MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by everforward | 2025-04-13 23:17:07+00:00
How do you handle the transition? Either the changes aren’t retroactive and the transitional generations have to fund their own retirement and the grandfathered folks, or they are retroactive and the elderly are either destitute or again supported by people funding their own retirement.

It would be an immense cost on those transitional generations. It seems terrible for the economy. Workers now have to save more of their paychecks, but also need compounding growth on stocks to make retirement feasible.
by sprocklebud | 2025-04-13 23:18:05+00:00
I got hit with a new equity compensation fugazi with RSUs at a small public company recently.

My offer letter pledged something like $100,000 of stock, vesting over four years. I was told that I would receive the grant within the first three months of my employment, once it was approved by the board.

Once I finally received the grant, it was 1/5 of what it should have been. “What gives?”, I inquired.

Apparently the stock incentive plan has a “price floor” for grants at $5 / share, and the stock had plunged to approximately $1 / share at my time of hire.

So my offer letter says my grant is for $100k, but in reality it’s $20k.

I learned this was because there was a limited pool of stock available for employee award grants, and a recent rout in the stock price meant there was an insufficient amount of stock available for grants.

Apparently going forward, offer letters specify the number of RSUs rather than a $ amount. So I guess a charitable interpretation is that it may not have been so much an intentional deception as a set of unfortunate circumstances coming together with some poor oversight on the details of my offer letter.

Still, I am incensed.

I referred to a previous employer’s offer letter and RSU grant for comparison. The offer letter also specified a $ amount, and did not specify how it would determine the price of the stock to calculate the awards by.

In that case, it seemed to be the average closing price of the stock in the month the award was granted. Which I’m content with, but these details also were not specified in the offer letter.

tldr if you get an offer letter for a $ amount of RSUs, make sure to clarify (in writing) how the valuation of the stock is determined for the calculation of the number of units awarded.
by godelski | 2025-04-13 23:18:31+00:00
Sure, I'm not going to use my terminal to watch HD movies in. Nor am I going to use it to browse the web. But we're being a bit obtuse here in thinking the terminal is going to do everything. There is no single tool that solves all problems. Not even the computer, as general as it is. That's okay.

Being terminally terminal doesn't mean I only use the terminal and go headless on all my machines. It is my main interface with my computers but I'm writing to you from Firefox. Nor am I going to play steam games in it. But most of the time I'm on my computer I'm not playing games or watching movies. Even with web browsing 99% of what I'm doing I don't actually need these things.

I'd love to have a web that is much more minimal. We don't need to go to walls of text like the 80's, nor even as stripped as HN (which is very lightweight), but there is a nice elegance to more minimal pages (more than just aesthetics) and the zippy experience is almost universally appreciated.

And again, a lot has changed from the 80's and no, a VT200 cannot create the images I see on my machine. I'm not looking at pixelated junk. When I'm running chafa I'm getting something quite similar to what I'm seeing if I open the picture through my file manager. I'm sure if I zoomed in I could tell the difference but that's not my usual workload.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-13 23:19:22+00:00
Never really got traction on HN, but this was popular 7mos ago at release:

All-bot app SocialAI stirs debate over AI-driven social media (Axios) (2 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41625025

SocialAI offers a Twitter-like diary where AI bots respond to your posts (TechCrunch) (2 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41589616

SocialAI: A private, personal social network just for you (Wired) (3 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41585930
by cogman10 | 2025-04-13 23:19:54+00:00
For sure, it's a matter of degree.

I'm not an absolutist about crude oil. It'll likely have a place in society for a long time.

With that said, it's a matter of degree and where it should be deployed.

If, for example, burning 1 gallon of gas sets up a power generation which produces the equivalent of 20 gallons of gas without emissions, that's a worthy trade off.

As it turns out, that's roughly the energy trade-off for new solar/wind installations assuming a pure fossil fuel grid.

