MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ifh-hn | 2025-12-09 09:33:23+00:00
I think visual signs are an amazing way to impart immediate information at a glance. Take road signs for example, at speed I can know what to expect around the corner.

However it is another language to learn and as such needs standardisation to be useful. If I go to another country and start driving the road symbols mean something else.

Its the same in the GUI. The symbols should allow me to move quicker around the interface, even if I've not used the software before.

The issues I see are each OS/App can, and does, use their own symbols for the same functionality (sure there are some universals like cut/copy/paste). And like the article these symbols now appear to be getting used as bullet points, so each item needs it's bullet points.

In my opinion, and like the greyed out keyboard shortcuts over to the right of some menu items, these symbols should only be there when they denote actions that can be done by clicking a button. They should be imparting the mouse equivalent or those keyboard shortcuts, a way to navigate and do actions; not as some decoration. Imparting the language of the GUI.

So yeah I agree with the article. Function over design aesthetic every time.
by raghavbansal11 | 2025-12-09 09:33:36+00:00
Firstly, to give you some more insight about our algorithm, commits are actually bonus points- they're not even a part of actual scoring. I'll make some changes to our landing page to communicate this better, thanks for your feedback!

Secondly, we’re currently focusing on startups looking to hire cracked coders, like college students or recent grads. The situations you mentioned are for senior engineers- people who have worked at companies for a while now. Not something we're too focused on right now, since senior devs would require different metrics and be more experience-based.
by klez | 2025-12-09 09:33:58+00:00
Take a look here[0] for a discussion about cassette quality.

TL;DR: Like many of us you probably had shitty equipment and shitty cassettes. They are more than capable of sounding great with the right tools.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jVoSQP2yUYA
by o999 | 2025-12-09 09:36:49+00:00
Some indirect results to this might be:

- More engineers moving from employment to indie development.

- Less abandoned open source software.

- Indie developers, small teams, and open source software developers will be more able to catch up and better compete with tech giants.

I believe the AI agentic coders will threat tech giants more than it - collectively - threats software engineers.
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-09 09:36:50+00:00
Cassettes suck hard. Sorry, but apart from being smaller and failing in a different way to CDs, they suck hard.

Yes they were portable, and if you want a "pure" sound experience (you're not going to get that from cassette, you're going to get tape hiss and pitch wobbling) I can sorta understand. But DAT is where its at if you want that.

Cassettes have terrible dynamic range, and hiss like a mother fucker. Sure it evokes a sound of your parent's youth, in the same way that those tedious fuckers talk about vinyls "warmth" but objectively they both suck bollocks.

The casing though, thats great. I do like the album art. thats nice.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-09 09:37:11+00:00
> Denying rights to others is poison. Wishing violence on people because of their heritage is harmful to all of us.

I think this is true for all cases, the author gives us example of trans co creator of arm architecture and alan turing and how their contributions in the web mattered

But I think quite frankly, even if that might not be the case, there STILL ISNT any reason why we should discriminate and I feel like some part of the intepretation I got was that we should be tolerant to all communities currently still persecuted because some part of them contributed to us...

But what about communities that did not support you because they weren't in the shape of? I feel like we should be tolerant to them.

I tend to stay less political nowadays but just look at the case of sudan. Its state is atrocious. I am not sure if sudan contributed quite heavily on the web or not so pardon me but even if they might not have, We should still be tolerant and like stop the atrocities happening there in my opinion.

Basically the point I am trying to make might be obvious but with or without the creations of alan turing, and co creator of arm, We should still be tolerant to each other as long as they are tolerant to us, thus a tolerant society.

I like referring to the paradox of tolerance as its a key of literally every problem in my opinion and this time tho its actually as clear as day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

I think what we as a society need is to look at if we are infighting with each other over petty differences created by spews of lies by people in power to stay in power so that we infight. The british used conquer and divide on India and africa which I am not going to lie, still impacts these countries.

I am pretty sure that people do divide and conquer on their own people too, Power and the Powerful don't discriminate in this sense.

TLDR: We should be tolerant of each other as a whole even if there might not be any web contributions simply because being kind is mostly good I guess but also we should be intolerant to the true intolerant of society which try to create this divide from (both sides) imo and just try to remove any type of extremism and actually focus on class issues too.
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-09 09:38:19+00:00
It might have been human operated, but it also might have just been copying its training data.

A robot that properly supports being teleoperated wouldn't immediately fall over the moment someone deactivates a headset. Falling over is almost the worst thing a robot can do, you would trash a lot of prototypes and expensive lab equipment that way if they fell over every time an operator needed the toilet or to speak to someone. If you had such a bug that would be the very first thing you would fix. And it's not like making robots stay still whilst standing is a hard problem these days - there's no reason removing a headset should cause the robot to immediately deactivate.

