skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It feels absurd for me to defend Sony, but this situation could have been a big problem for any company which has budgeted and maybe loaned money based on projected quarterly earnings. They may be reacting almost in panic to the new reality.
Ask HN: Why is SaaS discovery still hard even with Deepresearch/Manus?
I still find myself searching for a SaaS solution to a technical problem for way too long. And then a few days/weeks later I come across a product that solves that problem really well and wish I had found it earlier.

Gpt or deepresearch doesn't do a good job at going in depth, I still have to read the documentation and blog posts of a bunch of tools before getting a good idea of what'll work.

Do other people feel the same? What has worked best for you?
My understanding is that Lisp and most functional languages map very well to PL theory and how compilers and interpreters manipulate programming languages (functions as graphs of code, types as contracts etc.), while procedural languages map well to how CPUs execute programs, and the abstractions operating systems provide (functions as mappable pieces of memory, types as memory or register layouts etc. )
> the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say goodbyes

This is just so wild for me as an European, because at least in Germany if you get fired (or if you quit) you need to stay 1 - 3 MONTHS at the company still.
> Surely you must understand that "security" and "giving users a say in how their phone works" are diametrically opposed?

Absolutely not. With that logic, Google shouldn't allow people a say in what ROM it runs but I think the people in this thread are rather happy with having such choices
If my 5 yo daughter draws a square with a triangle on top is she an architect?
It really depends on your role. I still think our job is ultimately to solve problems for users and/or other stakeholders, and that coding is just one of the tools we use.

But it's not always the best tool. Even as an IC, I've done far more with emails and meetings than just writing code without thinking, whether that's discussing UX implementation details with the designer or pushing back on some half-baked over-engineered solution from management or fighting some evil advertising and tracking scheme from marketing. We don't just write code but also gatekeep it with some level of professional judgment and ethical discretion. (Or at least should.)

I think the orgs that don't give you any autonomy or agency beyond "code monkey" are the more problematic ones. Not only will you burn out having to repeatedly implement things you have no input into, you'll also be the easiest to replace if all you do is code.
Layoffs are one thing, but to be cut off without any notice, that really sucks. I usually know months in advance that when I'll leave, so I'll have time to finish what I'm working on and train the people who will take over my responsibilities. It seems weirdly destructive for a company not to allow for that.

As for email, calendar etc, I think the lesson here is not to depend on anything from your employer. Keep everything under your own control, so you won't lose too much when you get fired.
It's very hard for me to fathom why people want to be on a platform that lies about it's commitment to free speech, is pay to win, and is run by one of the worst people in the world right now.

I never had a Twitter account, so perhaps my ignorance is showing.
What's the Deal with Gemini?
> So does the engineer sit there and do nothing until they know the NFR, or do they decide on the NFR themselves and build to that?

Imagine you are going out to get dinner with a group of friends. "Hey, Antoine is allergic to shellfish and Lin is a vegetarian" are hard requirements. Now that I have some hard requirements, I may have input on options that fulfill those requirements because there are real constraints around which the choice must be made. With no requirements, I don't really care where we eat, I'll go with whomever has the stronger opinion; I'm really interested in having a great meal together -- why ruin vibe over whether it's Japanese or Indian?

Is there really a need to debate whether it's Japanese or Indian? Am I a coward for not taking a hard line on Japanese being the clearly superior dining option? Why cause friction when both get the job done? But if Antoine and Lin are coming, then I will take a hard line because Antoine is allergic to shellfish and Lin is a vegetarian so let's pick Indian because I like Antoine and Lin's company.

> ...send that NFR in an email...

Yes, this is exactly how real world software engineering works. Just send the NFR in an email and call it a day.
>There seems much unfairness sentiment nowadays where people think companies with access to lots of capital are guaranteed to succeed, like some kid with rich parents. Many seem to think that all there is between them and success is money, but in reality that's rarely the case.

