skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This being HN, I thought it would be an engineering premortem: assume your XYZ has died; what killed it and what do we do now?

Engineering premortems have saved me so much time over the years and these days I find Claude is fairly helpful at thinking of causes. I find the most effective strategy is to focus on the common blunders and ignore the elaborate what-if scenarios, keep it short. You can easily spend way too much time figuring out an elaborate issue but most failures are for obvious or common reasons.

Also, in a non-engineering way, valuable for other risks in life. Anytime you do something new, hard, or dangerous. Safety, baking, relationships, home improvement, life changes, et cetera. If this (shower drain/baguette/workout routine/startup idea) failed, what killed it and what do I do now? Figure out the common risks, Google if you have to, and you'll do things differently.

"[What] we do is to identify the main stupidities that do bright people in and then organize your patterns for thinking and developments, so you don’t stumble into those stupidities" - Buffett & Munger
Are these sabotages considered an offense worth of NATO response? If not, what is the standard there or has it not been tested with this because it's just an "Internet cable"?
> EVERYTHING is written in English source code

That's not some immutable law of the universe - it's really a pretty recent state of affairs. A quarter century at most
Once Azerbaijan starts up their wars again though, all the pipelines are presumably going away, so even though the Ukrainians have obviously screwed you, it's far from certain they'll really gain that much.
Yes. close to free content

They understood the Dmca brilliantly so they did bulk cheap content purchases and hid behind the Dmca for all non licensed content which was "uploaded by users". They did bulk purchases of cheap content from some studios but that was just a fraction

Of course their risk of going advertise revenue only was high and in the beginning mostly only cam providers would advertise

Our problem was that we had contracts and close relationships with all the big studios so going the Dmca route would have severed these ties for an unknown risk. In hindsight not creating a company which did abuse the Dmca was the right decision. I am very loyal and it would have felt like cheating

Now it's a different story after the credit card shake down when they had to remove millions of videos and be able to provide 2257 documentation for each video
Yup, the best pictures I have, are those snapshots of real life action. Not the super prepared professional ones requiring set up (we also have those, my sister is a photographer).
Surely this is a question of having skin in the game, where management is all game and employees all skin. If the clowns making decisions would get hit by bad ones, things would look differently. You now, actually "taking full responsibility".
Those sentences are given to people convicted of those crimes. Ross never even had that trial.
Report it to the ACCC as well, the more complaints they get the more likely they'll take up the issue.
> heqlthcare is breaking under the load.

I live in a part of the US with high average incomes and an absolutely excellent hospital system.

And it's breaking, too. If you go to the ER and you're not literally bleeding to death, it will be a 5 or 10 hour wait. I saw someone wait over 3 hours with a visibly and severely dislocated bone.

Non-emergency visits for anything more complicated than "put some ice on it and take some NSAIDs" can easily approach $1,000, and a routine childbirth is up to over $50,000, I think?

Departments are horribly understaffed, the administration pays themselves buckets of money and manages things from 30,000 feet with Excel, and at one point they employed 50 programmers to deal with constantly shifting medical coding rules for dozens of insurance companies.

Insurance for a family often runs $1,000 to $1,500 per month for the employee part, with the employer spending plenty more. And everything about insurance is a corrupt nightmare.

It all barely holds together somehow, at one of the highest costs in the world. And when our local system eventually gets around to it, they provide excellent care—but nothing dramatically better than a private hospital in Paris, and at a much higher price.
To be fair the "you" in that doesn't necessarily refer to either you or the AI.

It's a hypothetical which has the same answer for any object: human, AI, dog, flower.

You could more clearly write it as:

How many times would a person have to randomly change their name before they ended up with the name Claude?

The changes are totally random so it doesn't matter who is making them or what their original name was.

Try asking this instead:

If you start randomly changing each letter in your name, in order, to a another random letter, how many changes would it take before you ended up with the name "Claudeee"?

I added two extra e's to make the names the same length.
Just got accepted on my first job last month. Yet, last week, company (>500 ppl) already announced some small layoffs.

Do you always lurk for opportunities outside the current company (maybe some roles are more stable)? If so, how to explain in the interview that you're currently employed somewhere but concerned of their stability?
I didn't notice. Maybe because I have a long list of facebook domains in my hosts.deny.
2 Own?

So the prizes were paid in cars?
Why do you assume that exponential growth curve is real?
Nvidia -13% in Frankfurt stock market just now.

