MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jjbinx007 | 2025-12-29 01:44:00+00:00
Equally bad is the massive over sharpening applied to CCTV and dash cams. I tried to buy a dash cam a year ago that didn't have over sharpened images but it proved impossible.

Reading reg plates would be a lot easier if I could sharpen the image myself rather than try to battle with the "turn it up to 11" approach by manufacturers.
by parpfish | 2025-12-29 01:44:06+00:00
I think the heart of the problem is that we’ve somehow conflated the highest paying Eng jobs with being the most prestigious.

People feel like if they want to climb the prestige ladder, they need some way of justifying the business practices of the megacorps.

In contrast, I feel like it’s well established that gigs in big law or finance or medicine have found a way to decorrelate pay from social status. You can make a choice between chasing money OR prestige.
by jchw | 2025-12-29 01:45:12+00:00
The difference, IMO, between a mock and a proper "test" implementation is that traditionally a mock only exists to test interface boundaries, and the "implementation" is meant to be as much of a noop as possible. That's why the default behavior of almost any "automock" is to implement an interface by doing nothing and returning nothing (or perhaps default-initialized values) and provide tools for just tacking assertions onto it. If it was a proper implementation that just happened to be in-memory, it wouldn't really be a "mock", in my opinion.

For example, let's say you want to test that some handler is properly adding data to a cache. IMO the traditional mock approach that is supported by mocking libraries is to go take your RedisCache implementation and create a dummy that does nothing, then add assertions that say, the `set` method gets called with some set of arguments. You can add return values to the mock too, but I think this is mainly meant to be in service of just making the code run and not actually implementing anything.

Meanwhile, you could always make a minimal "test" implementation (I think these are sometimes called "fakes", traditionally, though I think this nomenclature is even more confusing) of your Cache interface that actually does behave like an in-memory cache, then your test could assert as to its contents. Doing this doesn't require a "mocking" library, and in this case, what you're making is not really a "mock" - it is, in fact, a full implementation of the interface, that you could use outside of tests (e.g. in a development server.) I think this can be a pretty good medium in some scenarios, especially since it plays along well with in-process tools like fake clocks/timers in languages like Go and JavaScript.

Despite the pitfalls, I mostly prefer to just use the actual implementations where possible, and for this I like testcontainers. Most webserver projects I write/work on naturally require a container runtime for development for other reasons, and testcontainers is glue that can use that existing container runtime setup (be it Docker or Podman) to pretty rapidly bootstrap test or dev service dependencies on-demand. With a little bit of manual effort, you can make it so that your normal test runner (e.g. `go test ./...`) can run tests normally, and automatically skip anything that requires a real service dependency in the event that there is no Docker socket available. (Though obviously, in a real setup, you'd also want a way to force the tests to be enabled, so that you can hopefully avoid an oopsie where CI isn't actually running your tests due to a regression.)
by 999900000999 | 2025-12-29 01:45:43+00:00
IDK about the worst thing.

To flip it around AI can help a doctor find a cure, the other day I used AI to help translate and assist a non English speaker find the right bus.

AI is just a tool. It's up to us to determine how it's used.

I know I'm not using any service or product that's so lazy as to use AI sloop to advertise. Especially if it's clearly AI with jumbled text.
by asa400 | 2025-12-29 01:46:43+00:00
I worked on a project where a dev wanted to mock out the database in tests "for performance, because the database is slow". I almost lost my shit.

Even funnier, this was all hypothetical and yet taken as gospel. We hadn't even written the tests yet, so it was impossible to say whether they were slow or not. Nothing had been measured, no performance budget had been defined, no prototype of the supposedly slow tests had been written to demonstrate the point.

We ended up writing - no joke - less than 100 tests total, almost all of which hit the database, including some full integration tests, and the entire test suite finished in a few seconds.