What you are saying isn't a gotcha. The entire cycle of CO2 released for fossil fuel use is not comparable to the CO2 released installing renewables. That some is released is meaningless.
by alganet | 2025-04-13 23:20:33+00:00
I don't think AI addiction is actually a thing.

Whoever is using chatbots obsessively, is using on others, not on themselves. Not to fill a void, but to play and harass other humans.

"Digital waifus" are old decade stuff, a very narrow market that has very low value. Those people aren't even addicted, it has become a healthy hobbyst culture.

If you are serious about mental health, the real issue right now is the growing "incel" supergroup of targeted "dangerous" personas. That also has nothing to do with addiction. Those kids need real friends, AI companions _will_ be an extra insult to them, not a pax to fill some hypothetical void. They are not lonely and sad (that's the label people put on them), they are desensitized.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-04-13 23:21:05+00:00
I think for some questions of resource scarcity, it can. Specifically this would apply to housing and material possessions (because war can decrease the population)

When the resources which are scarce are young, able-bodied workers who can caretake for the elderly while tilling the fields, I imagine war would exacerbate the problem.

Well, traditionally this would be the case anyway. In the modern age of warfare where civilians are killed with impunity, I imagine the casualty among non-combatants tracks population demographics more generally. So if there are twice as many people over the age of 60 as there are under 20 (for context, the population of these two groups was roughly equal starting in 2024 in the U.S.[1]), then one could imagine twice as many people in that age group dying. Perhaps more if population groups are required to relocate periodically to avoid bombings (as we've seen in Gaza) where the elderly are less capable of walking distances than the young.

[1]: https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-13 23:22:13+00:00
> I feel like I'm always fighting against the OS just to share files amongst users.

I’m not really sure what the issue you’re having is from what you’ve shared. But if the files and have read permissions for the relevant users, groups, or even everyone, then it should “just work”.

Perhaps the issue was with folder permissions? Hidden ACLs? Or shortcut icons? (the way Linux handles application icons is vastly over complicated in my personal opinion)

> I suppose the answer is probably a deduplicating fs like zfs/btrfs - although, do they dedupe across users (that feels like an exploit route).

Why would it be an exploit route? zfs and btrfs are CoW (copy-on-write) file systems which means if someone makes an edit on one copy, it wouldn’t edit both copies.

Maybe you’re thinking of hard links? These aren’t limited to CoW file systems (eg supported by NTFS and ext4) and those could run into issues where one person could update someone else’s “copy”.
by quantadev | 2025-04-13 23:22:39+00:00
Right, thanks. Appreciate the advise. I'm a big fan of using whatever libraries there available, in all contexts, as long as I'm using the "dominant" one. I always stick to whatever's most popular because it will be well supported, less buggy, have easily findable documents and resources the web, be "known about" thoroughly by LLMs, etc.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-04-13 23:22:49+00:00
There was a really good novel, "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson, that had a subplot about digital teachers for schoolkids as a subersive/revoluationary scheme against those not willing to educate the kids. It didn't discuss crappification though.

Gladiator at Law by Pohl and Kornbluth was also pretty good. Computerized jury trials. The "jury box" turned out to be a computer.
by tonyarkles | 2025-04-13 23:23:11+00:00
> And then, is it really impossible to develop an objective metric for the level of visible detail that is maintained? Is that really psychovisual and therefore subjective? Is there really nothing we can use from information theory to calculate the level of detail that emerges out of the noise? Or something based on maximum likelihood estimation?

