MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thiht | 2025-12-09 08:25:29+00:00
Allowing users to change emails is surprisingly tricky:

- if they verified their email, are they allowed to change it?

- if so, can they use the new email for anything as long as it’s not verified, or does it stay in pending state? for how long?

- if it’s in a pending state, can someone signup with a "pending state" email?

- does the email change need to be validated by sending a validation email to the previous email addresses?

- once changed, can an email address be reused for another account? That’s a dangerous one but if you don’t support it you end up shamed on HN with "OpenAI doesn’t allow me to create an account with an email address that used to be associated with an account on their platform but isn’t anymore"

I’m probably missing 10 more bullet points.

I bet most comments in this thread didn’t think beyond "UPDATE accounts SET email = $1"
by gaigalas | 2025-12-09 08:25:32+00:00
If an agent gets things wrong you should stop it and correct it instead.

Sometimes the correction will cost more than starting from scratch. In those cases, you start from scratch.

You do things manually only when novel work is required (the model is unlikely to be trained with the knowledge). The more novel the thing you're doing, the more manual things you have to do.

Identifying "cost of refactoring", and "is this novel?" are also developer skills, so, no formula here. You have to know.
by changadera | 2025-12-09 08:25:34+00:00
We recently dug out my portable cassette player (Not as small as a walkman, takes D cell batteries) so my daughter could listen to my wife's Disney cassettes from her childhood in the early 90s. I was amazed how a 5 year old immediately figured out how to manipulate the tape player and flip over cassettes etc. I suppose it was similar for me at the same age. We even found a NOS Disney cassette on eBay that my wife didn't have.

The funny thing is, even though I'm just about old enough to have bought a few chart music cassettes when they were a contemporary medium, I don't own any cassettes and I only had the player because I bought it on eBay to experiment with tape degradation for music.
by guessmyname | 2025-12-09 08:25:58+00:00
As much as people like to criticize Microsoft Teams, it actually offers a feature called Facilitator [1][2][3] that, to my knowledge, works very well. I say this based on both my own experience and feedback from friends who use it in their day-to-day work.

That said, I, of course, always welcome competition.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMoGOWOBicY

[2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/facilitator-in-mi...

[3] https://aka.ms/facilitator
by qweqwe14 | 2025-12-09 08:26:31+00:00
There is a way: you have to make something that's better in a meaningful way, so that companies' management would want to SWITCH to it. And your new shiny thing also has to be compatible with all of the integrations, the ecosystem etc. that the current thing has.

I'm not even mentioning trust issues, when sensitive data is involved.

Doing anything less and hoping that companies would use your toy project is just wishful thinking. Sorry to be that guy, but please get real.
by incanus77 | 2025-12-09 08:27:15+00:00
> A while back there was a rewrite language that was posted (white on black theme site) that was similar but more geared towards coding problems and less on lit programming. I don't remember the name but it was equally as interesting. If anyone recalls what it was it'd be greatly appreciated.

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/pocket_rewriting.html
by BaudouinVH | 2025-12-09 08:27:34+00:00
mixed bag of reactions :

- the part where the reader is invited to guess what a menu item does based on the icon alone was very interesting

- how come the floppy disk survived as as "save" icon when floppy disk use is not the default save medium ?

- has there been any global study (dis)proving that icons and emojis are truly understood and carry the same meaning everywhere on the planet ?
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-09 08:27:38+00:00
> Israel was formed also because Zionists were doing terrorist actions against the British forces and the Arabs. It wasn't just a legal process and Israel was a terrorist state from the start of its existence.

There were also a number of of Pogroms as well as back and forth retaliation/attacks, organizations like the Irgun did not just pop up randomly out of nowhere.

