MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chrismatheson | 2025-04-24 13:26:09+00:00
lots of the comments here focus on freelancing vs perm.

Organisations of all shapes and sizes make irrational choices like this all the time.

RTO - overwhelmingly unpopular with the workforce, with seemingly no tangible upside, being enforced all over the place "just because" (my pet theory is that those paying like to see the bums on seats, to look out over their empire, but just cant bring themselves to admit it).

startups looking for senior engineers and cant compete on price ... why not offer a pro-rata 4-day week? the "big boys" aren't doing that, and once you have a 4 day week its very hard to give up. "oh no we cant possible we have far too much to do". yes becuase 4 out of 5 days is worse than 0 out of 5....

im sure there are millions of such "irational" things which pretty much boils down to the fact that no one actually made a choice. Its all product of circumstance, how its always been done, what everyone else is doing, mixed with a bit of "well why should they get it if I didn't for all my previous 25 years of working"

</rant>

update: typos
by mcpar-land | 2025-04-24 13:26:31+00:00
One of my favorite tweets:

> Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day

https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888
by reverendsteveii | 2025-04-24 13:26:39+00:00
f/oss is a good thing and is probably a natural ally to what we're doing (after all, if something is evil but you're able to change it you can just make it not evil) but it's not actually the goal. f/oss is about what you can do with software once it's built. this is about what you can make software do.
by achenet | 2025-04-24 13:26:44+00:00
"if hard work was all you needed to get rich, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire".

The clothes I'm wearing right now were probably made by a sweatshop laborer working 12 hours a day under awful conditions, getting paid something like 1% of what I make in my tranquil 7 hour workday sitting comfortably at a computer.

I therefore think that just hard work has an almost zero correlation to success by itself.

If you add in "addressing a valuable market", then yes, hard work helps, in that more effort spent addressing that market will likely yield higher rewards. But working hard on something people don't want will not yield success, in my view.
by diggan | 2025-04-24 13:27:14+00:00
> Right, but why does that make letter size confusing?

That's the part I initially quoted; "the paper that the text was printed on wasn’t an A4, it was smaller and not a size I was familiar with. I measured it and found that it’s a US letter size paper at about 21.5cm x 27.9cm"

The author isn't from North America, so they had forgotten the format was different, so they got confused when they assumed it would have been A4 like the rest of the world, but it wasn't.

> the only people in the US who would even notice would be people who commonly do business with other countries or who live near the border

Or, as in the case of the author, they live outside of North American and send/receive letters to/from North America.
by 3np | 2025-04-24 13:27:28+00:00
So briefly, Zuck is arguing that the social media which was Facebooks main business of 2010s no longer exists and that Facebook has now pivoted to generic content consumption, competing with YouTube, TikTok, Reddit etc.

The article says FTC is in a bind here.

IMO it's veey simple: Yes, FB shifted their focus and are now a content hose. They still have monopoly on some market(s) - not where they are competing with e.g. TikTok. Local events, marketplace, genuine personal social networks.

That doesn't mean that they don't also compete with TikTok elsewhere, where further market consolidation could be a concern.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-04-24 13:27:44+00:00
What a crock.

The USSR saved a ton of people from Nazi occupation also, does that mean they enjoy carte blanche to do whatever and threaten whoever and invade whoever and do whatever they want and anyone who dislikes them should be left defenseless?

Maybe our reputation is slipping because we are needlessly threatening and taunting our allies, because we are detaining random tourists with legal visas to scare them, and because our President doesn't understand 1st year collegiate economics
by UnmappedStack | 2025-04-24 13:27:57+00:00
Yeah no problem. Multitasking isn't really complex - it's generally split into two categories: collaborative and preemptive. Collaborative multitasking is simply having user programs call a yield syscall which tells the kernel that it's ready to give up control of the CPU and it switches to the next task, but this is not very secure and is uncommon on newer systems. Alternately, preemptive scheduling generally has a timer which goes off regularly which automatically switches to the next task. Choosing the next task is the next part which the simplest one is round robin, where you literally just have a list of tasks and it always selects the next task and gives each task an equal amount of time. You also have SMP versions (that work for multiple cores) and also priority-based schedulers (which give certain tasks, such as system daemons, more processing time). Hopefully that extra info helped a bit!
by alnwlsn | 2025-04-24 13:28:38+00:00
What does it even mean for a TV to be energy efficient? A TV's job is to convert electricity into... light, I guess? It's not light like a light bulb, nor would you want it to be. You wouldn't light your home with TVs.

