MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-02 23:46:22+00:00
HN's "flamewar detector" (I prefer "spiciness indicator") is one of those tools I'd been highly skeptical of, and still have significant issues with, but ... it does in fact work much of the time. It's where it doesn't work that the problems really manifest.

I'd come to that conclusion after scraping all "past" front pages from 2006 through May-ish 2023 and doing a number of analyses of that corpus. (I've commented on that a few times here on HN and on the Fediverse.)

One of the absolute spiciest discussions ever was a pg post about HN itself. Which suggests that when a topic of of direct interest and familiarity, people will tend to hop on it. There are also a great many flame-y threads, though note that by virtue of making the front page, my sample probably skews to less disastrous threads with the absolute sh*tshows being well below the top-30 fold.

Among other weaknesses, spiciness doesn't distinguish between pure troll/clickbait threads, and those on which there's a significant and justified spread of opinion. As such, the metric makes hard discussions even harder to have, though mods can and do turn off the penalty on request (often many hours after the discussion's started, for obvious reasons, which is its own penalty). I do wish that HN could have those discussions, and I've thought and written (both on HN and in emails to mods) about what that might entail. I'm coming to the long-delayed and somewhat regrettable conclusion that it's not the right tool for that particular job.
by api | 2025-04-02 23:46:22+00:00
The phenomenon being discussed here is a type of overfitting:

https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....

The last 50 years or so of managerial practice has been a recipe for overfitting with a brutal emphasis on measuring, optimizing, and stack ranking everything.

I think an argument can be made that this is an age of overfitting everywhere.
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-02 23:46:39+00:00
I've thought about firing a forum or web IRC back up just for topics like these but I suspect it would just attract a lot of hate. I came here to escape running such sites but I am conflicted. It almost makes sense as anything political that is permitted here becomes instantly biased and there is a lot of misinformation, emotions and dog-piling from people that are unwittingly stuck in echo chambers. I would also have to find a CDN that would accept the hate. I do not usually implement CDN's for my personal sites but most VPS providers are cowards these days.
by HappMacDonald | 2025-04-02 23:46:57+00:00
Put it this way: robots will be every bit as susceptible to social engineering attacks as humans are (at BEST!), not due to any flaw in the robots but due to the flaw in ambiguousness of the specification of the laws. An adversary can trick an agent into not classifying a certain being as "human", for example. Or not classifying a certain outcome as a "harm".

It doesn't help that humans have had such a poor track record on those exact same topics for so many centuries, now. "Well they don't count, they're foreigners/a different race/a different gender/a different religion/criminals/barbarians/homeless/deviant/poor/listen to Nickelback etc". "Well, that's not a harm, it's an inconvenience/an earned outcome/a privilege/loss of a privilege/what do they expect, they should toughen up/not as bad as X/it'll heal/not my fault/not my concern etc".
by nosduhz | 2025-04-02 23:47:04+00:00
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by abhgh | 2025-04-02 23:47:41+00:00
The people who founded Ponoc seemed to have creative differences with Miyazaki. They wanted to make a movie [1] that they felt Ghibli won't greenlight [2] - but there seems to have been no deep seated animosity or desire to rip-off. Incidentally I just borrowed this movie from the local library a few hour ago because the cover art reminded me of Ghibli but I noticed it wasn't a Ghibli production. Some searching online led me to the cited article.

[1] Mary and the Witch’s Flower https://imdb.com/title/tt6336356/

[2] https://otakuusamagazine.com/hayao-miyazaki-says-he-wont-see...
by shaldengeki | 2025-04-02 23:47:52+00:00
This is an extremely minor point, but:

> significant parts of our federal government have abandoned key precepts of outcome-driven problem-solving. (Just try navigating the IRS’ Free File tax return tool. I gave up and paid for H&R Block instead.)

