MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by solatic | 2025-12-05 12:17:24+00:00
Spreadsheets are to Finance folk what WordPress is to Marketing folk and what tools like v0 and other LLM-powered web app builders are to Product folk. The promise of having some fancy schmancy technological tool let you do your job by yourself and without needing to collaborate with other people is basically the strongest value proposition that you can make to working professionals.

The fact that all these tools eventually fall apart at scale is basically irrelevant. You can only take away control from their cold, dead hands, and they will never learn the programming skills to build something more scalable themselves. All solutions almost invariably trend towards shifting scaling problems away from the desired frontend that keeps control (or at least the illusion of control) in the hands of business stakeholders (one of the reasons why companies love building all manner of integrations on top of Jira).

And let's be clear, it's not like the alternatives here (i.e. databases) are so easy. Finance folk are used to creating new spreadsheets on their local computer for free and at will; most databases require setting up a server, DNS, certificates, firewalls, most of which have real costs. SQLite naively sounds like a reasonable approach, but by default a table is limited to 2,000 columns while an Excel spreadsheet is by default limited to about 16,000 columns, and yes, stuff like this really matters when you're talking about trying to uproot a favored tool. At the end of the day, most of Excel's limitations are due to attempting to cram a spreadsheet into a single file (same as SQLite); if Microsoft were smart, they'd offer a cloud-only "spreadsheet" (really a database over a full filesystem, or maybe over object storage) without the limitations of ordinary Excel spreadsheets, where Excel-the-desktop-app only downloads to the local client the relevant cells that are actually in view, while adding more options to mirror/load data from external sources into other sheets attached to the same cloud-only "spreadsheet".
by throwaway_x235 | 2025-12-05 12:17:28+00:00
> How are these clowns deploying stuff on a Friday, it is unbelievable to me

I have stopped fighting this battle at work (not Cloudflare). Despite Friday being one of the most important days of the week for our customers, people still deploy the latest commit 10 minutes before they leave in the afternoon. Going on a weekend trip home to your family? No problem, just deploy and be offline for hours while you are traveling...

The response was that my way of thinking is "old school". Modern development is "fail fast" and that CI/CD with good tests and rollback fixes everything. Being afraid of deploys is "so last decade"... The problem is that our tests don't cover everything, it may not fail fast, and not all deploys can be rolled back quickly and the person who knows what their huge commit that touches multiple files actually does is unavailable!

We have had multiple issues with late afternoon deploys, but somehow we keep doing this. Funnily enough, I have noticed a pattern. Most experienced devs stops doing this after causing a couple of major downtimes, due to the massive backlash from customers while they are scrambling to fix the bug. So gradually they learn to deploy at less busy times and monitor the logs to be able to catch potential bugs early.

The problem is that not enough has learned this lesson because they have been lucky that their bugs have not been critical, or because they are too invested in their point of view to change. It seems that some individuals learn the hard way, but the organization has not learned or is reluctant to push for a change due to office politics. I decided to keep my head low and let things play out, as I simply no longer care as long as the management don't care either.
by morgengold | 2025-12-05 12:18:35+00:00
Am I right that you let LLMs decide for themselves what to read into their input data (like market data, news APIs, company financials)? While this is worth testing, I think it would be more interesting to give them patterns to look for. I played around with using them for technical analysis and let them make the associations with past stock performances. They can even differentiate on what worked in the last 5 years, what in the last year, in the last 3 month etc. This way they can pick up (hopefully) changes in market behavior. Generally the main strength of this approach is to use their pattern recognition capability and also take out the human factor (emotions) for trading decitions.
by OvbiousError | 2025-12-05 12:18:50+00:00
It's happening on a different level as well. More and more developers are moving from the US to popular startup hubs in Europe, e.g. Amsterdam, Copenhagen. They were often higher up in the FAANG chain, so they are immediately quite high up where the arrive, and they are bringing the American culture with them. E.g. what do you mean you're taking a month of holiday, or what do you mean, you're staying at home with your wife to take care of your baby. And yes, you have a right to that, but it's different to take that time when you feel it's accepted or frowned upon.
by torginus | 2025-12-05 12:19:56+00:00
It is an unstoppable force in the sense that it never goes away - they've been trying to pass Chat Control (or equivalent stuff) since forever - they rejected Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 was back bills later and is looking to pass.

They have infinite patience and tenacity, and vary their approaches, and strongarm/pay off politicians that effectively the most organized, engaged and effective popular activism can only delay their ability to pass legislation - and by the looks of it, that doesn't work too well, either.
by lima | 2025-12-05 12:20:22+00:00
They don't appear to have a rollout procedure for some of their globally replicated application state. They had a number of major outages over the past years which all had the same root cause of "a global config change exposed a bug in our code and everything blew up".