Yes, Rich kids tend to have better chances than poor kids. Get in any trouble, you'll have a decent lawyer. You'll attend better schools, your parents will probably buy or help you buy your first home.

Need a doctor or want to see a therapist, you can do so within 24 hours. I'd even argue therapy is largely a luxury for the middle class and up- most of the time Medicare doesn't cover it at all or you have like a year waiting list.

I've been evicted twice in my youth and now I've made 6 figures for a good while.

Money makes things easier.
You might run into issues with your friends trying to rob you, but they'll rob you when you're poor too.

Likewise, a company with no funding is basically an idea.
Might be a good idea, might be a God awful one.
Show HN: SQL-powered search query parser with React UI
Bad implementations of username/password degrade to magic links.
Another way to view it is a series that accompanies a child to young adult years. (It took me a few years to get through the series inbetween other books. I assume many bedtime reads for the first few, and independent reading for later ones). What starts as fantastical and whimsical, indeed becomes more somber and concerning interpersonal dynamics, especially those within Moomin family and those around them. "Moominpapa at Sea" is probably most relatable to adult readers. The underlying message of family unity, finding ways to cope with certain events, parenting styles, need to break routines (picnics), unrequited crushes.

Moominland Midwinter is interesting character study too, with sporty "artistic" coded Hemulen proving too much for most of the cast to handle, the forgetful grandpa. Perhaps the message was it is okay to not be friends with everyone as it is a bother.

Compare it to "Finn Family Moomintroll" which is just a constantly stacking ridiculous lighthearted escapade with a few more mature jokes mixed in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Vargas_Llosa
Famous example from the pop-culture is Burr vs Hamilton:

> If you stand for nothing, Burr, what'll you fall for?
Thanks for finding this!

Will get this merged as soon as we can test across platforms.
This kind of nonsense prose has "AI" written all over it. In either case, be it if your writing was AI generated/edited or if you put so little thought into it, it reads as such, doesn't show give its author any favor.
Midnight on the Rue Jules Verne by Bruce Sterling (1987)
came to make a joke about how jacked you are, then saw you are a caregiver, tip of the hat sir! Ive been trying to think of ways to use my programming skills to help people and this is a beautiful one man. Bravo zulu as we would say in the Navy.
I tend to do something like this for most tickets I work on (that have choices to be made). I work through all the details and make sure I understand them all, then note what the difference choices are for various things. Where there's a choice to be made that requires "customer" input but that I have a pretty solid idea what the right choice is so am going to move forward on that, I'll make note of it, etc. It also gives me time/space to document ambiguities in the requirements.

I am.. overly verbose in tickets. That being said, it's come in handy many times in the past; some of which are me trying to figure out why I made a specific choice.
They are definitely more error-prone usage patterns, and coming from Rust the amount of hidden unsafety is quite unsettling (in addition to the obvious potential for user errors, depending on the aliasing model of your language/compiler, which I suspect Zig hasn't figured out yet, this parent pointer trick could even lead to miscompilations...)

Having said that, intrusive linked lists are quite an important data structure in code which is required to be allocation-free. Kernel code, signal handlers and code which requires consistent performance (eg. audio processing) need to be able to move objects between containers or have objects in multiple containers without allocating.
The LittleGP-30: A tiny recreation of a big deal from the 1950s
In general I don't have a problem committing, but there's also some solid rules of thumb that you can follow, for example: "if all else is equal, take the option that leaves you the most opportunity later".

However I have also employed Weighted Decision Matrices[0] to a pretty high degree of success if they're undertaken seriously and the outcomes taken as a learning exercise.

