29 01:19:51+00:00
it's not a crime but applying post processing in an overly generous way that goes a lot further than replicating what a human sees does take away from what makes pictures interesting imho vs other mediums, that it's a genuine representation of something that actually happened.

if you take that away, a picture is not very interesting, it's hyperrealistic so not super creative a lot of the time (compared to eg paintings), & it doesn't even require the mastery of other mediums to get hyperrealistism
by krapp | 2025-12-29 01:20:02+00:00
>You can't think of a single difference in the nature of the job of artist/musician vs. lawyer vs. business executive?

I can think of plenty, but none that matter.

As the AI stans say, there is nothing special about being human. What is a "CEO?" Just a closed system of inputs and outputs, stimulus and response, encased in wetware. A physical system that like all physical systems can be automated and will be automated in time.
by luaKmua | 2025-12-29 01:20:59+00:00
In general when game development comes up here I tend not to engage as professional gamedev is so different than what other people tend to deal with that it's hard to even get on the same page, but seeing as how this one is very directly dealing with my expertise I'll chime in.

There are few things off with the this post that essentially sound as someone more green when it comes to Unity development (no problem, we all start somewhere).

1. The stated approach of separating the simulation and presentation layers isn't all that uncommon, in fact it was the primary way of achieving performance in the past (though, you usually used C++, not C#).

2. Most games don't ship on the mono backend, but instead on il2cpp (it's hard to gauge how feasible that'd be from this post as it lacks details).

3. In modern Unity, if you want to achieve performance, you'd be better off taking the approach of utilizing the burst compiler and HPC#, especially with what appears to be happening in the in sample here as the job system will help tremendously.

4. Profiling the editor is always a fools errand, it's so much slower than even a debug release build for obvious reasons.

Long story short, Unity devs are excited for the mentioned update, but it's for accessing modern language features, not particularly for any performance gains. Also, I've seen a lot of mention around GC through this comment section, and professional Unity projects tend to go out of their way to minimize these at runtime, or even sidestep entirely with unmanaged memory and DOTS.
by adolph | 2025-12-29 01:21:41+00:00
> This problem is hard because of the huge gap between the health/biology domain and the tech domain. Is there a reason you feel like Palantir is better equipped to close this gap?

I'm not certain that it is better equipped than any hypothetical or specifically focused system. Given any part of it, I see a lot of products that can be composed into a similar offering. That misses the point though because the problems are socio-political in nature, not technological. It is expensive, which means that if an organization adopts it, everyone from the top down better get into alignment or you will waste a lot of cash. Internal alignment like that can be achieved without spending a lot of money probably maybe, but not likely.

It is also externally aligned a little better than IBM/Oracle (saw Watson, Deloitte "data democracy" etc) as a SaaS with training and consulting.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-29 01:21:49+00:00
> Honestly, I think local LLMs are the future and we are just going to be doing hosted

Same here, otherwise I wouldn't be investing in local hardware :) But I'd be lying if I said I think it's ready for that today. I don't think the hardware as much to catch up with, it's the software that has a bunch of low hanging fruits available for performance and resource usage, since every release seems to favor "time to paper" above all else.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-29 01:22:05+00:00
> I'd guess the reason for the 800 ft is because the reservoir it'll draw from is near sea level.

I believe Tunnel #3 connects to the Catskill Aqueduct[1], which draws from the Schoharie and Ashokan reservoirs. Both are at least a few hundred feet above sea level (the Ashokan is about 600 feet above, since it was formed by flooding a valley in the Catskills).

But I have no idea why they dug it so deep, given that! Maybe to give themselves an (extremely) ample buffer for any future infrastructure in Manhattan.
by kcb | 2025-12-29 01:23:17+00:00
https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/436695...

> The new Trump-class battleships will replace the Navy's previous plans to develop a new class of destroyer, the DDG(X). However, the sea service intends to incorporate the capabilities it had planned to employ on that platform into the new Trump-class ships.
by lijok | 2025-12-29 01:23:29+00:00
Attributing something to luck sounds like a lazy cop out, sorry.
We just had an article on the front page yesterday about “increasing your luck”.

If you need to be lucky in meeting the right people, you can increase your chances by spending your evenings in the your nearest financial district watering hole. We’ve easily established luck can be controlled for, which puts us back into skill territory.

What specifically must one luck out on? Have you tried?
by whstl | 2025-12-29 01:24:01+00:00
> Although we don't know what Tom was really like with customers

The movie makes it quite clear, actually.