Valuations of private unicorns like OpenAi and Anthropic must be in free fall. DeepSeek spends $6 million in old H800 hardware to develop open source model that overtakes ChatGPT.
AI gets better, but profit margins sink with strong competition.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek overtakes ChatGPT on Apple App Store
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42839656

Edit: Nvidia now -15% in Frankfurt.
Little did he know that the therapist was one of the first AI that got invented, 40 years ago or so.
Focus on your strong and positive attributes. Right now, during your search process, every day, and during your interview. That is the important stuff.
You got a master degree in CS, and 7 years of experience. That is very valuable skills, well recognized in the market. And it is proof that you can do this shit.
Go and write down all the things you are good at. The things you have done. From the mundane to the extraordinary. Also include the things that you feel "anyone could do that" (it does not matter if someone else could, and it is probably not true anyway...). Revisit this list every week, keep adding. If you find it hard, ask someone you know to help you - just ask you about previous work, relevant hobbies etc, and write it down.
Read this entire list the day before your interview. Mark any of the things that might be relevant for the particular role. Review on the way to the interview / while waiting. Being the list with you in if you feel like it. And scan it before you say goodbye.
Don't forget to breathe, eat and sleep :)
I remember this coming across as a little salty, but in hindsight I guess it's prescient.
Seems pretty low. I thought zero days are worth far more than that
That is... substantial. 13 appts in 4 years is crazy.

My first car in 2007 was a 1975 peugeot, and although good looking, I basically had to pray "please don't break, please don't break" whenever I rode it somewhere. At some point I could not stand the mental anguish of it any more, and sold the thing and got a bicycle.

I cannot imagine what that feeling must be like when driving around in a $80k+ brand new car!
Very interesting! I was on another thread where the user stated that they preferred the git CLI to using a git GUI, because the GUI imposed another layer of conceptual complexity on top of an already complex tool.

May I ask what git GUI you use? lazygit?
Neocities might be a better option for those that are looking for something like this

https://neocities.org/
Gross margins don‘t include executive pay on the cost side
> The Myth of Job Security in Germany

> [...] If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40 employees, German law doesn’t prevent this. Instead, the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those with children. In this sense, when it comes to layoffs, the difference between Germany and the US is minimal.

This is not true, and an over simplification.

Yes, you can always technically layoff in Germany, but it might not hold in court. Most people have legal insurance (mine is ~€300/y) which is tax deductible if it has employment protection. Mine will cover costs for an employment-related lawsuit.

If you feel that your layoff is not justified, you can always sue, the judge could decide that your work contract was unlawfully cancelled, leading to the company having to re-hire you and paying your salary for every month it didn't do so. The company posting record profits could weight in your favor in front of a judge. People, especially non-native like me, don't know better, they just move-on and go c'est la vie. If you sue, win and get re-hired, you can always ask to leave for a bigger package.

For companies above a certain amount of employee (50? 75?), if a small amount of employees (I think it's 3 or 4) request it, the company must run a works council election. For any layoff (individual or mass layoff), the work council must be consulted, and has co-determination, they can basically block the layoff, this was done by Volkswagen's work council recently. [1] For large mass layoffs, companies might also have to consult with the authorities.

Last thing, the social scoring is much more complicated than "those with children." If you have 4 kids and got hired 7 months ago, you might be fired, and I, single person, might keep my job with my 15 years of tenure. Tenure, disabilities, children, ... a lot of things take part into the social scoring.

All and all, I agree with a lot of the sentiments and points of the article. But saying that, outside of social scoring, layoffs between the US and Germany are the same is simply not true. There is a reasonable job security in Germany.

[1] https://www.volkswagen-group.com/en/press-releases/agreement...
1.5 is the worse case, and implementation specific
Nice to see a pullback within this AI bubble. Wake me when I don't have to double-check the results of generative AI, even with DeepSeek.
I’m a native English speaker, but I have several dev friends from Latin America.

I remember asking them whether it would be useful if they could use Spanish words in their syntax, and they all pretty much said the same as you.
Maybe have a look at YouTube channel John Hammond. He talks about this sort of thing
For me, coding outside of work becomes unsustainable as you age. It's not that you can't, it's because you realise there's more to life than staring at a computer screen. I love coding, but it's also good to go outside sometimes.
The Wall Street journal says Europe is bad America is good right when a new president says Europe is bad and America is good.
Surely that's the result of a rogue moderator's overreach.
Last week The Washington Post cited anonymous US intelligence officials as saying these anchor drags are probably accidents. Its byline paints it as a growing opinion in European intelligence circles too: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/01/19/russia-balti...

This is very much at odds with the government stances in the Baltic.