Ironically when I employed the Weighted Decision Matrix I often didn't like the result, which was equally telling!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision-matrix_method
Also, getting better at intuitively analysing these situations and picking an option is part of what it means to gain experience and become better at what you're doing. If you're doing things right, you will start out finding it difficult to pick an option when you're new (to programming, to a particular domain, to a particular technology, whatever), and as you get better, you 'll develop a "taste" for what seemingly-equivalent solution you prefer.
I was thinking this morning how weird it is that everyone knows who Einstein was

But much smaller percent Niels Bohr

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr%E2%80%93Einstein_debates
Ju Wenjun Scores 4th Straight Win, Draw Away from Retaining Title
Ubik was intentionally hilarious, with the never-fully-explained-but-there-you-go eye-eater, and the briefcase psychiatrist intended to drive you insane! (Or maybe that was from 3 Stigmata?)

Mark Weiser told me that Ubik was the inspiration of the term he coined, "Ubiquitous Computing"!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42790807

The Computer for the 21st Century:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkHALBOqn7s

I also loved The Weapon Shops of Isher, with the parallel universes and third eyes.
The Accelerating Pace of AI Development: A Structured Timeline
From discussions I've seen online, a lot can fail on satellites so there is a bias to do as little as possible on them. There does appear to be plenty of bandwidth to transmit back to ground stations.

The real win will be satellite-to-satellite transmissions where any data collected by the constellation is passed to the satellite that'll next fly over a ground station. This will lower the time from capture to analysis considerably. The fresher the data, the more valuable it is.
As I wrote, if it’s something genuinely sensitive I wouldn’t discuss it in a cab or bar or work on a presentation about it in a plane but there’s a difference between a driver overhearing something and being recorded.
Appreciate it Definitely some vibe coding involved. Used tailwind for styling and a bit of framer motion for the subtle animations
> the 5th by a person extremely non-commital. This person avoids exerting any technically authority, so as not to disturb the team's balance. All decisions are made democratically, all votes being equal regardless experience/seniority. Same goes when being called for estimates.

This is a very common failure mode for first-time leaders and managers. They optimize for minimizing conflict and want everyone on the team to like them.

A difficult lesson to learn in leadership positions is that you can’t make everyone happy and you can’t avoid every conflict.

Hyper-democratic leadership styles don’t work outside of very small and tight knit teams where everyone was already on the same page.

Someone needs to pull that person aside for some intense coaching to train them out of the mindset of people-pleasing and into the reality of getting work done. It’s not a fun transition but it needs to be coached. This is one of the turning points where many people realize they don’t want to be in leadership or management roles because the difficult decisions and uncomfortable conversations are in conflict with their personality.
I'm reminded of the last part of 'TLA' form the Jargon File (I had a hard copy back in college that I read cover to cover).

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TLA.html

...

The self-effacing phrase “TDM TLA” (Too Damn Many...) is often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin “What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 90s?” Paul's straight-faced response: “There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms.” (To be exact, there are 26^3 = 17,576.) There is probably some karmic justice in the fact that Paul Boutin subsequently became a journalist.
DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
Political beliefs affect patients' trust in doctors, study finds
This strikes me as parallel to "the best way to get the answer to a question online is to post the wrong answer, and people will flock to correct you".
> The tariffs hit other country's stock markets harder than the USA's

... Did they? Which countries? What made you think that?

S&P500 is down about 9% YTD. FTSE250 (UK) down about 8% (but that's in pounds, and the pound is up 5% on the dollar). Shanghai Composite Index(China) is down 2.5%. Stoxx 600 (Eurozone, broadly) is down 1.5% YTD. The only big one where what you say _appears_ to be the case is the Nikkei 225 (Japan), which is down 15%... but remember that it's denominated in yen, and the dollar's down over 8% vs yen in the same time.