You seen to have a very one-sided view of history when the reality of the situation has a lot more nuance. That's the thing with this conflict, you can somewhat easily create a narrative that any particular side is at fault depending on how far back you go in history(Jews lived in the region well before Muhammad was even born which certainly makes any notion of one side being more native highly problematic) as well as by cherry-picking facts. It's basically a sort of endless back and forth retaliation.
by ragebol | 2025-12-09 08:28:27+00:00
Are we really? As much as I want to believe this and as much as some people want this, is is not yet the case AFAIK. Some govts. had some success recently though, like Schlesswig-Holstein.

The Dutch tax administration is currently busy pushing all of their internal docs etc to Microsoft as well, so much chagrin of course: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/makelaarstaal-over-onze-be... (in Dutch, although the author has good stuff in English as well)
by robot-wrangler | 2025-12-09 08:29:16+00:00
IANACosmologist, but in for a penny, in for a pound. If one accepts weirdness along the lines of extra spatial dimensions and mathematical singularities made physical, why not throw in a few extra dimensions for time or why not have imaginary time (in Hawking's sense)?

> One might think this means that imaginary numbers are just a mathematical game having nothing to do with the real world. From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, however, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_time
by spwa4 | 2025-12-09 08:29:28+00:00
The problem for nvidia is ... where do you go from here and still have spectacular performance improvements?

Nvidia got extremely lucky again and again and again, and what specifically did it is that right in time non-Nvidia researchers learned to train on smaller floating point bit lengths, which Nvidia raced to support. And great, well, done! A list of ironies though ... for example it's Google Deepmind that made the Turing generation of cards viable for nvidia. However, the new floating point formats train has arrived at it's last station, the NXFP4 station. There is no FP3 and no FP2 to go to. Is there a new train to get on? I'm not aware of one.

Nvidia's argument is "Blackwell easily doubles Ada performance!" ... but that is deceptive. The actual improvement is that Blackwell NXFP4 (4-bits) is more than double Ada FP8 (8-bit) performance in ops. That's the train that's arrived at its last station. Go back further and the same is true, just with larger and larger FP formats, starting at FP32 (single precision). Aside from a small FP64 detour, and a few "oopses" in some of the format they chose turning out useless or unstable, all quickly abandoned that's the story of nvidia in ML.

Comparing, for example, FP32 you don't see big improvements: e.g. 4090: 83 FP32 TFLOPS, 5090: 104 FP32 TFLOPS. Given the power requirements involved that's actually a regression. If you're stuck at 8 bits, nvidia's story breaks down and Ada cards beat Blackwell cards in performance per watt: 4090: 5.44 Watt/FP32 TFLOP, 5090: 5.5 Watt/FP32 TFLOP. Or, FP8, same story: 4090 is 0.681 Watt/FP8 TFLOP, 5090 is 0.686 Watt/FP8 TFLOP. Now effectively the new memory still buys some improvement but not much.

Will the next generation after Blackwell, with the same floating format as the previous generation be a 10% improvement and subject to further diminishing returns and stuck there until ... well, until we find something better than silicon? I should point out 10% is generous, because for FP8, Blackwell is actually not an improvement at all over Ada, on a per-watt basis for equivalent floating point lengths.

Plus Blackwell is ahead of the competition ... but only 1 generation. If nvidia doesn't get on a new train, the next generation of AMD cards will match the current nvidia generation. Then the next TPU generation will match nvidia.
by farhanhubble | 2025-12-09 08:29:39+00:00
My understanding differs and I might be wrong. Here's what I inferred:

Let's say you finetune a Mistral-7B. Now, there are hundreds of other fine-tuned Mistral-7B's, which means it's easy to find the universal subspace U of the weights of all these models combined. You can then decompose the weights of your specific model using U and a coefficient matrix C specific to your model. Then you can convert any operation of the type `out=Wh` to `out=U(C*x)` Both U and C are much smaller dimension that W and so the number of matrix operations as well as the memory required is drastically lower.
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-09 08:29:41+00:00
I idly wonder if what would actually make sense here is a hybrid model that combines a gigantic fulfillment center with tens of thousands of products located "far" from people, with a large physical footprint and near to road/rail arteries, but with a mid-bandwidth, high-granularity, low-latency physical link to "near" places.