You'd also have to hypothesize about why the supposed Tesla teleoperator takes the headset off with people in front of him/her during a public demonstration, despite knowing that this would cause the robot to die on camera and for them to immediately get fired.

I think it's just as plausible that the underlying VLA model is trained using teleoperation data generated by headset wearers, and just like LLMs it has some notion of a "stop token" intended for cases where it completed its mission. We've all seen LLMs try a few times to solve a problem, give up and declare victory even though it obviously didn't succeed. Presumably they learned that behavior from humans somewhere along the line. If VLA models have a similar issue then we would expect to see cases where it gets frustrated or mistakes failure for success, copies the "I am done with my mission" motion it saw from its trainers and then issues a stop token, meaning it stops sending signals to the motors and as a consequence immediately falls over.

This would be expected for Tesla given that they've always been all-in on purely neural end-to-end operation. It would be most un-Tesla-like for there to be lots of hand crafted logic in these things. And as VLA models are pretty new, and partly based on LLM backbones, we would expect robotic VLA models to have the same flaws as LLMs do.
by homakov | 2025-12-09 09:38:45+00:00
>I wasted years of my life in AI

→ “AI generates slop, false info, deepfakes make ppl look bad, therefore AI = bad.”

Same vibes.

You can wake up with your bank / broker / PayPal balance = 0, and there is nothing you can do to protect yourself from that scenario. Only replicated state machines (or L2s built correctly on top of them) even attempt to close that attack surface — and they’re still not finished.

In 10–20 years the world will run on government-run CBDCs, and your relationship with your bank/broker will finally be protected by actual cryptography and replicated state: xln.finance. That’s when crypto reaches its real bloom. Right now it’s nowhere close to being mature enough to judge.

If you’re a trader, jokes on you — you were never “in crypto.” You were just passing through.

The only people who are actually in crypto are the ones who build: smart contracts, consensus, p2p layers, replicated state machines.

Everyone else is just cheering from the sidelines (usually for the wrong team).
by gwd | 2025-12-09 09:40:29+00:00
First of all, it's not unlikely that the dentist is the owner. And in any case, when you have a small system of less than 150 people, it's easy enough for a handful of people to see what's actually going on.

Once you get to something in the thousands or tens of thousands, you just have spreadsheets; and anything that doesn't show up in that spreadsheet might as well not exist. Furthermore, you have competing business units, each of which want to externalize their costs to other business units.

Very similar to what GP described -- when I was in a small start-up, we had an admin assistant who did most of the receipt entry and what-not for our expense reports; and we were allowed to tell the company travel agent our travel constrants and give us options for flights. When we were acquired by a larger company, we had to do our own expense reports, and do our own flight searches. That was almost certainly a false economy.

And then when we became a major conglomerate, at some point they merged a bunch of IT functions; so the folks in California would make a change and go home, and those of us in Europe or the UK would come in to find all the networks broken, with no way to fix it until the people in California started coming in at 4pm.

In all cases, the dollars saved is clearly visible in the spreadsheet, while the "development velocity" lost is noisy, diffuse, and hard to quantify or pin down to any particular cause.

I suppose one way to quantify that would be to have the Engineering function track time spent doing admin work and charge that to the Finance function; and time spent idle due to IT outages and charge that to the IT department. But that has its own pitfalls, no doubt.
by DeathArrow | 2025-12-09 09:40:44+00:00
To credit a technical advance to a person's identity is to commit the 'Correlation is not Causation' fallacy. While diversity in a technical pool is interesting, the technical merit of the contribution must stand alone, independent of the contributor's personal characteristics. Shifting the focus from 'Does it work?' to 'Who wrote it?' is fundamentally anti-meritocratic and undermines the value of the technical discussion.

The health of a technical community like this one depends on its ability to separate the merit of the work from the moral character of the contributor. This is a necessary separation to preserve the integrity of the technical commons. For instance, a paper on a secure hash algorithm should be judged only on its mathematical proof, regardless of the author's personal life. Any attempt to link the two injects ad hominem fallacy into a technical evaluation.
by KurSix | 2025-12-09 09:40:46+00:00
Microsoft's problem isn't bad AI, but a fundamentally wrong UX pattern. They're trying to shoehorn Copilot into linear workflows - Word, Excel, Outlook - but chat is a terrible interface for editing documents or analyzing tables. Google with Gemini is winning not because their model is better (though it is good), but because they integrate AI better as a tool, not as a conversational partner. This difference in mental model defines utility
by bux93 | 2025-12-09 09:42:05+00:00
DOCX is a terrible format though. If you don't need to edit a document, PDF is more reliable.