I guess it's an organizational consequence of mitigating attacks in real time, where rollout delays can be risky as well. But if you're going to do that, it would appear that the code has to be written much more defensively than what they're doing it right now.
by eesmith | 2025-12-05 12:20:37+00:00
> because how could a fact checker have an agenda? It's not possible, they're just checking facts!

Of course a fact checker has an agenda. How else do they decide which fact checking to prioritize? It's not like a single person or organization has the ability to fact check everything about every topic.

A fact checking group with an emphasis on correcting mistakes about Catholic teachings is very unlikely to provide fact checking about water rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo nor fact checking statements about British tank production during the Second World War.

> Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?

I can't make sense of that argument. Which organization could that even be?

> To me, it was just journalism in disguise

It can also be journalism. Newspapers, magazines, and even podcasts can have staff fact checkers. The origin story for The New Yorker's famous fact checkers was to avoid libel after printing a false story about Edna St. Vincent Millay.

That is, the clear agenda of the New Yorker's fact checkers is to minimize lawsuits and enhance the reputation of the magazine among its current and future subscribers.

I therefore see no problem in fact checkers having an agenda as I can't make sense of how it would be otherwise.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-05 12:20:45+00:00
If you are a monopoly, there is no incentive to do anything well. You've saturated the market, the incentive is to cut costs.

In fact, there are incentives for public failures: they'll help the politicians that you bought sell the legislation that you wrote explaining how national security requires that the taxpayer write a check to your stockholders/owners in return for nothing.
by stingraycharles | 2025-12-05 12:20:55+00:00
Wasn’t there something going on with an internal battle between two content leads, one focused on “lots of content” and the other on higher quality, more risky bets (that lead to Squid Games, Ozark, Stranger Things, etc), and the one doing the higher quality content ended up losing.

I am convinced they’re hyper focused on the wrong metrics, and don’t take long term retention into consideration.
by mapt | 2025-12-05 12:20:58+00:00
Conversely, you get the cancer patients like my mother, who waited until her second cycle of chemo to explore cannabis, which is apparently the best antinausea medication we have, with the right strains embarrassing the best that the pharmaceutical industry has to offer. She was told that medical card approval needs to go before a state board and it takes 1-2 years; She's be dead or off chemo by then, so we gave up. It ended up being the latter.

A few years later, we've got a "walk-in clinic" a neighborhood over which advertises how easy/fast it is to get cannabis cards specifically; By this time there is no approval wait.

A few years later, recreational is legal.
by gwd | 2025-12-05 12:21:00+00:00
Not according to this post:

> Go generics combines concepts from "monomorphisation" (stenciling) and "boxing" (dynamic dispatch) and is implemented using GCshape stenciling and dictionaries. This allows Go to have fast compile times and smaller binaries while having generics.

https://deepsource.com/blog/go-1-18-generics-implementation
by slhck | 2025-12-05 12:21:27+00:00
This VMAF comparison is to be taken with a grain of salt. Netflix' primary goal was to reduce the bitrate consumption, as can be seen, while roughly keeping the same nominal quality of the stream. This means that, ignoring all other factors and limitations of H.264 with higher resolutions, VMAF scores for all their streaming sessions should roughly be the same, or in a comparable range, because that's what they're optimizing for. (See the Dynamic Optimizer Framework they have publicly posted a few years ago.)

Still impressive numbers, of course.
by kingstnap | 2025-12-05 12:22:10+00:00
I've had a lot of experience with dealing with exactly this problem in ML.

There is no replacement for visualizing the data and intermediates. You have to see what is going on, it's the only way to catch bugs and issues and make good performance improvements.

Like actually looking at the gradients and weights and activations and predictions and stuff often shows you that something janky is going on, its great for adjusting architectures. Looking into specific high loss test samples and mispredictioms and stuff will show you that there are problems with your data or normalization and whatnot.

The issue is that there are basically an infinite number of intermediates you could potentially look at. So ignoring almost all of them is the only thing that scales and you have to be extremely deliberate.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-12-05 12:22:23+00:00
You wrote:

> On one side, the right preparing by slowly taking over positions, on the other side people ignoring the problems of many.

You bisected the political landscape, but not into left and right. I did this and, as you may agree on, the center is shifting right too. An aspect i wanted to bring up by adressing your "problems of the many" and where/why the political focus has been on in the past.

Maybe you are familiar with the whole lefty concept of "capitalism inevitably turning into fascism". The right and the status quo center have more in common, so you can group them together and i called it "your mistake".
by krapp | 2025-12-05 12:22:23+00:00
>I would love for you to convince THOSE people that they are party to this agreement.

That's a different and much more difficult problem, though.

