MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-08 04:48:52+00:00
You are arguing from this bucket

> conversely if we delete funds nominally allocated to X or Y it means we don't care about X or Y

I am saying you can't assume that because money was allocated for something it went to the critical thing you wanted. Like 45 billion for rural broadband.

> The example here was doctor reimbursement.

Yes. If the doctor reimbursement is improper you don't pay it out. It is the hospital's job to get things right when asking for money. If the hospital sent an invoice for a procedure the patient did not actually get (this was a large amount of the waste), you REALLY DO NOT PAY, if you pay then you are signaling to the hospital that it's OK to keep overcharging the VA.
by JimDabell | 2025-04-08 04:48:56+00:00
> Git was always worse than Mercurial. It won because of GitHub. If MercurialHub had been invented instead we’d all be using that and would be much happier.

MercurialHub was invented. It’s called Bitbucket, it was founded around the same time as GitHub, and it started out with Mercurial. People wanted Git, so Bitbucket was forced to switch to Git.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-08 04:49:04+00:00
And even if it was bigger, and it dislodged bigger rocks, these rocks would basically stay in the same orbit around the Earth as the moon is. The extreme amount of dV it would take to escape the moon’s existing orbit in the right direction so as to fall anywhere near the Earth makes this scenario improbable. I believe (don’t quote me) that we are talking on the order of 10km/s.
by jart | 2025-04-08 04:50:58+00:00
Those policies ostensibly make life better for people, but the main reason they exist is because they stimulate technological development by driving up the cost of labor. Societies where labor was cheap, like dixie and ancient rome, weren't going to get us to the singularity. Their smart people were too comfortable. As for YIMBY now that's something we can agree on.
by danielscrubs | 2025-04-08 04:53:30+00:00
Japan always does the hard thing. If someone misbehaves and two people are close by you can be sure that they loudly will talk with each other about how the person misbehaves (they are not afraid). The prisons are very strict, with beatings if you don’t follow authority. The police acts swiftly and have small offices everywhere . Green tea and healthy food makes people be able to control their mood (hard to not stuff your face).

The rules are very open and clear. The deincentives for misconduct are strong.

The newspapers focus are different. More fun or actionable news.

People just think they are built different, that is not the case. They just succeed with many small things that makes a greater whole. But people just dismiss it as a culture thing, which is reductive.
by HKH2 | 2025-04-08 04:54:53+00:00
And the bit before it:

> The results indicate that certain listening habits differ significantly between the neurotypical and ADHD-screened groups. The ADHD-screened group reports significantly more background music listening during less cognitive activities and while studying, compared to the neurotypical group.

I don't think it's an interesting conclusion, so maybe the GP is looking for something more substantial.
by defrost | 2025-04-08 04:55:00+00:00
There are more and more quality papers in my opinion.

That said, we are now collectively aware of more and more poor quality papers thanks to the speed of the internet and the ease with which anyone can search for subject and throw up a paper without regard for quality.

It's worth noting that the source here is a dubious "research publisher" paper mill described as:

They’re quasi-predatory. Maybe not as bad as MDPI, but engaging in many of the same practices: inflation of special issues, startlingly fast review times, and from other commenters it seems they’re also ignoring reviewers so they can publish more articles and bring in the APCs. Like MDPI, you can find good articles in Frontiers papers - one of my go to’s for interrupted time series is in a Frontiers journal - but as time goes on and knowledge of their shadiness spreads, you’ll be better served not having your name associated with them.

here in r/AskAcademia : https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/comments/179bnvv/how_ar...
by simonw | 2025-04-08 04:55:10+00:00
John wasn't really talking about the Quake demo where each frame is rendered by generative AI. He started by saying:

> I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is, but I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers.

By the time he got to "power tool" he was talking about something else entirely.
by galaxyLogic | 2025-04-08 04:55:14+00:00
JavaScript is not Lisp but it is more like Lisp than like C, even though syntactically it much resembles C.

ES6 JS has nice syntax for calculating with lists:

let [car, ...cdr] = [1,2,3]

After the above 'car' has value 1 and 'cdr' has value [2,3].
by bitmasher9 | 2025-04-08 04:56:35+00:00
If you’re a state actor it probably wouldn’t be too hard to create US citizen IDs anyone could fall into.

Hack a hospital to give a birth certificate for a new born baby (easily within NK’s reach), and then mail the documents for a SS card. In eighteen years have an agent take the GED and SAT, and score well enough to get into state school. Then graduate and apply to the list of target companies you want to infiltrate.

You’d have to go pretty deep into someone’s identity to unearth this sort of approach. Probably not enough for a military clearance, but enough for anything not directly defense related.
by gregdoesit | 2025-04-08 04:57:30+00:00
If you think the issue of devs using fake identities is a problem limited to the Fortune 500: I talked with a 6-person startup who very nearly hired a person who could have been from anywhere else than they claimed, including North Korea. All they know is the candidate used an AI filter to make them look like a Polish person [1] - and this startup recorded when they caught this faker.