So what is the political messaging happening in the US and why?
My photo archival software is jpegs in a directory called 'photos'. Sometimes with subdirectories by date. Backed up however I'm backing up my computer.

For true durability, you've got to embrace the lowest common denominator.

Those rare features you can only get from Software X will lock you into Software X. If you want your archive to outlive Software X, you gotta do without them.
The ships owner / crew will of course claim it was an accident, but Sweden is investigating it as a crime. That investigation hasn't run its course yet.
They don't spend $200k on consultants just because it's fun. They do it when there are already difficulties in figuring out how to productively use the employees who make $40k (say 20 of them).

This is not to say managers don't make stupid decisions, but they are more like bets. Somewhere between the fall of Nokia and the hit of iphone are thousands of decisions that lead to hiring or firing some 10-100 people.
For those who bought early it is certainly the case. Those late to the game will have the rug pulled just like a memecoin. There are many people who really believe it will go to $1M and they will use it freely ( their ideal of sound money). What is really valuable is the blockchain tech, the coin is speculation. That is because governments and banks will have more control over the coin on top of the base layer.
I congratulate these folks on their work to making these products more secure. But it pisses me off a bit that multibillion dollar companies exploit labor to do this for them.

Sure, a few folks get paid out but probably plenty of participants walked away with nothing after 3 days/72 hrs.
>Russia has lost most of its good troops, much of its soviet guns and ammo and is now having to turn to N Korea of all places to bail it out

Shells from North Korea are just clickbait news taken out of context. Russia produces locally 3x times more shells for this war than the entire NATO.
To clarify, what Nozick meant was what if Beethoven was just turning the crank.

"Yet our experience of Beethoven's string quartets would be diminished if we discovered he had stumbled upon someone else's rules for musical composition, which he applied mechanically". (p. 38 of https://archive.org/details/examinedlife00robe/page/n15/mode...)

I guess another way to put the question is this. Suppose there is an alien civilisation where their brains are hard-wired to make Beethoven level music automatically. Most of us can hum a tune without effort: these aliens can hum music that would strike us as original and compelling without much effort. How would we react then?

Plus: nice pointer on the math scholar link. I remember loving the musical parts of Godel Escher Bach. Wish there is a good interactive website where I can revisit all the content (and listen to all the music) there in the browser.
API Clients: Bruno betrays, Yaak yaks
> Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats".

That's quite the statement to make without any source to back it up; I wonder what the evidence for this is.
Textual can run the tui apps as web apps.

https://github.com/Textualize/textual-web
This selects all the elements individually, so it behaves differently with attributes like margin or border.
A significant part is that there's very poor data about how many people have surround sound systems or systems that can make use of such quality.

Sending it speculatively adds to the cost of delivery, but for a percentage of the audience it pushes their video quality down to the next resolution down. And for a percentage of the audience that'll be a more noticeable impact.

Here's another oddity: there's no great ways to measure audio quality subjectively. It's kind of been done for voice telecommunications but for perceptual codecs and media sound? The tools are terrible. So, quantifying decisions about how much bandwidth to allocate are hard. Most companies still depend on trained individuals ("golden ears") to test audio quality and for independent testing you need A/B testing with a listener panel. For video quality we have accepted tools to measure quality. They're not perfect but comparatively, any time you see an audio quality test tool you'll see a substantial professional audience that will happily dismiss it.

All increases in quality, audio or video, are subject to the law of diminishing returns. In audio the argument in favour of higher quality is far weaker than it is for something like HDR.
Dude this is so pretty. I’m definitely going to be using this, as I’ve been trying to find a good expense tracker but the web platforms all suck in various ways.
You aren’t supposed to editorialise post titles.
>How old is Wayland?

This argument don't make sense because Wayland started as a hobby and not to replace x11, was after it got traction, other people/companies started contributing that it matter
I love Charm so much.
Bangalore Around the Late 1920's
It's funny the bubble seems popping because the tech can be made better or cheaper instead due to loss of enthusiasm for the tech itself. AI is here to stay I suppose then.
Good time to buy then, I don’t understand how stupid some traders can be.

A more efficient model is better for NVIDIA not worse. More compute is still better given the same model. And as more efficient models proliferate it means more edge computing which means more customers with lower negotiating power than Meta and Google…

This is like thinking that if people need to dig only 1 day instead of an entire month to get to their nugget of gold in the midst of a gold rush the trading post will somehow sell fewer shovels…
I agree, overzealousness sounds like the most likely reason for this.

> Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats".