It seems deeply weird to me to pick this example, of all things, where things are getting better because of outcome-driven problem-solving. (You might also want to consider that "I gave up on Free File" might score you anti-points with your audience.)
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-02 23:48:03+00:00
~19M people live on the US-Mexico border alone in the US [1]. I am not ignoring nor unsympathetic to those who cannot, for whatever reason, make a trip outside of the US happen, but surfacing it as an option for those who can. When you are trapped within a suboptimal system, you have to find ways to hack around it.

[1] https://www.southernborder.org/border_lens_southern_border_r...
by groby_b | 2025-04-02 23:48:05+00:00
What's the _point_ of the anecdote, though? You're taking up everybody's time to tell a story, do us a favor to have a relevant point.

"Have no fear" doesn't apply to the article, at all. You might as well write "what I learned was to not stick legos up my nostril". Also good advice. Also not applicable.

It's fine if it doesn't work for everyone, it's annoying if it isn't relevant to anyone.
by polishdude20 | 2025-04-02 23:48:29+00:00
Yep. Especially when you know you have the qualifications. If it's not a match, despite meeting your written qualifications, then how about you at least update your requirements so I don't waste my time?

Also, the application process requires me to download their Fathom software anyways. The least they can do is respond with a rejection.
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by xxprogamerxy | 2025-04-02 23:48:45+00:00
I'm a bit skeptical if this will do the trick. These PoW challenges can be parallelized across different websites and may not be as off-putting as intended. Here some quick back-of-the-napkin math:

DeepMind's MassiveText dataset was sourced from ~2.35B documents. A difficulty of 4 leading zeros requires an expected 16^4 SHA-256 hashes per site. Benchmarks [1] show an H100 at ~12k MH/s, meaning it would take just ~3.5 hours to solve for all 2.35B pages.

[1] https://gist.github.com/Chick3nman/e1417339accfbb0b040bcd0a0...
by kragen | 2025-04-02 23:49:11+00:00
Conventional wisdom is to not wear gloves when working with HF, as pedvide points out. It may not be to your advantage to ban people like pedvide's advisor from your lab, especially if at some point they're refereeing your papers—though, at least from my point of view, there should be no such personal-offense considerations involved, it would be unsurprising if someone were insufficiently detached for such a personal snub to prejudice them against you.
by xyzzyz | 2025-04-02 23:49:28+00:00
You missed the point. Imagine we want to deport a British citizen to Britain for felony fraud committed in US, and it just so happens that the same person is wanted in Britain for a completely different crime, say burglary. We know that if we deport him, he will be jailed and prosecuted in Britain according to British laws. Should this prevent us from deporting him? Is him being considered a criminal in his own country somehow protecting him from deportation there? Are we only allowed to deport non-criminals, and must keep foreign criminals in US, lest they get thrown in jail in the countries we deport them to?
by simne | 2025-04-02 23:49:53+00:00
It depends.. For some goods possible to just immediately raise prices, for others, business will try to compensate from another source.

As example, Daimler stated, they will cut cheapest models from export to US, so some segment will got less concurrent market, and probably prices will raise.

Probably, this is because Daimler have much higher profits on expensive models, so they could just lower profits on them. Other variant, also possible, expensive niches are more tolerant to price raise.

For small countries, tariff raise nearly guarantee prices rise, but US is big country, things are not so simple.
by j1elo | 2025-04-02 23:50:25+00:00
$90 if you buy it, $80 if you ~rent~ ehm I mean "acquire" a temporary digital license.

my point being: due to the risks assumed (someone can click a button and rob the product from you), the rights lost (cannot exchange games with your cousin), and the general lack of consumer protections on digital rentals aka. licenses, I'm a firm believer that their price should be 20 to 50% of what a proper physical copy costs; starting from the fact that you cannot spend $80 on a game, enjoy it, then resell it for $60 or so as we all ought to be able to do in all cases no matter what.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-04-02 23:50:40+00:00
I want to avoid letting a meta-level conversation slip into object-level. But using the object-level as an example, I would expect a comment that acknowledges the types of things that are hard to build with Manifest V3, particularly more advanced adblocking, and acknowledges that there need to be solutions for those things, and makes the point that letting extensions be all-powerful does lead to problems and that also needs solving, would not get downvoted to oblivion. That's much more nuanced than, for instance, suggesting that Manifest V3 is an unalloyed good with zero problems, which I would expect to get downvoted.
by cldellow | 2025-04-02 23:52:28+00:00
> If he's correct

He's not.