I'm all for building in a way that respects performance as an engineering value, but we got lost somewhere along the way.
by rmonvfer | 2025-12-29 01:47:26+00:00
Website: AI generated, slop
Comment replies: AI generated, also slop

“Fair point — that’s totally valid…” come on, are we supposed to just pretend this is an acceptable submission? I’m all in for vibe coding but at least be upfront about it and don’t waste other people’s time and energy.

What’s this supposed to be?
by Animats | 2025-12-29 01:48:05+00:00
This is a consequence of late-stage technology. When few people could make it work at all, the people who could were left alone to make it work. Once it was a routine job, management and political priorities began to control.

This has happened with other technologies as they matured. Bridges. Electrical power. Radio.
(The story of Roebling, the Tweed Ring, and the Brooklyn Bridge is worth knowing. Tweed tried to steal too early in the history of the technology, and it backfired on him big-time.)

This happened to software a while back.
Semiconductors had it less because keeping up with Moore's Law dominated the politics.

Learn more about the history of technology and this pattern reappears.
by resfirestar | 2025-12-29 01:48:16+00:00
Manabi Reader (OP's app) is way too "busy" for my personal preference. Opening a book and seeing it covered in highlighting and annotations by default is intimidating. To the extent that progress tracking is fun, I want it to be something that's done passively rather than covering every page of every book with paragraph splitting.

It also does not support Yomitan-style custom dictionaries, which is a shame but I understand why it would be a non-goal. Shiori (the other iOS reader app the post mentions) and Jidoujisho (the Android app winner) both have only partial support. The Yomitan+ttsu stack on desktop is unbeatable for learning by reading in my experience. I hadn't heard of Lumie but will try it out on the blog's recommendation.
by danielrm26 | 2025-12-29 01:48:30+00:00
How many senior developers do you need to tell you that they've been vastly surpassed (in coding) by AI before you believe them? The creator of Claude Code just said he's not opened an IDE in a while. He was a principal engineer.

And why would you think this would be the only place that'll happen?

I agree there are things they can still do better than AI, but coding isn't one of them.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-29 01:49:04+00:00
I’ve been using iOS since 2013 or so, and even spent five or so years off-and-on developing for the platform.

I never use the multitasking stuff. Too confusing. I regard the loss of the single physical home button as a tragedy. One of the best UI elements ever created. Not joking. So simple, imposible to confuse because there’s just one, basically nothing about it that requires training, and it acted as the perfect “oh shit, get me back to something normal!” button for the tech-unsavvy, which is one of the things they most-need in a UI. So good.
by satvikpendem | 2025-12-29 01:49:23+00:00
Aside, why not link the original video instead of a reddit post?

This point about "private equity" being a boogeyman is such a tired take, the vast majority of equity of companies are held privately, and the vulture PE firms do exist but are not as prevalent as people make it seem online. It's a meme that many people seem to have latched on when the vast majority of PE firms and companies work perfectly fine, buying a company, growing it, then selling it for a profit.
by zinekeller | 2025-12-29 01:49:34+00:00
The NTSC color coefficients are the grandfather of all luminance coefficients.

It is necessary that it was precisely defined because of the requirements of backwards-compatible color transmission (YIQ is the common abbreviation for the NTSC color space, I being ~reddish and Q being ~blueish), basically they treated B&W (technically monochrome) pictures like how B&W film and videotubes treated them: great in green, average in red, and poorly in blue.

A bit unrelated: pre-color transition, the makeups used are actually slightly greenish too (which appears nicely in monochrome).
by tourmalinetaco | 2025-12-29 01:49:51+00:00
> You should stop watching youtube channels.

Why? Because they say things you don’t like?

> Consider the number of m1 laptops manufactured and then the number of claims.

Consider the fact that most consumers wouldn‘t file a claim even if they were eligible—the FTC finds that only about 5-10% of affected consumers actually participate in class actions. And considering there‘s multiple class actions over different models of the laptops, that signifies a decent chunk of users.