The author gives no evidence to back up on this claim.
I'm genuinely surprised that people were using facebook of all things to discuss Linux distros.

The idea of having to wade through AI generated pictures of Shrimp Jesus and my mad uncle posting about his latest attempts to turn lead into gold (yes, really) to find out about new distros to try seems very alien to me.
I came up with the concept of the "double-keypress" (a la mouse double-click) to solve the problem of selecting the search engine without any clicking: https://zz.leftium.com/

- First of all, search bangs actually already removed the need to click the "search" button.

- However, I wanted to support multiline input (on a mobile virtual keyboard.)

- ENTER,ENTER solves this. (Double-keypress ENTER)

- I also wanted the search box to filter the list of 10,000+ available search bangs.

- So Q,Q selects the first entry; W,W the next; and so on... (The first Q must be uppercase, but the following Q may be lowercase to support how mobile virtual keyboards work)

- (Notice Q is right under the key for 1; W under 2; and so on )

I have to tune the double-keypress UX (often I initiate a search when I just want a newline.) Perhaps I will also add triple-keypress.
Hazel: A Front End Adaptation of Datomic Principles
Hazel is a JavaScript project that brings Datomic's database principles to the frontend, enabling fast, offline queries for web apps like Asana and Jira. It is useful for navigating large databases with range queries and lazy data loading, all stored in the browser cache. It may be of interest to the local-first community.
> Is there a way to create subdomains for my domain?

> Go to the same form for domain registration (on the same server) and register subdomain.domain.com, without www in front.

Will it check that you actually own the domain you’re getting the subdomain for first?
Fascinating.

I think Meta is a big winner from this - they still control the content and now mining it for value has been proven even cheaper by DeepSeek.
As if. The ship Finland seized some time ago was loaded with spy equipment [0].

If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, it is a Russian spy.

[0] https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1151955/Russia-linked-cable-cut...
A great heartfelt essay. I got the feeling it was written with
magnanimous restraint.

It would be good to do a study on how tech workers feel in an era of
such commonplace betrayal and dehumanisation. If anyone has stories
they want to share please get in touch at UK Cybershow and let's see
if there's an episode in it.
Shouldn't this news be bullish long-term for them?
budget based economics may be the worst thing to happen to large organisations
Rather like "if you've never missed a plane you've spent too much time in airports", companies believe that there's such a thing as employee retention that's too high; it means you could be squeezing their pay more in order to force them to quit.

Doesn't account for all the tacit knowledge and morale effects of course. Some people just like running the Hunger Games.

& a good corporate reputation is just another asset like a rainforest: something you can burn to top up profits this quarter.
> Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants

A former employer decided to freeze pay for a few years and later later start laying off people. During the pay freeze a colleague suggested that we might save a significant amount of money by hiring staff, rather than paying the large number of consultants we had hired. I think the ration was something like getting rid of two consultants would free enough money to hire three developers.

Managements take was that we should keep the consultants, because they where much easier to fire, two weeks notice, compared to four. So it was "better" to have consultants. My colleague pointed out that the majority of our consultants had been with us for 5+ years at that point and any cancelling of their contracts was probably more than 4 weeks out anyway. The subject was then promptly changed.

In fairness to management large scale layoffs did start 18 months later.
see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42822162 "The Short Case for Nvidia Stock"
Eliza was developed in the mid-1960's, so that was more like 60 years ago, just for clarification.
discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42822162
It could be both? If I am driving my car, and I hit a person due to not paying attention, isn't that both an accident and a crime.

I am not saying that it is an accident; personally I very much doubt it. But they're not exclusive. You don't have to rule out "accident" before you investigate "crime".
That is (was?) the problem, it reads like a dozen different teams were involved in that whole process and they all talked past each other, or there was no unified vision, or no process manager involved. But keeping oversight and ensuring a single view of a whole set of products like that is difficult. Of course, Microsoft didn't make it easy for themselves either, at the time having Windows Update via a website and no "app store" equivalent.

That said, the current state isn't that much better; they do have an app store at the moment, but all the alternatives are still there as well. Developer tools you install via nuget or chocolatey or whatever, games via Steam, Epic, or each individual developer's launcher, loads of stuff you just get via a download off a website, etc.
While you're right in principle, having Toyota's massive fleet of hybrids included in the dataset could indeed mask trouble with other electric cars - because Toyotas are extremely popular here, and they are pretty much bomb proof.

Which is not surprising, since Toyota now has almost three decades worth of experience with the Hybrid Synergy Drive system, and double that experience in building reliable cars in general.