The Bobs were actually way better than the stereotypical layoff consultants. They even caught on the crazy management chain and the busywork generated by TPS reports. Sure they wanted to layoff good engineers, but doesn't invalidate the actual good findings.
by lapcat | 2025-12-29 01:24:37+00:00
It's definitely privileged to take a trip to the Galapagos, but I don't think it's privileged to ignore the news. A lot of poor people ignore the news. They may be too busy, or they may feel powerless to change anything. I think the real question is what exactly this entirely content-free statement means: "I’ll be focusing more on stories that actually matter instead of chasing the flash-in-the-pan ephemera that nobody remembers the next week."
by RodgerTheGreat | 2025-12-29 01:25:06+00:00
Why not both? When you make tools that putrefy everything they touch, on the back of gigantic negative externalities, you share the responsibility for making the garbage with the people who choose to buy it. OpenAI et al. explicitly thrive on outpacing regulation and using their lobbying power to ensure that any possible regulations are built in their favor.
by arachnid92 | 2025-12-29 01:25:28+00:00
I couldn’t get it to trigger until I opened the camera app and made sure to switch to the front facing camera before exiting. After doing that I was able to consistently trigger the indicator when swiping across and long-pressing the icon.

EDIT: it also only seems to happen if the camera icon is on one of your Home Screen pages. I haven’t been able to reproduce the behavior when swiping across the icon while in the App Library. Wonder why they decided to do it that way? Do most people keep a camera icon on their Home Screen? That would be baffling to me. Why clutter your Home Screen when you can so easily access the camera from the lock screen or by using the physical camera button on newer iPhones?
by dvt | 2025-12-29 01:25:54+00:00
This is all just cynical bandwagoning. Google/Facebook/Etc. have done provable irreparable damage to the fabric of society via ads/data farming/promulgating fake news, but now that it's in vogue to hate on AI as an "enlightened" tech genius, we're all suddenly worried about.. what? Water? Electricity? Give me a break.

The about-face is embarrassing, especially in the case of Rob Pike (who I'm sure has made 8+ figures at Google). But even Hickey worked for a crypto-friendly fintech firm until a few years ago. It's easy to take a stand when you have no skin in the game.
by doldge | 2025-12-29 01:25:58+00:00
Just want to call out that these are both not great examples?

High performance sports teams have a captain that is often elected in some form from the team.

Likewise the crew of a pirate ship used to elect their captain.

Both examples serve contrary to your point, and there's no reason you couldn't have something similar in business: a cooperative that elects a CEO, rather than it being done by a board of other CEO's.
by milleramp | 2025-12-29 01:26:06+00:00
Several reasons,
-Silicon efficiency (QE) peaks in the green
-Green spectral response curve is close to the luminance curve humans see, like you said.
-Twice the pixels to increase the effective resolution in the green/luminance channel, color channels in YUV contribute almost no details.

Why is YUV or other luminance-chrominance color spaces important for a RGB input? Because many processing steps and encoders, work in YUV colorspaces. This wasn't really covered in the article.
by jama211 | 2025-12-29 01:26:15+00:00
I just did my yearly attempt at this again, and unfortunately I ran into multiple issues - aside from issues I had during dual boot setup which is still WAY too user unfriendly, the driver recommended for my video card breaks the standard resolution on my main monitor, downgrading the version fixed it but it took me an hour of hacking with console commands to work this out, and reading forum posts where I watched people be insulted by the community just because they ran into an issue. Sleep is still half broken, the login appears on the wrong monitor and only console commands I had to modify to copy some obscure config file would fix it. And cyberpunk crashes for me randomly every 10-30 minutes and runs 30% slower. And I can’t install it on my macbook… but I don’t blame linux for that last one.

Linux isn’t ready in 2025. I wish it was, I try it every year, but it just isn’t. And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial.

SteamOS seems promising though and we may have a saviour there.
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-29 01:26:33+00:00
> Attributing something to luck sounds like a lazy cop out, sorry.

Everyone one of us here has an unbroken line of lucky (lucky enough!) ancestors stretching back a billion years or so. Pretending it's not a thing is silly.

When you're born matters. Where you're born matters. Who you encounter matters. etc. etc. etc.

> What specifically must one luck out on? Have you tried?

I think perhaps we have different definitions of luck.
by senshan | 2025-12-29 01:26:38+00:00
I do not understand the dilemma.