Why do we keep electing fascists to power with an explicit mandate to undermine our freedoms, out of a categorical rejection of post Enlightenment values and democracy and a desire for ethnic cleansing and race war?

Why are we accelerating the normalization of theocracy and conspiracy theory while rejecting the validity of science, secularism and critical thought?

Why is the only truly inalienable right in the US the right to keep and bear arms, and why is it still so vigorously defended despite failing spectacularly at its one stated purpose?

There will always exist people who want to change that status quo. Unfortunately you can't force fascists to not be fascists, and the best answer I'm aware of is to not allow them to gain a foothold anywhere. But we've regressed culturally so far that fascism, racism, antisemitism and other formerly extremist right-wing ideals are now considered legitimate and credible points of view. We can't even agree on the existence of a consensus reality where facts even exist, much less that the Nazis are actually wrong.

I do think part of the solution is to preserve the right of anonymity on the internet and the right of private platforms to moderate content as they see fit, although that obviously has its own externalities and issues. I don't think that, say, repealing Section 230 and forcing all platforms to allow any legal content or requiring a license and legal ID to post online or any of the other "solutions" to the "problem" of free speech online would help more than they would harm.

Beyond that, I don't know. How do we get people to stop electing fascists and stop treating groypers and incels like intellectual sophonts and cultural leaders? How do we get people to take things seriously again?
by amiga386 | 2025-12-05 12:22:25+00:00
In the chain of events that led to Cloudflare's largest ever outage, code they'd rewritten from C to Rust was significant factor. There are, of course, other factors that meant the Rust-based problem was not mitigated.

They expected a maximum config size but an upstream error meant it was much larger than normal. Their Rust code parsed a fraction of the config, then did ".unwrap()" and panicked, crashing the entire program.

This validated a number of things that programmers say in response to Rust advocates who relentlessly badger people in pursuit of mindshare and adoption:

* memory errors are not the only category of errors, or security flaws. A language claiming magic bullets for one thing might be nonetheless be worse at another thing.

* there is no guarantee that if you write in <latest hyped language> your code will have fewer errors. If anything, you'll add new errors during the rewrite

* Rust has footguns like any other language. If it gains common adoption, there will be doofus programmers using it too, just like the other languages. What will the errors of Rust doofuses look like, compared to C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc. doofuses?

* availability is orthagonal to security. While there is a huge interest in remaining secure, if you design for "and it remains secure because it stops as soon as there's an error", have you considered what negative effects a widespread outage would cause?
by xienze | 2025-12-05 12:22:41+00:00
It’s the cycle of newcomers to <field> looking at the existing solutions and declaring “this shit is too complicated, why did these morons design it this way? Check out my DSL that does everything and is super simple!”

Then time passes, edge cases start cropping up and hacks are bolted on to accommodate them. Eventually everything struggles under the weight of not having loops, conditionals, etc. and those are added.

After some time, the cycle begins anew.
by gosub100 | 2025-12-05 12:22:43+00:00
I see this directly on my team. The h1bs get bullied by their boss (it's a split team, I work with him but don't report to him) and they don't say anything because he could effectively have them deported. At least 2 of them have kids here and perhaps the others do. So not only does it incentivize the bully to do it, but it traps them to just take it for their family. I openly talk shit back to him because he can't deport me.
by greatgib | 2025-12-05 12:22:49+00:00
I might be wrong, but I think that what these articles are showing is just the tip of the Iceberg.

Like that "children protection" associations would vouch for such a ruling or something like that would look like a no-brainer. But the real question is who lead them, who created or fund them, who is driving the coordination in the back.

If we compare with the current "US polluters" case, if you were the target of their lobbying, you would just see a big number of different groups lobbying you (in one case it will be Total, another time "small startups" that appears unconnected together, another time an economic celebrity or rich person, another time that would be the topics at conference you attend, ...). It will look like that it is a global trend of disconnected entities.

But, in the back, there is a single interest group that is pulling strings in the shadow in an unified way. Same as what Russia is often doing at big scale to try to shape opinion in its favor.
by homakov | 2025-12-05 12:23:02+00:00
> Imagine

why imagine? The world already functions exactly like that. Talk on Tg like every chat is summarized every 24hrs and monthly (with cheap LLM and then with strong ones if signals found), and it reports to all kinds of interested intel agencies.