This is a full-remote startup and they have now added a mandatory in-person interview to their recruitment loop.

Amusingly, in their case, using local job boards did not help: they got candidates pretending to from Poland or Serbia, yet not speaking the language.

A little sad to see how each episode like this casts more doubt and uncertainty into full-remote interviewing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43340994
by uecker | 2025-04-08 04:59:48+00:00
A lot of the ideas around git were known at this time. People mentioned monotone already. Still, Linus got the initial design wrong by computing the hash of the compressed content (which is a performance issue and also would make it difficult to replace the compression algorithm). Something I had pointed out early [1] and he later changed it.

I think the reason git then was successful was because it is a small, practical, and very efficient no-nonsense tool written in C. This made it much more appealing to many than the alternatives written in C++ or Python.

[1]: https://marc.info/?l=git&m=111366245411304&w=2
by polynomial | 2025-04-08 05:00:10+00:00
Not in this case. Fox News didn’t initially report it as fact, but rather the claim seemed to stem from a misinterpretation of Hassett’s interview.

But then CNBC flashed a similar headline (without unpacking it as not what Hassett actually said, and then Reuters picked it up, citing CNBC. And markets spasmed 3.5%.

What Hassett had actually said, for those who missed, was 'Trump's gonna do what Trump's gonna do.'
by usefulcat | 2025-04-08 05:00:21+00:00
> something I think it was called VSS

Hmm, maybe Microsoft Visual Source Safe? I remember that. It was notorious for multiple reasons:

* Defaulted to requiring users to exclusively 'check out' files before modifying them. Meaning that if one person had checked out a file, no one else could edit that file until it was checked in again.

* Had a nasty habit of occasionally corrupting the database.

* Was rumored to be rarely or not at all used within Microsoft.

* Was so slow as to be nearly unusable if you weren't on the same LAN as the server. Not that a lot of people were working remotely back then (i.e. using a dial-up connection), but for those who were it was really quite bad.
by palmotea | 2025-04-08 05:00:35+00:00
I don't think so. I think the US is seeming more and more like a paper tiger. It still has a bit of a technology advantage, but China has such an overwhelming advantage in manufacturing capacity, that I think a conflict may will end up being like WWII in reverse: the US with V-2s and jet fighters (but too few) overwhelmed by waves and waves of Chinese B-17s and P-51 Mustangs.

Also China's cornered the market on the latest military tech advancement: small drones. They've completely changed the battlefield in Ukraine, and my understanding both the Russian and Ukrainian drones are made from kits of Chinese building blocks (motors, frames, control boards, etc) sources from places like AliExpress. In a conflict with China, the US is going to get its AliExpress accounts closed, and probably lacks the manufacturing base to replace it at the necessary scale.
by cmurf | 2025-04-08 05:00:44+00:00
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5236989-partisan...

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5236599-thune-trump-tari...

Believe it. With polls like this, no chance of a vote to overrule the president on tariffs. He said he was going to do this. It was central to his campaign. The single most repeated thing he promised were big tariffs.
by fsloth | 2025-04-08 05:00:50+00:00
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘good’.

May I suggest you may have meant ‘there are probably people who in the deepest of their heart disagree with state policy’.

If the state can execute your family on a whim because somebody stepped out of line you keep generally those sentiments well hidden.

But _liking_ the policies of the state where you live in is generally not considered a vice. So if a person who disagrees with the NK state is ‘good’ this implies people who agree NK state are ‘bad’ and I don’t think that’s the right framework when discussing large populations of nation states.
by tkel | 2025-04-08 05:07:45+00:00
"A lifetime of propaganda" about how NK is some nightmare land?

The evidentiary standard on reporting goes basically to zero if it's about NK. Outlandish claims are to be taken at face value and not interrogated, because of a "lifetime of propaganda" in the US, since the Korean War. Yes, that is linked with racism. The evidentiary standard in the media on other European countries for example is much much higher. For the most part, the racist narrative follows that places where white people are good and free, and places where non-white people are dangerous and bad. Classic racist rhetoric.

With regards to the specific points the article is making: "The FBI reported the money funds nuclear weapons and operations". Is a laughable fearmongering hypcrocrisy. part of Every tax dollar in the US goes towards funding nuclear weapons and operations. But good luck trying to get reporters at Fortune to be self-aware of their hypocrisy. That's the propaganda: bad when they do it. Good or neutral when we do it. Uncritical re-printing of statements from government agents (FBI). A reporter with an evidentiary standard would ask for evidence before printing that. Last I checked there was only one country that has actually used a nuclear weapon. Objectively, I would say that country is far more dangerous.
by ravirajx7 | 2025-04-08 05:08:50+00:00
This reminded me of something that happened to a friend of mine not long ago. He’d just been laid off from a pretty good Salesforce Admin job and was already in a tight spot financially when his laptop’s motherboard fried after a voltage spike.