The sole reason I am hired for my position as an engineer is that I am expected to make the life of my hiring manager easier. Not to save the world, not to do "the right thing" (whatever this means), but help my manager. During the interview, I had a chance to a get a rough idea what I am going to be responsible for.

If the organization or the mission changes to the extent that it is no longer consistent with my values, I start pinging my former colleagues working elsewhere.

So where is the intrigue?
by cap11235 | 2025-12-29 01:27:00+00:00
I don't know about New York in particular, but Chicago water engineering seems a related topic.

Here you do deep tunnels to avoid the surface, in ways another poster said; everything is easier when nothing is in the way.

For the mathematical difference, 400 feet below sea level and 800 feet below are almost exactly the same: difficulties are water getting in to your pit, but the machines that work on rock, work on rock at the same speed regardless of depth, so the difference between 400 feet and 800 feet is best described as 400 feet difference. A big issue here is that they do not drill; they hammer. Pounding base pylons into bedrock causes dramatic rhythms in the surrounding 500m, but that's to deal with the bedrock, not depth.
by reactordev | 2025-12-29 01:27:18+00:00
This is gold people.

My username on here is after my (now older) game engine Reactor 3D.

I taught myself this stuff back when Quake 3 took over my high school. Doom got me into computers but Quake 3 got me into 3D. I didn’t quite understand the math in the books I bought but copied the code anyway.

Fast forward into my career and it’s been a pleasant blend of web and graphics. Now that WebGL/WebGPU is widely available. I taught PhD’s how to vertex pack and align and how to send structs to the GPU at my day job. I regret not continuing my studies and getting a PhD but I ended up writing Reactor 3D part time for XNA on Xbox 360 and then rewriting it half a decade later to be pure OpenGL. I still struggle with the advanced concepts but luckily there are others out there.

Fun fact, I worked with the guy who wrote XNA Silverlight, which would eventually be used as the basis for MonoGame, so I’m like MonoGame’s great grand uncle half removed or something. However,

Now that we have different ways of doing things, it demands a different kind of engine. So the Vulkan/Dx12/Metal way is the new jam.
by vips7L | 2025-12-29 01:27:43+00:00
I'm not sure Kotlin is a hack, but it's growth is directly related to Java not being able to deliver on simple features that would help the day to day lives of developers. So I also can't blame anyone for moving on from the language. I get frustrated with it all the time, especially when Kotlin shows that some feature could work perfectly fine.

Here are some examples that have hit the graveyard: It's been 2 years since exception handling in switch was proposed [0], 3 years since null-restricted types were proposed [1], 4 years since string templates [2], 8 years since concise method bodies [3], and 11 years for JSON parsing [4].

[0] https://inside.java/2023/12/15/switch-case-effect/

[1] https://openjdk.org/jeps/8303099

[2] https://openjdk.org/jeps/430

[3] https://openjdk.org/jeps/8209434

[4] https://openjdk.org/jeps/198
by woodruffw | 2025-12-29 01:28:03+00:00
This piqued my interest, so I checked: Tunnel #3 passes under the Harlem River and then the East River, but the Harlem River is less than 30 feet deep for the most part and the East River is around 40 feet deep at the most.

(The Army Corps of Engineers has great detailed depth surveys for most of NY's waterways[1].)

Edit: There's also a higher-resolution render of the tunnel layout here[2].

[1]: https://www.nan.usace.army.mil/Missions/Navigation/Controlli...

[2]: https://extapps.dec.ny.gov/docs/water_pdf/nycsystem.pdf
by conartist6 | 2025-12-29 01:28:34+00:00
Haha I knew you'd say that. I'm not pretending there aren't advantages to strict systems of declared types. There are many! But my point is simple to the point of stupidity: there's just more stuff on screen when you have to write `User` twice. In this simple example it looks trivially simple to write the word "user" twice, but in a reasonably-complex real example the difference will be far more noticeable.
by duxup | 2025-12-29 01:29:05+00:00
I worked at a place where I did tech support for some networking equipment. A few big customers insisted all their support run through the US & US citizens (this was the case anyway, but it was part of their support contracts).

The big customers were mostly banks and financial institutions. I always assumed the idea was that everyone was in the same legal jurisdiction and while I'm sure corruption crosses financial boundaries ... they also knew their support people were well paid full time employees that the equipment maker had a direct relationship with.