So is it something like "only produces light where needed on the screen" or "uses the least energy when turned off" or "does image processing for x format with the least energy" What are they measuring here?
by whynotmaybe | 2025-04-24 13:28:46+00:00
> China is now seen as a more positive influence than the US. It’s the first time this has been the case during the ten years we have tracked this question. Across the 29 countries covered, an average of 49% say China will have positive effect on world affairs, up 10 points on six months ago.

That's the real change.

The drop of America is consistent with it's president behaviour towards its allies, but it's still surprising that it's so intense that now China seems better for the world than it was a few months ago, even though nothing really changed.
by marcusb | 2025-04-24 13:28:50+00:00
The original code is explicit as to the intended purpose:

# Auto generate random X-Forwarded-For if doesn't exist. # Otherwise AWS forwards true IP address in X-Forwarded-For header x_forwarded_for = request.headers.get("X-Forwarded-For") if x_forwarded_for is None: x_forwarded_for = ipaddress.IPv4Address._string_from_ip_int(randint(0, MAX_IPV4)) The DOGE guy just stripped the comments out.
by throw4847285 | 2025-04-24 13:29:53+00:00
It's nice to know that despite playing fast and loose with the facts, the film The Social Network does capture something fundamentally true about Zuckerberg's psychology. The pathological need to dominate can be disguised when you're the underdog, but the more power you accrue the more it becomes the sole motivation. To paraphrase Robert Caro, "power does not corrupt, it reveals."
by stevenAthompson | 2025-04-24 13:30:04+00:00
Many fleet vehicles are still this way. The 1284x key, for example, can open a surprising number of things including many older police vehicles.

A few hundred dollars more on Amazon will net you a magic keyring that can open a surprising number of vehicles, buildings, control systems, and vending machines.

If you're into that sort of thing check out Deviant Ollam's physical pentesting videos on Youtube.
by tallanvor | 2025-04-24 13:30:39+00:00
Look, there's plenty of things to complain about with regards to the US - especially these days. But getting upset about US citizens not using all the same standards in their daily lives as many other places is just silly. --It's like complaining about the UK and a relatively small number of countries that chose to drive on the left instead of the right. Could they change? Sure. Are they likely to change? Seems pretty unlikely.
by nabla9 | 2025-04-24 13:30:59+00:00
It's called The Government Pension Fund Global (Statens pensjonsfond utland), aka Oil Fund (Oljefondet). As the name suggests, it's used to pay pensions.

How do we spend our savings? https://www.nbim.no/en/about-us/about-the-fund/

>Each year, the Norwegian government can spend only a small part of the fund, but this still amounts to almost 20 percent of the government budget.

>There is a broad political consensus on how the fund should be managed. The less we spend today, the better the position we will be in to deal with downturns and crises in the future. Budget surpluses are transferred to the fund, while deficits are covered with money from the fund. In other words, the authorities can spend more in hard times and less in good times. So that the fund benefits as many people as possible in the future too, politicians have agreed on a fiscal rule which ensures that we do not spend more than the expected return on the fund. On average, the government is to spend only the equivalent of the real return on the fund, which is estimated to be around 3 percent per year. In this way, oil revenue is phased only gradually into the economy. At the same time, only the return on the fund is spent, and not the fund’s capital.
by mcgrath_sh | 2025-04-24 13:31:33+00:00
Genuinely curious, I don't write anything long by hand, but do you not jot down disposable information with frequency, or date food, or anything like that? I date food we put in the fridge/freezer. I jot down something like a phone number if I am redirected. I have to give my pet medication occasionally and I use a post-it to track so the household can know. Like I said, I'm not writing anything even as long as a card, but I use a pen multiple times a week, and essentially daily. I know a lot of people use their phones for this stuff (and I do too), and maybe I'm an old person now for not using my phone for all of that.
by _heimdall | 2025-04-24 13:31:36+00:00
Where do you draw that line though?

If you're talking about a person using an LLM, or some other ML system, to help generate their music then the LLM is really just a tool for that person.