If you do need to edit, DOCX will invariably fudge up headings, numbering, ToCs, alignment of images/figures, keep-together not working properly for captions or tables, etc.

I think for the second usecase someone ought to introduce a completely new format that handles this a lot better. Or maybe the format is already there and it's ePub?

But then what's needed is an editor (on-prem server and local portable executable) that has the nice things like automatic ToC generation, foot/endnotes, track changes/document comparison, online collaboration.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-09 09:42:35+00:00
I am raised in hindu religion and we have a saying here basically meaning, treat others the way you wish to be treated yourself and I am sure that literally every main religion and philosophy can kind of share the sentiment and create a tolerant society overall.

Shame that those same religions and people in power forget this core part I suppose. I think that the forgetfulness might be on purpose but I basically hope we can treat literally everyone others the way we wish to be treated ourselves, with dignity and respect.

Of course, some people who are clearly bad shouldn't be treated this way but I hope you can get what I mean by the general sentiment of this idea I guess.
by sameermanek | 2025-12-09 09:42:46+00:00
A little shameless plug:

Ive just released a game built around this project on play store - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.noobgiraff...

Has 4x4, 5x5 and 6x6 puzzles. Generating 7x7 puzzles is long process and i think i may have to do it on cloud, but am planning to release them soon.
by bayindirh | 2025-12-09 09:42:49+00:00
Recording with Dolby-B on a Sony consumer level integrated Hi-Fi produced pretty solid sounding cassettes back in the day, given you have used TDK's chrome or metal blanks.

Some gotchas:

- Loudness wars were just beginning. - Many CDs had some analog stages in its recording/mastering stages, so none of them was sounding "razor sharp" anyway.

Yesterday, I have listened Depeche Mode's Best of album on an Mechen M-30 with a good but not exquisite pair of Philips neck headphones, encoded as FLAC, and it sound superbly enjoyable. While I love vinyl, no, I won't return back to cassette (even though I have a nice deck), thank you.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-09 09:42:57+00:00
Thanks, I see how this would make sense in general. But it does go against this particular case, no? L&D should probably be budgeted outside the widget COGS anyway, but assuming that the widget department has a single budget, and they're going to be using it for O'Reilly books anyway, is it still somehow rational to pay more for a subscription than less for owning the books? Is it just that that consider the extra accounting effort to be more expensive than dealing with the relatively small inefficiencies?
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-09 09:43:52+00:00
And how do you know that exactly? What is the source of that certainty? What makes you fully confident that a system that can write short stories and one-shot Python scripts and catch obscure pop culture references in text isn't "thinking" in any way?

The answer to that is the siren song of "AI effect".

Even admitting "we don't know" requires letting go of the idea that "thinking" must be exclusive to humans. And many are far too weak to do that.
by Covenant0028 | 2025-12-09 09:44:57+00:00
In the case of horses and cars, you need the same number of people to drive both (exactly one per vehicle). In the case of AI and automation, the entire economic bet is that agents will be able to replace X humans with Y humans. Ideally for employers Y=0, but they'll settle for Y<<X.

People seem to think this discussion is a binary where either agents replace everybody or they don't. It's not that simple. In aggregate, what's more likely to happen (if the promises of AI companies hold good) is large scale job losses and the remaining employees becoming the accountability sinks to bear the blame when the agent makes a mistake. AI doesn't have to replace everybody to cause widespread misery.
by hnfong | 2025-12-09 09:45:10+00:00
You decide you need a web server. Ask management chain for approval. Ask IT dept for approval. Ask finance for approval for the expense. Contact Microsoft sales. Buy it.

Now you can start developing on it…

With open source it’s not just the cost of software you save, but also potentially all the other bureaucracy that you save due to not having to pay money to do something. You also get a lot of transparency on the technical side about the products you may choose to use.
by GermanJablo | 2025-12-09 09:45:28+00:00
I think it's debatable what constitutes an "operation". In a CvRDT, a delta or diff can be considered an operation. In an ID-based OT, it can be considered that there is a transformation of operations, only instead of transforming with respect to other operations, they are transformed with respect to the current document (if there were conflicts, they cannot always be applied in their original form).
by Terr_ | 2025-12-09 09:46:05+00:00
This is calling up dim old memories of Java (which I haven't used in years) and boxing primitive float values into Float objects which provide their own implementation of equals() and hashCode().

AFAICT the pre-hash values come from this method [0] which returns an integer which is a 1:1 representation of the float bytes except that NaNs are all collapsed to one canonical form. So at least at this phase, it doesn't quantize any virtually-equal floats together.

Skimming an implementation of HashMap [1], I didn't notice any obvious "do something special for Floats" code.

[0] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/java.base...