As far as I can see, the only way you could even pretend this was the case would be by ignoring the decline of the dollar, and even _if_ you ignore the decline of the dollar that only really works for Japan, not Europe or China.
this happens in the UK (called garden leave) but in my experience you're typically sent home with full pay
the only factor that's stopping me from moving to readeck is a lack of import functionality for evernote bookmarks. otherwise, i'd be 100% on readeck.
I wish I were joking. When I predicted that HTTPS will be mandatory, many thought it was a joke.
90% of these remote jobs are either hybrid or US only. I'm so tired of wading though all this incomplete and dirty data.
Sorry, folks, I got COVID and haven't felt good enough for a couple days.
> WebSockets are superior to all revisions of HTTP except that HTTP is sessionless. Typically when developers argue against WebSockets it’s because they cannot program.

What did you mean by this? Were you suggesting that interactive web apps should maintain a persistent and stateful connection to the server and use that to send interaction events and receive the outputs back, like a video game would, rather than using stateless HTTP calls and cookies and such? Why is that superior?

And sorry if I misunderstood!
Indeed. The day to day compliance work will be very expensive, and in addition you would need to put a lot of money aside in case of a security flaw.
looks nifty, but does it do snapshotting?
Yes but what do you say? Don't dodge the question.
Great point in the article about tools lacking output schemas. Makes reliable multi-step planning tough.

We based Xops (https://xops.net) on OpenRPC for this exact reason (disclosure: we are the OpenRPC founders). It requires defining the result schema, not just params, which helps plan how outputs connect to the any step's inputs. Feels necessary for building complex workflows and agents reliably.
Thinking about this more. I guess my n=5 observation is that committal engineers tend to have specific expectations about the performance of their teammates, and hence produce similarly performing teams to them
That my opinions are right and if you don't agree with me you truly suck!
I'm not saying you'd be wrong to blame the bad leader - just that blaming them doesn't achieve much.

The CEO takes the blame, the board picks a new one (Unless the CEO has special shares that make them impossible to dismiss), and we go on hoping that the king isn't an idiot this time.

My reading of history is that some people are fools - we can blame them for their incompetence or we can set out to build foolproof systems. (Obviously, nothing will be truly foolproof. But we can build systems that are robust against a minority of the population being fools/defectors.)
google is not like it was in the 2000's, 2010's. Its much more corporate, politicky, and evil.
HN doesn't hate humor in general. Many of us just know what happens if you don't downvote away the easy jokes: all comment sections become more comedy than discussion. It's just too easy to make joke comments compared to the difficulty of making a comment that contributes to the discussion.
And they could just walk.
I am curious how much of python’s rise is a result of the data/ai rise and people wanting to be a part of that. Is it being used to consistently build production applications? If the TIOBE is mostly lines of code, which it’s description seems to indicate, are their any other indexes that are something like “production lines of code”?
> I’ve written about the platform’s array of issues before, but, in summary, the removal of the verified public figures and the introduction of the new Blue Ticks basically allowed people to pay for engagement.

I think the alternative was worse. Basically unseen employees at Twitter get to make judgement calls on who is noteworthy, with not much objective reasoning. I've seen people with 1k followers have a blue checkmark and then others with hundreds of thousands of followers not have one. And you even had instances where blue check marks were removed as punishment.

The only reasoning that made sense was politics, if you were a left wing author with a self published book of poems and 1k followers you had a good shot at a checkmark, and if you were right wing, you would have that check mark dangled over you. No clear process. And considering how influential these social media platforms are and how checkmarks effect discoverability, it made a huge difference. Instagram had the same thing and there were even stories of "influencers" sleeping with Meta employees to get verified.

Now anyone willing to pay a few dollars per month can have the same reach. There's a reason Instagram basically has this pay to play model and I think it's far better.