Local shops were quoting ₹25,000–₹30,000 (roughly $300–$360), which he just couldn’t afford. Then a friend told him about Nehru Place. He sent the laptop there through someone he knew, and the repair only cost him around ₹5,000–₹10,000 ($60–$120). Way more reasonable.

He was glad to get it fixed without spending a lot but it does make you wonder how reliable those reused parts are. Like, how long is it gonna hold up before something else goes wrong?
by bhasi | 2025-04-08 05:10:46+00:00
You are not alone. Coming from Gerrit myself, I hate that GitHub does not allow for commenting on the commit message itself. Neither does Gitlab.

Also, in a PR, I find that people just switch to Files Changed, disregarding the sequence of the commits involved.

This intentional de-emphasis of the importance of commit messages and the individual commits leads to lower quality of the git history of the codebase.
by never_inline | 2025-04-08 05:11:36+00:00
> What did you get from it?

Beside the obvious "deep work", its the ability to be bored, and shut down time.

> I read it, but like most self-help books - I felt like it could've been 1/4 the size. The book could've been 10-20 pages.

Have to agree. It can be summarized.
by fragmede | 2025-04-08 05:12:10+00:00
The git tag hash references a commit. Without the commit metadata, you don't have a tree object and thus don't know any hashes. You can take the files on disk and compute the hash and furthermore you can take that hash and make a tree object. but without the commit, all you can say is you have a tree object, you don't have a tree object for the commit in question to compare it to.
by muzani | 2025-04-08 05:13:07+00:00
I always recommend Ray Dalio's video on how economics: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8

The tariffs and heck, electing a man like Trump, is a response to the existing situation.

1. Debt is very high and increasing at an unsustainable rate. Rather than default on debts, empires always print more money.

2. Competitiveness has gone down. In times of comfort, work ethic goes down too and a culture emerges where the working class is looked down on.

3. Economic disparity results in political polarity between the left and the right. This leads to revolutions. American revolutions tend to be fairly peaceful, but many are violent.

4. Technological advances allows for a shift in the order. New contenders have the conditions to make good use of them, which allows them to outpace the global leader.

5. Wars increase in a desperate move to hold on to power without having an economic lead. This leads to overextension and further collapse.

The tariffs are primarily a response to debt and competitiveness. Trump's election and everyone's distrust for him stems from political polarity. Many of his recent surprising actions are in preparation for a war.

The tariffs are an attempted cure to an existing problem. But like many cures, it buys time until the inevitable happens. It's not making the US more competitive. It might not cure the economic disparity.

So what you see is three things coming together: 1) admission that the US debt may not be manageable, 2) worrying long term outlook, 3) Trump's lack of diplomacy making people assume the worst
by ryandrake | 2025-04-08 05:14:49+00:00
Yea, but most of them scale too much and have 1,000 clients looking for 1,000 jobs. That's not enough focus for me to pay for. I wouldn't pay $10K or even $1K for that level of service.

Ideally, my "agent" would have max 2-3 other candidates, and offer a totally white glove service: They know my comp preferences, my location (or remote) preference, my ideal company size, industry, desired job level. They would know my schedule and go out and do all the searching and filtering, the application legwork, and basically only get back to me when the interview is scheduled and I need to show up. Then, afterward, they would take care of all the salary negotiation/maximization and let me know the offer and starting date. I'd probably be willing to pay 5-15% of my first year's salary for that level of service.

Don't quote me on that, but as a rough approximation, I feel like the toil of job hunting is so extreme that I'd be willing to part with a significant chunk of change for someone who could actually reduce that toil and deliver a real job offer or two.
by ezekiel68 | 2025-04-08 05:15:44+00:00
>And the git data structure... falls apart for large files.

I'm good with this. In my over 25 years of professional experience, having used cvs, svn, perforce, and git, it's almost always a mistake keeping non-source files in the VCS. Digital assets and giant data files are nearly always better off being served from artifact repositories or CDN systems (including in-house flavors of these). I've worked at EA Sports and Rockstar Games and the number of times dev teams went backwards in versions with digital assets can be counted on the fingers of a single hand.
by SilasX | 2025-04-08 05:16:31+00:00
To repeat my litany of shirking:

1) We don't need software tests because we have a QA team.

2) We don't need a QA team because we can just watch for user bug reports.

3) We don't need to watch for user bug reports because anything that actually matters will show up in the usage or sales stats.

4) We don't need to watch the usage or sales stats because it's redundant with our general financial picture.