> Regarding, the “fragile screens” — find me one that ended at least with a settlement and not dismissed.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/apple-ordered-to-pa...
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-29 01:50:49+00:00
> The first part works because otherwise reusable rockets wouldn't have been invented…

Maybe, maybe not. We often see technology reach a threshold that allows for sudden progress, like Newton and Leibniz both coming up with calculus at around the same time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu...), or Darwin rushing to publish On The Origin of Species because someone else had figured out the same thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace).

SpaceX benefited immensely from massive improvements in computing power, sensors, etc.
by lijok | 2025-12-29 01:51:10+00:00
Then why were you bringing up conditions of ones birth?

Vanishingly unlikely to get one if you try, or vanishingly unlikely to get one if you sit on your ass all day?

I assume you’re talking about the former and yet I don’t think you’ve thought this through. I think you’ve blindly attributed to luck what actually requires time, perseverance, grit, lack of morality. The only way to figure that out is for you to offer up your understanding of what one must luck out on?
by wahnfrieden | 2025-12-29 01:51:22+00:00
Thanks for trying it and sharing the feedback. I hear you... I'm working on a full redesign at the moment that is almost complete. In addition to making the highlights/annotations optional, it introduces a minimal "full screen" view that activates automatically when you scroll/paginate/tap blank space and makes the annotations much less prominent and hides navigation UI. I will post a screenshot of the WIP here in a moment.

I will consider more automatic ways of tracking reading progress as well. And I will make this tracking far more valuable soon too: it will automatically review your flashcards (ones that exist and ones you create in the future) when you read the words/kanji that appear in texts. This will also automatically transition words to "known" status simply by reading and applying the FSRS algorithm to it to determine learning status maturity levels based on the resulting intervals.

Yomitan is also absolutely a goal, and high priority. I'm working on Yomitan custom dictionary import at this moment. I hope to launch this very soon. Besides bringing your own dictionaries, it will also include Wiktionary ones out of the box so that you can get monolingual lookups easily (which will also let me add more languages than English for Japanese lookups).
by Aurornis | 2025-12-29 01:52:31+00:00
> For example, the IP cameras I have, sometimes when I come home on the bike, part of the wheel is missing, having been deleted by the algorithm as it struggled with the "grainy" asphalt driveway underneath.

Heavy denoising is necessary for cheap IP cameras because they use cheap sensors paired with high f-number optics. Since you have a photography background you'll understand the tradeoff that you'd have to make if you could only choose one lens and f-stop combination but you needed everything in every scene to be in focus.

You can get low-light IP cameras or manual focus cameras that do better.

The second factor is the video compression ratio. The more noise you let through, the higher bitrate needed to stream and archive the footage. Let too much noise through for a bitrate setting and the video codec will be ditching the noise for you, or you'll be swimming in macroblocks. There are IP cameras that let you turn up the bitrate and decrease the denoise setting like you want, but be prepared to watch your video storage times decrease dramatically as most of your bits go to storing that noise.

> Smartphone and dedicated digital still cameras aren't as drastic, but when zoomed in, or in low light, faces have a "painted" kind of look. I'd prefer honest noise, or better yet an adjustable denoising algorithm from "none" (grainy but honest) to what is now the default.

If you have an iPhone then getting a camera app like Halide and shooting in one of the RAW formats will let you do this and more. You can also choose Apple ProRAW on recent iPhone Pro models which is a little more processed, but still provides a large amount of raw image data to work with.
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-29 01:52:47+00:00
> Then why were you bringing up conditions of ones birth?

Because they're a form of luck?

If you're born in the developed world, that's luck. If you're born to supportive parents, that's luck. If you're Steve Jobs and you wind up high school buddies with Woz in Mountain View, CA, that's luck. White? Luck. Male? Luck. Healthy? Luck. A light touching of psychopathy? Luck!

> Vanishingly unlikely to get one if you try, or vanishingly unlikely to get one if you sit on your ass all day?

Both.

> I think you’ve blindly attributed to luck what actually requires time, perseverance, grit, lack of morality.