For example, imagine you had an upscaled pneumatic tube system (don't get hung up on the exact implementation, it could be a small gauge train system or conveyer belt: whatever floats your Factorio-addled boat) with a diameter around, say, half a metre to a metre, packed goods into canisters and shot into town where they pop out at local distribution centres for pickup or last-mile delivery.

This is where I thought the Boring Company might be going back before it was obvious it was an anti-public transit gambit.

Possibly the curse of rail systems applies where the maintenance of the track (tube) costs so much that it's cheaper to fly (done delivery) or drive all the way on public roads (current solution). The advantage over rail is that the land footprint is very small: the tract is about a metre wide and can be buried if needed. Perhaps it's just not really different enough to trucking it all into town using semi trailers, which would still be required for large items and especially construction materials.

Then again, even if this hare-brained system were to work, this assumes we actually want to continue to reduce most human commercial interactions to gigantic, remote, anonymous capital-intensive megasystems producing pods that pop out of the ground into robotic vending stations.
by davnicwil | 2025-12-09 08:30:37+00:00
> Almost as good as Emacs Org mode

I take that as the highest compliment!

But yeah, the sharing aspect is a key thing I wanted to nail here. In my mind, it should be so simple to share and just start typing in Docket that say, the organiser of a meeting will just share the notes and it should be the simplest (or, at least, a simple) option for everyone to dive in.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-09 08:30:42+00:00
It's a quite wonderful area to empty one's pocketbook. I really do miss living near(ish) to there.

Lots of memories, and all of them are good.

(Including that one time when a buddy and I bought a used 3D printer out of the trunk of a fellow geek's sedan, in cash, in the Microcenter parking lot. We actually went to Microcenter looking to buy a resin printer, and we definitely succeeded -- just not in the manner in which we had expected to succeed. That's been a solid little machine for a few years now and was precisely as it was described.)
by vladvasiliu | 2025-12-09 08:31:08+00:00
> I think people want something in their hands.

I can understand that, and I like it, too. But, personally, I dont want to fill my home with random artefacts if it's not strictly required, and I don't know of anything "in my hands" that doesn't come with this issue.

To your compressed Spotify point, I do recognize this as a general issue for modern music distribution, which had already started with CDs (and to which cassettes aren't technically immune either).

So, as a musician, do you know of places selling digital media mastered as the artists intended? I've had good luck with Bandcamp, but they don't have most of the music I'm into.
by lambertsimnel | 2025-12-09 08:31:34+00:00
I wonder whether people who disagree about this are talking at crossed purposes. I think there's politics in a narrower sense (concerning partisanship and state intervention) and politics in a wider sense (concerning power relations and decision making). To depoliticise things in the former sense (by depolarising and deregulating) isn't to depoliticise them at all in the latter sense. In society, arguably everything is economic, legal, psychological, etc. Presumably, what people mean when they say "everything is political" is that politics in the wider sense is both important and on this list.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-09 08:33:07+00:00
YC has funded 5000 companies. from a quick Google search and only 20 have gone public and 3 of those have gone out of business

https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...

So yes, if you want to start a business your most likely outcome is going to be complete failure. Your second most likely outcome is muddling along in obscurity until you give up realizing you could make more money being an enterprise CRUD developer at a bank and not work as hard. The next outcome is you might get acquired.

Unless you are decision maker for a medium to large company, you shouldn’t have heard of Lattice.

But don’t you think before someone invest time in building something they hope to be successful they look at the landscape of others in their vertical?
by thetruthinside | 2025-12-09 08:33:15+00:00
I keep seeing posts about bad experiences with the Scaled Agile Framework, and I get where they're coming from. A lot of implementations fail. But after working with multiple organizations and Coaches in this field, I’m convinced the problem is rarely SAFe itself.

The framework claims to be grounded in Agile values and continuous improvement. Most teams try to live those values. The real bottleneck is usually management, which struggles to support agility at the right level. Decisions stay centralized, change is cosmetic, and the Lean Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) becomes more of a reporting function than an enabling one.