[1] https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/java.base/sha...
by SPICLK2 | 2025-12-09 09:46:05+00:00
No-one is "speaking out against" the one who is pointing out any wider discrimination, beyond whatever aribtrary circle you choose to draw.

What is being "spoken out against" is the idea that taking the moral (or political) action within whatever circle you feel able or willing to support is insufficient, or even discriminatory in itself. After all, this is exactly how this conversation started. Good for you if you want to change the world - let's not forget 3rd party discrimination against other 3rd parties! For many of us, it's one of numerous pressing problems to be addressed. If you wish to bring privilege into it, having the freedom to make fighting any and all discrimination a primary concern is a sign of privilege that few have.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-09 09:46:09+00:00
This problem only shows that these corporations can't see beyond their own nose. Yes modern GTK is crap, but in GTK+ 2, there is a global per-user setting, whether you prefer only icons, icons and text or only text. All native applications respect it, because it is of course handled in the UI toolkit. I expect QT to be the same, this is typically even more configurable. QT and GTK+ also have interop for such settings.
by trinix912 | 2025-12-09 09:46:34+00:00
Pretty much. The pattern I'm noticing is users see that drawing in Word is cumbersome (layout features "get in the way") while in PowerPoint they can put things all over the place, so they naturally gravitate towards PowerPoint when they feel they don't need a classic letter layout but rather an "empty canvas" they can do whatever with.

It can all be done in Word too, but most people I've seen using Word don't bother even setting image placement for each image or change margins. They just stick with what's default.

I actually agree with you that a whole mode is an overkill, but I think whatever they put in they'd have to market pretty well so users would consider it at all. So it also makes sense to me they'd say "use PowerPoint instead" as it is what many are already doing.
by slashyellow | 2025-12-09 09:46:52+00:00
I mean, it's a fiercely competitive market and they've managed to stake out a position, which is great and all, but to be blunt they have a market share of ~2.1%, and they've consistently unprofitable. And they've been at this for like 20 years.

Honestly the main problem seems to be most people just don't like buying certain items online, and that doesn't seem to be changing quickly. If Covid didn't break people out of that, I can't think of anything that will.

And FWIW, I think for an online only supermarket you'd expect their website to be pretty amazing, but their competitors are just as good.
by hatch_q | 2025-12-09 09:47:16+00:00
You're just very opinionated. Other software engineers just give you space because they don't want to confront you and they don't want any conflict with you as it's just waste of time.

6 months is also average time it takes people like you to burn out on a project. Usually starting with relatively simple change/addition requested by customer that turns into 3 month long refactor - "because architecture is wrong". And we just let you do it, because we know fighting windmills is futile.
by defrost | 2025-12-09 09:47:20+00:00
Ne Zha 2 was huge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_Zha_2

Like its predecessor, the film received highly positive reviews from critics, and achieved even greater commercial success at a gross of $2.2 billion worldwide against a production budget of US$80 million. Ne Zha 2 broke numerous box office records inside and outside China, including becoming the highest-grossing film in a single box office territory, the highest-grossing animated film, being the first adult animated film in this position, the highest-grossing non-English language film and the first animated film in history to cross the $2 billion mark, as well as being the highest-selling animated film based on ticket sales. It also ranks as the highest-grossing film of 2025 and the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time.

and that immediately sprang to mind for a 60+ Australian english speaking mathematician / geophysicist not of asian descent. No Google / Bing / AI required.

Having grandchildren made it hard to avoid.

As for China in Africa:

Global power dynamics in Africa are shifting, with China eclipsing the influence of the US and France. China has become Africa’s single largest trading partner.

is true, but has been overstated by some to raise fear of Red Menace.

Source: https://theconversation.com/maps-showing-chinas-growing-infl...

FWiW China has been a significant employer of US mercs in Africa.

eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Services_Group
by qcnguy | 2025-12-09 09:48:06+00:00
It means what it says. A lot of these academics want to access people's IP addresses because they're trying to map out social networks and bot accounts, by which they mean any account they don't like the views of. So it means stripping people's anonymity under the guise of "research" and of course those academics can be trusted to immediately report everyone posting conservative views to the police, who will then arrest them and prosecute them.

> Facebook / Meta is compliant with these laws

They have a blue check system that works in the same way as X's does, so they aren't compliant. https://www.facebook.com/business/m/meta-verified-creators

But please understand that the EU is not a part of the world that has the rule of law. It has rule by law. Law in the EU is a vague thing, discovered as often as written, in which people who advance the EU's social plan are legal and people who oppose it are illegal. It's a system in which the EU Commission is judge, jury and executioner, and the courts are merely rubber stamps to which you can appeal if you feel like wasting money arguing in front of judges chosen for loyalty to the project over loyalty to high minded judicial principle.