I can't run 80 mph but I can drive a car that fast, its my tool to get the job done. Should I not be allowed to do that professionally if I'm not actually the one achieving that speed or carrying capacity?

Personally my concerns with LLMs are more related to the unintended consequences and all the unknowns in play given that we don't really know how they work and aren't spending much effort solving interoperability. If they only ever end up being a tool, that seems a lot more in line with previous technological advancements.
by exceptione | 2025-04-24 13:31:46+00:00
Thanks for following up, maybe I can learn something. I wonder what you mean by a "shared context layer"? Do you run everything local on big rigs and did you train your own models?

The idea I have got now is that you let general off-the-shelf AI models role-play, and one hands it over to the other? But how would you be able to let those use a shared context layer, that is also typed? How is feedback organized in that process?
by sgarland | 2025-04-24 13:32:03+00:00
Yes, but that’s the annoying part. So many tech problems that people encounter can be trivially solved with a quick web search, poking at menus until you find something promising, or a combination thereof. I remember helping my mom over the phone to troubleshoot something on her iPhone – at the time, I had an Android, so everything was foreign to me, but I was able to deduce where a given setting might exist, and figured out whatever the problem was.

I don’t know when or why this skill declined, but it’s upsetting.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-04-24 13:32:20+00:00
> you have to agree to terms and conditions before you're "allowed" to do anything with it

I don’t have experience with this so I’m taking it at face value; if this is true, it’s so strange that I have an idea of this being an “open” model. As in, not that they PR’ed to make people believe it but that people who were required to accept those terms seem to believe it (as users seem to repeat it). Seems a little bit of critical thinking should dispel that notion. Are there any, more reasonably open models? Is LLaMa just called open because it’s the most accessible?
Show HN: I Parsed Every Name from SSA Cards and Visualized the Data
by aramsh | 2025-04-24 13:32:30+00:00
Hi HN!

I’m Aram, a fourteen year old in Seattle. I recently found out that the social security administration (SSA) provides datasets of every name on a social security card (1880-2023)! So i made a tool for people to graph them, compare them with other names, view the most popular names of years, and even see how many people are alive with a name (using a rough actuary db also from the ssa). I would love to hear y’all’s thoughts!

It's also open source https://github.com/aramshiva/nomen if you want to check out the code
by pona-a | 2025-04-24 13:32:35+00:00
Most regulations are motivated by universal normative prescriptions. People don't want to be served asbestos in their food, structurally unsound homes being built, or data brokers conspiring to raise your insurance, regardless of the violator in question.

Everyone can agree regulation burden exists, but I too often see it invoked in bad faith, like in the case of GDPR. This primes me to ask for concrete proof why any regulation would be especially burdensome for small business.
by palata | 2025-04-24 13:32:50+00:00
I don't. I like to keep it as close as possible to the defaults so that it just works everywhere. I don't want to have to import my vimrc whenever I SSH somewhere :-).

I am on a standard qwerty keyboard, nothing fancy here either!

And I almost don't use vim plugins: I enable syntax highlighting, relative line numbers and I add CtrlP as a plugin. That's all. Whenever I need more than that, I start an IDE (configured with the vim bindings of course :-)).
by hylaride | 2025-04-24 13:32:52+00:00
IIRC, he borrowed against them for a lot of stuff, including the Twitter acquisition. It's probably why he's freaking out a bit and returning to it. It's also not the first time he's had liquidity problems. Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse. The infamous "refundable deposit" for the car back then that ended up being almost twice as much as promised was essentially an unsecured loan. People were almost out all their money.

Bethany McLean (a journalist that was among the first to start questioning Enron's numbers and wrote the book "the smartest men in the room" on it that also became a documentary) has been following Elon Musk for well over a decade.

She once said "Whenever Elon is lashing out is when he's under enormous stress". Also, he has a large cult of true believers who believe a man who's taken credit for others work as his own all his life. Watch this documentary called "the cult of the dead stock" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Bd6YxifCo ; it's like that x100.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-04-24 13:33:04+00:00
It doesn't have anything to do with this though. It has to do with having so much power and money in a "meritocracy" and the mental gymnastics needed to maintain those two opposing propositions.