So I built an application focused on helping this organizational layer (especially the LACE) structure the work, track improvement, and actually operationalize SAFe instead of treating it like a ceremony checklist. Obviously, no tool can fix a culture that rejects agility. But many companies fail not because SAFe is excessive, but because they try to scale processes without scaling autonomy, trust, and decision-making. My goal is to nudge organizations in that direction.

I’m looking for people who want to test the app, give feedback, or simply discuss this topic. I’m especially interested in hearing from those who believe scaling frameworks are inherently flawed. Agile purists often describe an ideal world that works well for small teams, but many companies are far beyond that size.

Is the issue the framework, or our inability to evolve leadership behavior as fast as we evolve team practices?
by ManBeardPc | 2025-12-09 08:33:16+00:00
My next company‘s boss was pretty much Windows only (server and desktops/laptops, some Linux servers). Linux on the server was already replacing more and more machines. Now I am even allowed to use MacBooks or Linux laptops. Current company is already using the Google suite, MS Office was an exception if required for some reason. I saw the same shift with Oracle. Previously nearly everyone wanted Oracle as a DB, then the price increases got too much and everyone who could switched to alternatives like MySQL or Postgres.
by thot_experiment | 2025-12-09 08:34:13+00:00
I know that modern office has xlookup and other niceties, but if you're not a power user Office 97 off archive.org is like 200mb installed, works just fine on win 10 or under wine, and has the benefit of being written 28 years ago so on a modern computer everything happens imperceptibly fast. I installed the 97 suite like 2 or 3 years ago and I've never looked back.
by Norl-Seria | 2025-12-09 08:34:46+00:00
I am not sure if anyone is still viewing my post, but I will leave this here. I forgot to mention that for the companies and organizations that have supported me, I will share the exclusive rights to the future hobby projects I develop, and I will also cooperate in the development of AGI and ASI. For further details, please refer to PLEDGE.md on GitHub.
by pianopatrick | 2025-12-09 08:36:03+00:00
I didn't like Vue or React so I've been working on my own Javascript framework this year. I wanted to share it at some point as I've gotten value from so many other people's projects. Maybe someone will benefit from my project too.

My framework uses an html attribute called foreignkeys="" to hold urls with custom schemes that reference pieces of browser state. When that browser state changes, the framework searches for all the linked elements and emits a 'foreignkey' event on them. This uses a ForeignKeyEvent event object that has the value of the changed data and the url key that changed. Then the elements just react to the change via event listener code.

The benefit of doings things this way are: 1. I can write normal event driven javascript code and object oriented custom elements. No functional code or anything like JSX is required. 2. The framework can use setTimeout() to return control to the browser between processing each event. With this the page can update one element at a time while letting the browser render in between. I did set things up so that visual elements update synchronously while hidden elements update one at a time. 3. In theory, because the reactivity information is contained in an HTML attribute, this should integrate nicely with server rendered HTML. Should be able to render some regular HTML with foreignkeys="" to state that will change. Then when the javascript code is loaded and runs, the UX can react to future state changes. I use Firebase and don't do any server rendering right now so I haven't tested that, but I think it could be made to work.

I am currently in the middle of rewriting a personal project to use this, so it's still a work in progress. Let me know what you think.
by msuniverse2026 | 2025-12-09 08:36:30+00:00
In Anthroposophy or Western occult science time runs in reverse in something we call the etheric body. The physical body on the other hand is something that experiences the world through organs that register only the present moment. It can't perceive what no longer physically exists or what has not yet manifested physically. The etheric is a time-body, containing the complete formative record of one's biography and is the source of memory, the brain is sort of a receiving organ for it, though the whole body utilises it.

Upon death the etheric body opens up and turns itself inside out and as you identify less with your physical body and more with your etheric body your perception of time is now in reverse. Your entire life tableau is opened in front of you, and as your spiritual organs of perception once "facing inwards" to your interior are now "outward-facing" and working backwards you start to see the effects of all your choices and actions from the perspective of its consequences. This is the source of those "life flashes before your eyes" moments people with near death experiences go through.