I think you'll find something similar with audio, image, and video compression algorithms in general. The majority of these are explicitly designed to spend more bits on the parts that humans care about and fewer bits on the parts we won't notice. E.g. MP3 uses perceptual coding/masking: when there's loud sound at frequency f0 and a quieter sound at nearby f1=f0+(small delta f) most people won't hear the sound at f1 so the codec just throws it away. You'd be able to see the difference on a spectrogram but you wouldn't be able to hear it.
by mullingitover | 2025-04-13 23:23:15+00:00
> When US interest rates went from 1% to 4.5-5% without a drop in stock prices

The Dow crashed from ~36k to ~28k in less than a year, and that decrease in value doesn't account for inflation. Adjusting for inflation I don't think the markets have actually fully reached their late 2021 peak.
by Uzmanali | 2025-04-13 23:24:03+00:00
In my case, I built a product specifically designed for a niche audience, an area that larger competitors overlooked. As they scaled up for the masses, I focused on solving a specific problem and engaged directly with users.

What I’ve learned is that small teams with fewer resources can win by moving fast, being hyper-focused, and offering something personalized.

It's not always about having the most resources; it's about using what you have in an efficient and creative manner to carve out your own space.
by fragmede | 2025-04-13 23:24:23+00:00
Not since... I'm not sure the regulatory change, but if employees are able to sell back to the company or to private investors, resulting in cold hard cash in employee bank accounts, without the company going public, I'd say they are worth something. We can argue about how, without an IPO, the price isn't fairly decided upon, but having cold hard cash in the bank is nonetheless real.
by Onavo | 2025-04-13 23:25:18+00:00
> Europe craves work life balance, Elon craves technological power. He's convinced some smart people their life is the company. Europe just doesn't have that culture, and it's mandated by law that you can't have that culture.

The problem is cultural yes but they have plenty of low cost labor willing to work overtime and put in long hours. It's called Eastern Europe. The bigger problem is an overly bureaucratic Brussels and a lack of imagination among their leadership. Britain can probably do well in this area, maybe the French too if they get their head out of their asses. The day they stop sending their top ML companies like Huggingface and Mistral to the US for funding is the day when the Fifth Republic finally spreads realizes their potential.
by omoikane | 2025-04-13 23:25:19+00:00
A lot of the article can be generalized to "don't run a business in your home". It sounds like in this case, Storj is the one running the business while you are a customer (paying with storage), so you are shielded from a lot of the risks mentioned in the article.

By the way, I can't find the exact plan you described on the storj.io site, but there is this page that mentions STORJ tokens, so now I am confused as to whether this is a cryptocurrency thing or not.

https://storj.dev/support/account-management-billing/payment...
by int_19h | 2025-04-13 23:26:09+00:00
Empty string and nil are not at all the same in Pascal. Pascal, even in its most basic version, still had pointers, and nil was the null pointer. You could have pointers to strings (and other kinds of arrays), as well.

What made standard Pascal problematic wrt string handling is that it did not have array NEW nor pointer arithmetic. So if you wanted to heap-allocate ARRAY[1..100] OF CHAR, that was fine; but there was no way to get a pointer to N bytes on the heap where N is determined at runtime; and even if you could do that, somehow, you still wouldn't be able to use that pointer as an array by indexing through it.

Interestingly enough standard Pascal did support allocating variable-length data structures, but only in form of variant records (roughly analogous to discriminated unions in ML or enums in Rust, but with multi-level nesting and the ability to define a common sequence of fields shared by all variants at any level).
by wasabi991011 | 2025-04-13 23:26:28+00:00
If you don't want to assume, here is the section from Wong 2021:

>While we did not find any group difference in the experience of playing with toys without genitals in childhood, the frequency of playing with such toys is associated with erotic attraction to castration for the Interested and Wannabe groups. These findings suggest that childhood play with male toy figurines lacking genitalia might potentially contribute to BIID, which for some individuals may fulminate as extreme castration ideations and ultimately genital ablation. Such an impact from toy play resembles other study findings (Fernandez & Pritchard, 2012; Galioto & Crowther, 2013) that exposure to slender and muscular models may lower body satisfaction and motivate body modification for males, in parallel with the Barbie doll syndrome for girls (Dittmar et al., 2006). Yet it should also be noted that there was a higher proportion (59% vs. 45%) of individuals in the Castrated group, who never played with male figurines, than in the Wannabe group. These results indicate that play with male genital-less toys may be significant for some, but not all, in contributing to extreme castration ideations.
by retiredpapaya | 2025-04-13 23:26:37+00:00
The Netflix approach to this [1], where Netflix allows employees to choose how much of their compensation is cash vs options seems like the best approach - you can tune based on your risk tolerance.