There are many, many people who devote time, perserverance, and grit to their endeavours without becoming a "hugely expensive" CEO. Hence, luck. Is it the only thing? No. Is it a thing? Yes, absolutely.
by danielrm26 | 2025-12-29 01:53:28+00:00
> There is no "separation of moving things on the job vs. moving things at the gym" when it comes to creative craft...

- Coming up with names for cities in a role-playing game you're making
- Summarizing an idea that you're writing about
- Doing research for an article
- Brainstorming character names
- Creating an aesthetic for a new website for a customer
- Etc, etc.

I could go on for days with these examples. And so could any AI.

Pre-2022 ALL these were done 100% by a human.

Now they're not. Now creative people are using AI to help them massively with tons of these. So, yes, the separation needs to happen there as well.

For example, maybe you say, I'll never use AI to help me name characters. Or to come up with plot lines. Or whatever.

That's a Gym vs. Job distinction.
by linguae | 2025-12-29 01:53:43+00:00
I’d feel better about the RAM price spikes if they were caused by a natural disaster and not by Sam Altman buying up 40% of the raw wafer supply, other Big Tech companies buying up RAM, and the RAM oligopoly situation restricting supply.

This will only serve to increase the power of big players who can afford higher component prices (and who, thanks to their oligopoly status, can effectively set the market price for everyone else), while individuals and smaller institutions are forced to either spend more or work with less computing resources.

The optimistic take is that this will force software vendors into shipping more efficient software, but I also agree with this pessimistic take, that companies that can afford inflated prices will take advantage of the situation to pull ahead of competitors who can’t afford tech at inflated prices.

I don’t know what we can do as normal people other than making do with the hardware we have and boycotting Big Tech, though I don’t know how effective the latter is.
by shagie | 2025-12-29 01:53:43+00:00
> You're uninformed. France has that, and it doesn't result in excessive unemployment; in fact, the unemployment rates in France and in the US are practically the same, respectively 7.5% vs. 7.8%.

You might want to expand that to the youth unemployment rate.

https://tradingeconomics.com/france/youth-unemployment-rate

> Youth Unemployment Rate in France decreased to 18.90 percent in October from 19 percent in September of 2025. Youth Unemployment Rate in France averaged 20.52 percent from 1983 until 2025, reaching an all time high of 28.20 percent in November of 2012 and a record low of 14.50 percent in February of 1983.

https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/youth-unemployment... for the data by country. United States is at 10.6%.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14024887 for the US data (youth being defined as 16 - 24 in that data set)

---

While the overall unemployment rate may be similar, the "hire them once and have to take exterodary action to fire them" significantly impacts the employment rate of college new graduates where it can be difficult to identify how well they actually work in the work force.

That can also lead to some social instability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_youth_protests_in_France

> ... High unemployment, especially for young immigrants, was seen as one of the driving forces behind the 2005 civil unrest in France and this unrest mobilized the perceived public urgency for the First Employment Contract. Youths are particularly at risk as they have been locked out of the same career opportunities as older workers, contributing to both a rise in tensions amongst the economically disenfranchised underclass, and, some claim, a brain drain of graduates leaving for better opportunities in Britain and the United States.
by 101008 | 2025-12-29 01:54:19+00:00
I hear you. Two years ago I went to my dad's and I spent the afternoon "scanning" old pictures of my grandparents (his parents), dead almost two decades ago. I took pictures of the physical photos, situating the phone as horizontal as possible (parallel to the picture), so it was as similar as a scan (to avoid perspective, reflection, etc).

It was my fault that I didn't check the pictures while I was doing it. Imagine my dissapointment when I checked them back at home: the Android camera decided to apply some kind of AI filter to all the pictures. Now my grandparents don't look like them at all, they are just an AI version.
by dipeshsukhani | 2025-12-29 01:54:27+00:00
Our old stand‑up was the classic “what I did yesterday / what I’ll do today / blockers” round‑robin on a call. Now we treat it as an AI‑generated, repo‑driven status report instead of a live status meeting.