Only for very unconscious people is it a hell-like experience. Even if you lived a rather thoughtless and abusive life it is said that it can still be a time of reflection and learning. Eventually after viewing your entire life "inside out" your perception opens up to your pre-birth condition, the etheric body sloughs off (being made of elemental beings itself) and is picked up and put together with all the karma of your previous lives for your next go-around on Earth. You liberate the elementals in your etheric body (which are just below humans in the spiritual hierarchy) by growing spiritually either during life or in the etheric condition and eventually, hopefully, move up the spiritual hierarchy to a being that liberates humans, an Angel.

Thought maybe HN might be interested in some other conceptions of time. :^)
by nwatson | 2025-12-09 08:36:36+00:00
The past that we have yet to subject to our subjection also is effectively future.

Supplication for unknown outcomes surely already determined in the objective past wrt the present time still makes sense. The Divine Successive Relaxation with physical laws as the substrate, and the choices of human free will, human petition and desire, and Divine Will And Intention as boundary conditions, will solidify objective reality into a coherent whole in Open Theism.
by quchao | 2025-12-09 08:36:58+00:00
AO3dle - The Ultimate Daily Fanfiction Guessing Game for AO3 Enthusiasts! Challenge yourself to identify mystery fanfictions from Archive of Our Own using carefully revealed clues including tags, ratings, word counts, and snippets from summaries. Each day brings a new puzzle featuring popular works across all fandoms. Perfect for dedicated readers who pride themselves on their AO3 knowledge. Share your results, compete with friends, and discover new stories along the way. How well do you really know AO3?
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-09 08:37:25+00:00
My point is that with macOS, Apple writes the drivers which means at least as long as the hardware is supported you can be pretty sure that there will be prompt fixes for any issue. With Android, Windows or closed-source Linux drivers (cough NVIDIA) you're left entirely at the mercy of whoever made the tiny little component controlled by the driver to provide a fix, which then has to bubble up through the ODM/OEM until it finally appears in an update you can install.

If you want fast responses to driver bugs, you only have Apple or a fully open-source Linux systems as an option.
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-09 08:37:43+00:00
> Most of software work is maintaining "legacy" code, that is older systems that have been around for a long time and get a lot of use.

That's not the definition of legacy. Being there for a long time and getting lots of use is not what makes a legacy project "legacy".

Legacy projects are characterized by not being maintained and having little to no test coverage. The term "legacy" means "I'm afraid to touch it because it might break and I doubt I can put it back together". Legacy means resistance to change.

You can and do have legacy projects created a year or two ago. Most vibecoded apps fit the definition of legacy code.

That is why legacy projects are a challenge to agentic coding. Agents already output huge volumes of code changes that developers struggle to review, let alone assert it's correctness. On legacy projects that are in production, this is disastrous.
by Someone | 2025-12-09 08:38:02+00:00
Looking at https://rectangleapp.com/, they basically use the same idea, yes, but is there a reasonable alternative?

Also, IMO, Apple’s pictograms look a lot better and are clearer. In Rectangle, the “left half” icon almost is a dark gray rectangle alongside a bright gray one, with the _dark_ indicating where tryout window will go. In Apple’s version, there is only one rectangle and the screen border is much easier to spot.
by kakacik | 2025-12-09 08:39:33+00:00
Its the same hipstery thingie like LPs are with similar talk about quality, experience and whatnot. People still do it, heck people do a lot of seemingly weird stuff that is far from optimal behavior.

Who cares at the end, somebody likes gardening and somebody likes analog music thingies (that they usually didn't grow up with before - this seems to remove most of the lure of these gizmos).

There is that fact of another plastic stuff playing more (rather fragile) plastic stuff polluting the planet at the end, but since this will be fringe activity and many folks reuse their old collections its not the worst offender.