According to [1], the White House claims Vietnam has a 90% tariff rate.

According to [2], 90.4% is the ratio of Vietnam's trade deficit with the US -- they have a deficit of $123.5B on $136.6B of exports.

The same math holds true for other countries, e.g. Japan's claimed 46% tariff rate is their deficit of $68.5B on $148.2B of exports. The EU's claimed 39% tariff rate is their deficit of $235.6B on $605.8B of exports.

Who knows, maaaaybe it just so happens that these countries magically have tariff rates that match the ratio of their trade deficits.

Or maybe, the reason Vietnam doesn't buy a lot of US stuff is because they're poor. The reason they sell the US a bunch of stuff is because their labour is cheap to Americans. (They do have tariffs, but they're nowhere near 90%: [3].)

America's government is not trustworthy. Assuming that what they say is truthful is a poor use of time.

[1]: https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1907533090559324204/photo/1

[2]: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/southeast-asia-pacific/vi...

[3]: https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/news/vietnam-gives-us-tax-b...
by mubou | 2025-04-02 23:52:39+00:00
The problem is that a lot of people will google mermaid chart, or come across an extension like this, and find a site that looks like the official website and docs but isn't; it's a paid product with no relation that's simply profiting off of the name. That's deceptive, regardless of whether it's "fair use" or not.

Honestly, I'm surprised anyone on HN would defend that sort of behavior.
by emchammer | 2025-04-02 23:54:07+00:00
Russia in the White House is a lot more aggressive than McNuggets on sale in Red Square, and it means that containment is past dead.

I'd love for Zombie Henry Kissinger to rise from the dead, fix things, restore the galut to chutz l'aaretz, and fuck my brains out, but I just don't think it's going to happen.
by kanjun | 2025-04-02 23:54:21+00:00
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by zusammen | 2025-04-02 23:54:37+00:00
Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way.

My grandpa once said something that seemed ridiculous but makes a lot of sense: that every workplace should have a “heavy” who steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself. Why? Not to haze or bully but to filter out the non-fighters so that when management wants to impose quotas or tracking, they remember that they’d be enforcing this on a whole team of fighters… and suddenly they realize that squeezing the workers isn’t worth it.

The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.
by kevinqi | 2025-04-02 23:55:03+00:00
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by lesuorac | 2025-04-02 23:55:16+00:00
I mean, if just hire somebody without any sort of training it should just be expected that they're bad?

Like show me where in the Apple training they teach how to set ringtones?

UPS straight up flies people to training [1]. Of course their drivers are going to be better.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/UPS/comments/16oizrm/hiring_and_tra...
by danpalmer | 2025-04-02 23:55:31+00:00
And my point is that for Wikipedia to be the best Wikipedia, these initiatives are important, and therefore I don't see them as that much different.

I know Wikipedia has a reputation for cringe donation drives, but at a basic level I don't disagree with them raising money, with what they're raising it for, or with most of how they pitch the donation requests, as continuing to maintain and improve Wikipedia. Focusing on the split between the Wikimedia Foundation (the org you donate to) and Wikipedia (the product they produce) is a bit of a red herring in my opinion.
by okanat | 2025-04-02 23:56:24+00:00
This is simply too complex. There are quite a bit dependencies on Glibc and other GNU-based behavior.