Concretely, we:
- Break each person’s day into deterministic, measurable tasks with expected time cost and explicit test/code criteria in the repo.
- At EOD, run the updated repo through an AI agent that checks for those tests/changes, scores how much of each task was actually completed, and produces a per‑person and team summary that replaces the verbal stand‑up.

Happy to elaborate on this more if you would like.
by nradov | 2025-12-29 01:54:30+00:00
The notion of a "crew optional" ship is a bit silly. It might have some utility for coastal defense: when it breaks down close to shore you can send a tugboat to tow it back. But I can't see how uncrewed surface vessels would be of much use to an expeditionary blue-water navy. Anything constantly exposed to salt water and vibration will break down. We're decades away from having robots that can do maintenance and repair.
by danparsonson | 2025-12-29 01:54:43+00:00
Well, no - you don't.

What you're describing is a very limited subset of testing, which presumably is fine for the projects you work on, but that experience does not generalise well.

Integration testing is of course useful, but generally one would want to create unit tests for every part of the code, and by definition it's not a unit test if hits multiple parts of the code simultaneously.

Apart from that, databases and file access may be fast but they still take resources and time to spin up; beyond a certain project and team size, it's far cheaper to mock those things. With a mock you can also easily simulate failure cases, bad data, etc. - how do you test for file access issues, or the database server being offline?

Using mocks properly is a sign of a well-factored codebase.
by bbor | 2025-12-29 01:55:45+00:00
This is just patently absurd:

"AI" is just the vehicle (the excuse) - it's not the root of the problem nor is it the ultimate goal.

People are investing in AI because they believe the scientists' warnings that the Frame Problem[1] has been solved (or, in other words, "AGI is suddenly within reach").

You can say they're fools if you want - you might even be right! But pretending like hundreds (thousands?) of board members across the world are conspiring to build a buyer's cartel (monopsony?) in order to starve out the PC Gaming market of all things is just myopic.

I hope I'm not too vitriolic, especially if the guy in the video is here -- I certainly share a lot of politics with him, and absolutely share his priors regarding PE. I just think it's extremely clear that this particular subreddit has "lost the plot" as the ~~kids~~ mid-30s nerds say. If anyone's not familiar, I highly recommend a perusal through the top posts of the past week/month...
by TheFlyingFish | 2025-12-29 01:56:30+00:00
Technically native selects do have a very rudimentary form of filtering: start typing text with the select focused and it will auto-select the first matching option.

E.g. if the select is a list of US states, type "N" and it will jump to Nebraska. Continue into "New" and you'll get New Hampshire, etc.

This is better than nothing (and I personally use it all the time) but not a patch on an actual proper select-with-filtering which, yes, you still need JS to implement properly.
by satvikpendem | 2025-12-29 01:56:50+00:00
Now read the rest of the article. It talks about CEOs in general, not just megacorp ones, even if it does use megacorp CEOs in the intro. It is asking a general question of whether the role of a CEO should be automated. Articles often start with a hook that is related but does not wholly encompass the entirety of the point of the article.
by danparsonson | 2025-12-29 01:56:59+00:00
For the same reason you isolate variables in a scientific experiment; to ensure you're controlling the test that you're running, and not accidentally testing something else.

To easily simulate failure cases, a range of possible inputs, bad data etc.

To make the testing process faster when you have hundreds or thousands of tests, running on multiple builds simultaneously across an organisation.

Off the top of my head :-)
by rgoulter | 2025-12-29 01:57:10+00:00
> there is a massive difference between writing mocks and using a mocking library like Mockito

How to reconcile the differences in this discussion?

The comment at the root of the thread said "my experience with mocks is they were over-specified and lead to fragile services, even for fresh codebases. Using a 'fake' version of the service is better". The reply then said "if mocking doesn't provide a fake, it's not 'mocking'".

I'm wary of blanket sentiments like "if you ended up with a bad result, you weren't mocking". -- Is it the case that libraries like mockito are mostly used badly, but that correct use of them provides a good way of implementing robust 'fake services'?