Same for openrouter. everything that leaves your device plaintext = public. Period. No hopes.
by black3r | 2025-12-05 12:23:05+00:00
> HBO Max is coming to EU in Jan and UK sometime next year finally

This is a very misleading sentence. HBO Max has been available in 14/27 EU countries since 2022, and by now it's available in 22/27 EU countries, 4 of the remaining ones are covered by Sky, with which they signed an exclusive distribution agreement valid until 2025 back in 2019 - even before HBO Max was launched in the USA.
by c22 | 2025-12-05 12:23:06+00:00
I think in this case many of these people are "useful idiots" in the sense that they lack a strong technical understanding of how the internet and www are architected. This can cause them to accept erroneous concepts like "tracking the identity of all internet users is the only way to protect the children" while alternatives like the one proposed at the beginning of this thread can be easily glossed over as some techno mumble jumble.
by corimaith | 2025-12-05 12:23:23+00:00
Equality =/= Freedom. It is perfectly possible to have high inequality but individual agency when operating in a positive sum game.

If you want to critique unequal distribution of power, that has always been the case with any society. You cannot coordinate thousands without some form of delegation. But problems borne of the market are always much easier to resolve than problems borne if the political. Therefore it is better to contain an unavoidable problem in a manageable domain that let it establish itself in a more concrete way.

The actual failures of the Western economies lie in naive assumptions about dealing with mercantalist countries and NIMBYism, but given this forum is against the solutions to both it is more politically acceptable to blame everything on "neoliberalism".
by veunes | 2025-12-05 12:24:10+00:00
The 4x growth in prompt length is a fundamental shift. We've quickly moved from "Q&A" mode to "upload full context and analyze" mode.

This completely changes infrastructure requirements: KV-caching becomes a necessity, and prefill time becomes a critical metric, often more important than generation speed. That's exactly why models with cheap long context (Gemini, DeepSeek) are winning the race against "smarter" but expensive models. Inference economics are now dictated by context length
by haritha-j | 2025-12-05 12:24:20+00:00
"most" of us? Really? Once you add up the people in the countries the West invaded / started wars for the sake of oil, countries where the oil industry gets rich while the population suffers in poverty due to oil induced instability like Venezuela, all the countries where climate change induced national disasters have destroyed lives and livelihoods you'd find that its not really 'most' of us. But hey at least you have your strawberries.
by DaveZale | 2025-12-05 12:24:32+00:00
another holy grail is hugelkultur. Bury agricultural waste beneath a foot of soil. You will get an amazing mycelial network that swaps sugars from plant roots to the fungi, with the fungi supplying minerals to the plant. And sure, go ahead, use sensors to make it all cool and measurable. I've tried this technique in my backyard shale soil. It works, including retaining moisture, so much less irrigation is required.
by homakov | 2025-12-05 12:24:49+00:00
The parent comment is exaclty right. "LOL" is best possible response.

>We should demand privacy, not laugh at the notion of privacy.

Recently got m3 ultra 512gb studio. LM Studio runs frontier models routinely. Going local is the ONLY way. That's all you can do. "Demanding privacy" is security theater. Act accordingly.
by strzibny | 2025-12-05 12:25:42+00:00
Yes, the distribution is super hard. I recently changed how I blog and building entire platform around that called LakyAI (https://lakyai.com). The idea is being able to run multiple blogs in parallel with crosslinking, sharing resources, reposting to platforms that give you distribution, repurposing the blogs entirely, and more. I am at the beginning but if someone is interested in some novel ideas just drop me an email at hello@lakyai.com.
by calgoo | 2025-12-05 12:26:00+00:00
To me it died when they changed acceptable series length to 6 episodes on GoT. I really miss the days of 24 episodes, split into 12 episodes runs. I dont care that you spent the income of a small nation on the 6 episodes, I prefer you spread that money on 12 or more episodes so we can get story telling again.

Today's "TV shows" are more like TV movies that where split in into 3 1 hour runs.
by djohnston | 2025-12-05 12:27:30+00:00
All around us a societal contract is disintegrating. It's unsurprising to see the same with faked disabilities to gain an academic edge. It was the case years ago but it seems like there's a more formalised industry to support such endeavors now.

These days you can assume any loophole must be exploited by people who not only are unashamed in doing so, but rather proud of their prowess to exploit. It is an ADD diagnosis for extra time, a disabled placard for better parking - hell the new meme is motile people pretending to need wheelchair access for priority boarding at airports.

It is the metastatic presentation of a society too fat, gluttonous, and imbalanced to function in the face of any actual adversity.

I don't blame anyone - American society is cruel, untrustworthy, alienating, and unforgiving. Spoils are awarded to the least scrupulous actors and all negative outcomes are externalized. Take what you can and fuck everyone else, right?
by anovikov | 2025-12-05 12:27:32+00:00
Well, regardless of what government does, renewables will eventually price out oil and gas. And the government and the megacorps will be on their side because that way they will be making more money. Not before.

No one is trying to limit renewables just for the sake of it. They are trying to do so because so far renewables don't allow to make much money while oil and gas does. There won't be any reason for the powers that be, to resist them once this situation reverses.