> Each employee chooses each year how much of their compensation they want in salary versus stock options. You can choose all cash, all options, or whatever combination suits you. You choose how much risk and upside (down) you want. These 10-year stock options are fully-vested and you keep them even if you leave Netflix.

[1]: https://jobs.netflix.com/work-life-philosophy
by phire | 2025-04-13 23:26:58+00:00
It's really surprising how long reddit lasted.

Slashdot lasted maybe 10 years (though still limps on). Digg lasted about 4 years before it started shedding users at alarming rates (and 6 years before it killed itself).

But after 20 years, Reddit still is still gaining users; It's not dying yet.

Reddit has changed so much over time. Reddit of 2006 was very different to reddit of 2008, and reddit of 2013 was very different again. By 2019, it's more or less managed to reinvent itself as an App, trading blows with Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok, almost unrecognisable.

I'm sure many people will put peak-reddit around 2019, but for me, Reddit of roughly 2011 was my favourite, and it's only been down hill from there.

I don't think Reddit can re-invent itself again, only continue to get worse. But I suspect it will still be around in 10 years.
by duxup | 2025-04-13 23:27:00+00:00
> He was told the planes were carrying Venezuelan migrants from the United States who would become inmates at the Terrorism Confinement Center, a notorious prison in El Salvador also known as CECOT.

——

> A 60 Minutes report this week found that a majority of the Venezuelans who arrived in El Salvador that day have no apparent criminal record.

The religious right in the US doing just what Jesus would do right?
by amiga386 | 2025-04-13 23:27:41+00:00
By which you mean /r/The_Donald

The reason for deliberately antagonizing them, and eventually banning them, was that /r/The_Donald's moderators were directly telling their membership to upvote specific posts so they'd rocket to the front page. "Inorganic results", "vote manipulation", "gaming the algorithm", whatever you'd like to call it.

So the admins had a reason to ban it, even if no doubt they and most of Reddit's users saw Trump supporters as "the enemy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Prominence_on_Red...

Also, as this article has reminded me... 'member that time Spez admitted that he invisibly edited users' comments?

https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...
by dustingetz | 2025-04-13 23:28:39+00:00
as you’ve listed, there are answers within reach but switching costs are enormous and the labor market is locked into a set of known technologies that generate salaries, a low energy state that would require substantial energy investment in reskilling, but there’s no slack energy in the system for that and even if there was, the transition will have winners and losers, redistribute jobs, and if there’s one thing the labor mkt is terrified of it’s losing one’s job. disruptive technology shifts can be career ending for a lot of people … bottom line is that getting paid to shovel python slop has been historically lucrative
by alganet | 2025-04-13 23:29:17+00:00
Streaming has more to do with the addiction part of computer gaming than gaming itself.

I would say computer gaming had sucessfully removed the money spending bad part of gaming and turned into a real culture. Streaming brought back that bad part.

But that's another topic. It is hard to compare.

Of course we need laws. What I want is laws that work and address the real issues.
by patall | 2025-04-13 23:30:00+00:00
Not a swede (yet) but grew up with the books (and merch): I never identified Findus as a child as he was, obviously, a cat. It was fun comic around 3-9 but I cannot say the lesson ever really made sense to me since it was just too abstract. Just funny, like the other Nordquist books. I also liked the associated PC games, which where interesting as they where quite challenging at a certain age with lots of engineering puzzles. But at that point it is really not much about Findus anymore, just the general mood that comes from the comics. Oh, and my brother loved the pancake-cake, whose receipt we somehow got from the book.
by alamortsubite | 2025-04-13 23:31:04+00:00
This is entirely accurate, but there's a legion of "real" pickup trucks roaming North American roads that exist no less for show than the Tesla. At this point, they're probably the vast majority.