What you're actually asking from them is creating a new Android or Chrome OS i.e. recreating the entire userspace. "Just split up musl" will not work. How the system headers work needs to be redefined. This is basically a complete redefinition of entire API of all Linux programs and libraries. Which library will supply unistd.h or any of the sys/whatever.h? Any interdependencies? I think even POSIX itself can be hostile against this. So the fix will have to deviate a lot from that (that's probably why Windows cannot be made POSIX easily either).
by marcuschong | 2025-04-02 23:56:45+00:00
In the country where I live, the problem is that it became much of a religious question. People feel like one candidate represents values different than mine, and that by not aligning with them, I'm not an ally. I don't have friends with such different values, but managing family has become a big problem during these times. It's very hard, for example, hearing your mother-in-law defending a change in the constitution that would forbid women to have an abortion, even when raped and at any time of pregnancy, when you have a small daughter. That person is actively trying to make the world a horrible place for my family, according to my values and honestly any sane person.

EDIT: typo.
by zusammen | 2025-04-02 23:57:57+00:00
Worse yet, these are upward-censored metrics. Failing to make them hurts your career, but making or exceeding your targets doesn’t really help your career—it’s just seen as validating management’s approach.

As soon as they impose metrics, you need to bring in a union, and (to be frank) chase or bug out anyone who’s not on board with worker solidarity.
by belter | 2025-04-02 23:58:38+00:00
The full list:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/02/trump-reciprocal-tariffs-cou...

10% tariffs on the Heard Island and McDonald Islands which are uninhabited, and can be reached only by sea, which from Australia takes two weeks by vessel. And also 10% on Svalbard and Jan Mayen which is also uninhabited. That will teach them not to ripoff the USA!

Oh NO tariffs on Russia or Belarus. None.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-02 23:59:16+00:00
I think a lot of commenters here are projecting this article onto their work lives as tech office workers, but it's really more about the world of unskilled and semi-skilled service/gig workers, like handymen, furniture assemblers, delivery drivers, and so on.

All these things can be true and they reinforce each other: The jobs suck <-> The people willing to do them aren't very happy, skilled or competent <-> The pay is minuscule. And we can't seem to get out of this Nash Equilibrium.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-02 23:59:17+00:00
Well yes, in practice color often is chaotic. Nobody is color-coordinating the cars in the road, or the houses on a street, or the signs and advertisements and billboards. It's a free-for-all that turns into garish noise.

And more neutral environments with accent colors makes sense because the main accent is always people and their clothing. Your patterned red dress won't clash with a neutral background. It will likely clash with a patterned orange wall. A more neutral environment allowed for lots of colored accents to exist without competing or clashing with them.
by atmavatar | 2025-04-03 00:02:00+00:00
> I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.

Voting for a party explicitly demonstrates at least acceptance of if not outright support for its platform. You don't get to absolve yourself of support for kicking puppies because the FooBar party also includes a modest tax cut in its policy agenda that you really want.

It doesn't matter if the opposing party advocates for raising taxes or even eating kittens.

That's true even if realistically, there are no other parties capable of winning. You can support a third party, abstain out of protest, or even begin a grass-roots campaign to start yet another party. You can even try changing the FooBar party from within, so long as you don't vote for them until sufficient change has occurred.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-03 00:02:20+00:00
We have to learn how to DIY more things. I pretty much don't hire anyone to do anything anymore, because I always end up having to supervise them, they do the work incorrectly, and I have to double check the quality and insist they come back to do it right. So, I'm not really saving any time. At some point, you might as well just do the work yourself because you know it will be done correctly.
by jdcasale | 2025-04-03 00:03:01+00:00
I recently tried Cursor for about a week and I was disappointed. It was useful for generating code that someone else has definitely written before (boilerplate etc), but any time I tried to do something nontrivial, it failed no matter how much poking, prodding, and thoughtful prompting I tried.

Even when I tried to ask it for stuff like refactoring a relatively simple rust file to be more idiomatic or organized, it consistently generated code that did not compile and was unable to fix the compile errors on 5 or 6 repromptings.

For what it's worth, a lot of SWE work technically trivial -- it makes this much quicker so there's obviously some value there, but if we're comparing it to a pair programmer, I would definitely fire a dev who had this sort of extremely limited complexity ceiling.

It really feels to me (just vibes, obviously not scientific) like it is good at interpolating between things in its training set, but is not really able to do anything more than that. Presumably this will get better over time.