5) We don't need to watch our general financial picture because we already have a canary in the form of repo men hauling furniture out of the lobby.

Different companies have different standards for when they start noticing and caring about a bug.
by cookiengineer | 2025-04-08 05:17:11+00:00
Minitube is pretty great, and uses MPV (and therefore yt-dlp) behind the scenes. It has filters that are really neat, and is very minimalistic.

I personally use it, too, to avoid distracting myself and to actively search for everything I consume.

[1] https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube
by fragmede | 2025-04-08 05:18:02+00:00
https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/comparison-human-and-chi...

gives the 40 million (35+5). It gives by name a bunch of genes unique to humans, though doesn't count them. 300 is just an estimate, I couldn't find a specific reference to that number, thought it's widely to believed to be in the hundreds (and not, say, the millions).

Also https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/comparison-human-and-chi...
by kazinator | 2025-04-08 05:18:41+00:00
The thing is, "jeepers", "ain't got nothin'" or "far out" are correct in ways that wrong usage of "begging the question" aren't. They're not based on a misunderstanding or anything. Jeepers is a way of avoiding saying Jesus, far out is just a shortening of something like far out of the ordinary, rad is an abbreviation of radical. None of these are criticized as words or phrases being used incorrectly.

In the English speaking culture it's not uncommon for "begging the question" to be called out when it should be "raising the question". Until those voices completely stop it's questionable usage. It carries a blemish, unlike usage that is free of criticism.

That's a descriptive stance. If I stand outside the English speaking culture and observe it, I see that certain malapropisms and whatnot are criticized by a good many of its members. They are native speakers and their opinions are data points that cannot be disregarded.
by try_the_bass | 2025-04-08 05:22:36+00:00
I mean, everyone's trying. I've noticed a marked increase in the number of people in software engineering who are there first and foremost for the paycheck. Some of them don't even like writing software!

This doesn't necessarily correlate to skill at writing software, but I've also encountered a higher ratio of poor performers from this growing demographic, as well. The end result is that the median skill level seems to go down over time.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and seems like it should be expected as the pool of people working in software development grows.

But as time goes on, there are definitely more and more people who are trying (and succeeding!) at doing it.
by huevosabio | 2025-04-08 05:23:12+00:00
It's a tech assisted operations company, similar to Uber and Lyft.

The key distinction between say United Airlines and gig tech companies is that the latter will aggressively avoid owning physical assets and use tech to be a streamlined middle man in a market that actually requires a lot of operations.

They are a tech company, but in the sense that they get their edge from software not that they sell it.
by bruce511 | 2025-04-08 05:23:51+00:00
Like Peter, I do recommend talking to someone about this. You don't sound content, and life is too short to miss out on the journey.

I say this as someone who earns much less than you (never mind 800k), and who didn't go to a top school.

I'm no psychiatrist but your posts suggests that you see yourself as a failure, or possibly you've gotten that feedback from others directly. Perhaps at Amazon or elsewhere.

Projecting that feeling onto others suggests you would really benefit from talking to a professional about this.

I don't think you're a failure, I don't know you. But from what little you've revealed I'd say you're not a failure. But perhaps you had your own goals you failed to achieve?
by usefulcat | 2025-04-08 05:24:26+00:00
There were far, far worse things out there than Subversion. VSS, ClearCase, an obscure commercial one written in Java whose name escapes me now..

Subversion was basically a better CVS. My recollection is that plenty of people were more than happy to switch to CVS or Subversion (even on Windows) if it meant they could escape from something as legitimately awful as VSS. Whereas the switch from Subversion to Git or Mercurial had more to do with the additional powers of the newer tools than the problems of the older ones.
by sshine | 2025-04-08 05:25:14+00:00
My impression is that once we didn’t want to call jails for containers to differentiate them to jails’ advantage: they’re essentially more secure. They’re not just containers (if your frame of reference is Linux).

But since containers have become such a hype in our global infrastructure, and people are seeking off the big cloud platforms, perhaps it is more in FreeBSD’s interest to remind off-clouders that FreeBSD does have container technology.
by rzzzt | 2025-04-08 05:26:18+00:00
Data broadcasting companies did use scanlines originally intended for Teletext/Ceefax in the 90s to transmit public information (e.g. weather forecasts, water levels): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datacasting

In that case the "antenna in" signal did go to an ISA decoder card in the PC, but it appears that the BBC Micro also had an adapter for receiving classic Ceefax pages, some of which also contained software: https://www.teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ceefax/telesoftware/
by LordGrignard | 2025-04-08 05:28:04+00:00
this is all the more important since 60$ in india is enough for a meal for four in an expensive restaurant in one of the better malls ( for e.g. in Mumbai ) ... and 25k to 30k is just ludicrous for a laptop. Even 5-10k will easily hurt his pockets but it depends on what the laptop's specs were and what it was worth