In the EU no one would think twice about towing the aforementioned big bike with a cheap trailer attached to a Honda Civic. Coming from someone who's towed a lot of bikes, it's an arrangement that makes more sense than an American pickup on several levels.
by alexjplant | 2025-04-13 23:31:05+00:00
> My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.

This. On forums you recognize members by their funny avatars and the hyper specific advice that they have (useful or otherwise). Stickied posts like "timbit2's Guide to Vintage Frobulators" or "New to Frobs? Not Sure Where to Start? READ" abound. There are usually decades of easily-searchable posts accumulated. People reply to your threads helpfully. The marketplace forums are full of well-cared-for gear.

On Reddit you get a lot of beauty shots and question posts with replies like "bro just get the new Vinculum x Chadbert420 frobber. Shit is [fire emojis]". There's usually a woefully out-of-date wiki or sticky that you can only access from one interface or another. There's no sense of community, just upvotes of pictures for clout.

Of course these are contrived straw men versions of their respective communities but in my experience they're correct more often than not. I have been dipping my toe into various Discords that seem to have a better sense of community but Discord doesn't seem to lend itself to longer-form content as forums do... I wonder whether this is something the Discord platform could be augmented to facilitate.
by JadeNB | 2025-04-13 23:31:12+00:00
> Is there anything even remotely comparable in quality to Monty Python right now?

I suspect that, like most things that we now recognise as classics, much of Monty Python wasn't recognized at the time as a classic. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grai... suggests that, while reception was generally positive, there wasn't the sense we'd now expect of a great treasure having just been unearthed.

All of which is to say that, whatever is comparable right now, we probably think of it as so-so, and will have to await retrospective critical appreciation to find out what we should have been treasuring.
by yongjik | 2025-04-13 23:33:02+00:00
I think people are talking about immigration, though it's a thorny issue, partly because Korea has been virtually monoethnic for a very long time. But I think Korea will eventually have to open up more: the current population crisis is so dire that I don't think Korea is in a position to choose its medicine.

(I don't think immigration alone will solve the problem, BTW - Korea should obviously fix its horrendous work culture, education, and runaway housing prices.)
by int_19h | 2025-04-13 23:33:33+00:00
It has little to do with the language itself, moreso with the tools.

One thing that very clearly distinguished (extended dialects of) Pascal from C in the era where the two were competing was that Pascal's units were self-describing. That is, when you compiled a unit, you got a single file with all the metadata for that unit as well as binary object code for linking. Then, when another unit or program did a USES declaration, that would locate the file by name and use the metadata as needed. Conversely, in C you had to deal with header files, and while on the surface it looks kinda sorta like the INTERFACE section of the Pascal unit, it's not quite that because e.g. it needs to #include things it depends on - and that is textual inclusion, not just a metadata reference.

This all meant that working with dynamically loaded type information was much easier in Pascal tooling - it just needed to parse the metadata embedded in the compiled unit files, and each file would only contain metadata for its own types and functions, without contamination from other units that it relies on. This is great for things like code completion and visual UI designers.
by fragmede | 2025-04-13 23:34:16+00:00
unlimited everything? getting rid of misery in the world is top of my list, but specifically kids getting molested is this huge generational and societal problem in the world that I have no idea on how to even begin to address, even with infinity money and time, never mind what I can do as some programmer and definitely not a politician, other than to donate to some random organizations here and there.
by nighthawk454 | 2025-04-13 23:35:01+00:00
It’s an option for payment. Detailed on the same link:

> Storj created the STORJ utility token as a medium of exchange on its decentralized cloud storage network. The STORJ utility token facilitates payments from people around the world for their use of the Storj network to store their data, and Storj uses it to pay our community of Storage Node Operators that rent their unused hard drive capacity and bandwidth to the network.