Also the fact that Twitter is the only (?) social media that pays its creators directly. No convoluted process, just if you're verified you get a check every once in a while and from what I've seen it's pretty substantial. The idea that social media companies should pay their creators has been around a while. It seemed deeply unfair that these billion dollar companies were created on the back of free labor. Reddit had worthless "gold" as a reward, but come on. This was a huge long overdue development in social media landscape that I don't think gets enough attention.
I suspect it is a ControlNet style generation, driven by some real underlying footage. The nonverbal communication is just too good for what I've seen so far from pure AI generation.
We used to make notes of management-isms and then play buzzword-bingo in company-wide meetings. When you got a full card, to properly win, you were required to ask the management a question that included the word 'house' (saying 'bingo' would have been too obvious, even for our managers).
It's normal flow of things in the industry, isn't it? It used to be an important skill for a programmer to optimize constantly. Tasks like "We need to cut halfkilobyte at least!" were challenging, and satisfying puzzles. And today you open a news webpage, it takes 1.5Gib and who cares? Typing speed used to be an important skill too, and nowadays one can be a decent software developer using two fingers. Memorizing names, and parameters used to be extremely important until autocomplete, and autosuggest appeared. I can expand this list to a hundred points probably.
Right. We've had mass data collection tools for a long time, web trackers, CCTV, microphones etc.

But what AI brings to the table is how much easier it makes it to combine and analyse all that data, build peoples' profiles. It scales infinitely better than hiring human analysts to track someone. It's too cheap and too tempting.
I can't thank you enough for providing that link and bringing it to my attention.
Pro tip: a sealable plastic sandwich bag filled with boiling water from the kettle. Rub it on the ice; watch the ice vanish extremely quickly.
#confidentlywrong

Most modern cameras can stream video to a computer through a proprietary protocol. These are implemented under Linux in gphoto2, and in other OSes, through some proprietary tool. During the great webcam shortage of covid, many companies made special, flaky Windows utilities to allow those to be used for web conferencing. Very few can natively as a USB Video Class (UVC) device. This is Canon's version:

https://www.dpreview.com/news/4796043082/canon-s-new-softwar...

Now, for Canon, it's a monthly subscription:

https://www.usa.canon.com/cameras/eos-webcam-utility

As a footnote: The general rule-of-thumb is about f/11 is where you start to notice diffraction limiting sharpness on full frame. That's a rule-of-thumb, and you're welcome to not step down below f/8, but calling f/9.5 "abysmal" is more than a little over-the-top. But no, a phone will not compare to a full frame with a $2000 f/1.2 lens. But it's quite competitive with a kit lens.
Wow Objective C still banging.
Lula "far left" lol I wish...
Ask HN: Port all Compute!'s Gazette games/apps via AI prompts to modern systems?
For example, imagine a version of the SpeedScript word processor that runs from the Terminal on macOS.

A detailed description of SpeedScript—including its shortcuts and some screenshots—might be enough for an AI prompt to generate code for a version that uses Curses.

Would this be easy to do?
Farmers' Favorite Weedkiller Nears Its End, Bayer Warns
Hako: An embeddable, lightweight, secure, high-performance JavaScript engine
The fundamental blocker: Context
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/business/farmers-favorite-weedkiller-nea...
Of course you push forward as a team, committal here I take to mean between two or more engineers trying to debate a technical option.

Why must every engineer have an opinion on every technical decision if there are no hard requirements? I may only have an opinion if there is a hard requirement.

I gave an example below.

> Say we must choose where to get dinner. Japanese or Indian. Without constraints, I do not care. But if Antoine and Lin are coming and Antoine has a shellfish allergy while Lin is a vegetarian, I now want to commit because I like their company and Indian is the better choice. Why make a fuss about Japanese or Indian if I do not care unless there is actually a real reason to pick one over the other? I just want to go out to dinner and have a good time otherwise; I am happy with Japanese or Indian!

Do you see the difference? If Antoine and Lin are not coming, I will eat anywhere; I don't care -- let's have a good time! If Antoine and Lin are coming, I think we should pick Indian because they have requirements that we should consider -- let's have a good time!

It seems pretty clear to me that not every engineer must have an opinion on every technical decision to which they should commit when sometimes, the choice doesn't matter and it's easier to let the individual with a stronger opinion drive the choice because the other option is friction for no reason and expending energy debating made up constraints.