Meta's core product is a machine to sell ads, just like YouTube, TikTok, Netflix (now), etc. It's not that unique. And these stories are all over the valley for even much less powerful individuals
by paulcole | 2025-04-24 13:33:17+00:00
> The hypothetical question is is whether this individual has already experienced everything there was to experience and decided "No, working 9-9 is what I value in life!"

This is a foolish question.

A person can’t experience “everything” even if given a life of 10,000 years.

Everybody has to decide what they value in life before experiencing everything.

The question is whether someone has decided that the thing they’re doing is what they personally find value in or not.

The alternative which I’ll admit is sad (and which is not what you have said to this point) is that someone is doing something that they do not find value in. Your whole point has been that working is not a good way to spend limited life, without acknowledging that what you call work someone else calls enrichment.
by mberger | 2025-04-24 13:33:27+00:00
You have to be able to get new keys made without having an original to read. A database of vin, key would be too big of a target and would have to be shared with dealers anyway so they could program new ones. I'm not a security expert but it seems like it would really shorten battery life on the fob if you wanted to protect against replay attacks by adding a time sensitive value.
by asoneth | 2025-04-24 13:33:39+00:00
I don't personally know any people who believe that hard work and talent have zero positive correlation with success. However I know many people who believe that parents' socioeconomic status, genetics, luck, birthplace, and lack of scruples are all much more significant factors.

I choose to actively reject that mindset because doing so motivates me to focus on elements within my control, but if I'm being honest I think they are probably correct, at least from a statistical perspective.
by massysett | 2025-04-24 13:34:02+00:00
Wow, I use a pen nearly every day. Sometimes I deliberately get a pen or pencil and paper rather than a phone. I was doing some home improvements in my attic, and I would often need to jot down a measurement so I could cut wood etc. I did this once or twice on my phone and realized it's much easier to do this with a pencil and small notepad.

In what is perhaps the most ironic blend of high and low tech, I wrote my own software to build grocery lists, which I then print and use a pen to cross items off as I shop. This is by far the most efficient vs trying to faff about with some mobile solution.
by ajb | 2025-04-24 13:34:06+00:00
There is also a feedback effect. Most people are part of groups which aren't strongly selected for moral character, but the rich and powerful become surrounded by people who are after money and power, unless they deliberately manage to avoid that. So some of their bad behaviour is because the availability heuristic tells them that that's how most people behave, and fills them with cynicism and contempt
by bombcar | 2025-04-24 13:34:09+00:00
The European sizes exist in the USA if you want them, you just have to order them from a print shop or supplier.

Or you can get whatever you want - I wanted B4 paper to print a booklet (or B3 maybe) and I just bought a ream that was larger and had a print shop slice it down to B4. My US laser printer was fine printing onto B4.
by samiv | 2025-04-24 13:34:17+00:00
Not necessarily..

During the Great Depression the Americans did pull together and demanded from President Roosevelt a social reform. That was called the New Deal Coalition.

This time though the fight will be much harder because even the democrats are so strongly indoctrinated in the "free market" idolatry that they are much closer to the republicans than any true social democratic movement (such as labor unions) that would actually be needed in order to help the American working (and soon ex-middle) class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal_coalition
by dismas | 2025-04-24 13:34:18+00:00
> I am loyal to doing competent work. If our goals align, then we will get on.

100% agreed here, but I've also noticed I've had a fair few managers who didn't know what to do with someone like this. Sure, promotions are nice and what not, but if I'm not producing interesting work (or managing a team of people producing interesting work), it's pretty difficult to care about said job, and I'll move on quickly.
by roywashere | 2025-04-24 13:34:28+00:00
That reminds me on the time the FSF moved, they changed their address, and the open source product I worked on had to change their address in the license notices in our product:

https://github.com/moritz/otrs/commit/e845575e1848fd0124fb8d...

And of course, as happens more often, this issue was raised to us by Debian developers, who care a great deal about 'correctness'
by throwaway5752 | 2025-04-24 13:34:40+00:00
"even though nothing really changed."

I have seen estimates that dissolving USAID has caused 10,000 excess deaths, so far.

They threatened three countries with military invasion.

They placed real punitive tariffs on most of the world besides Russia.

They began abducting legal foreign residents and sending some to a foreign prison camp, and not complying with legal orders to return them.

They are responsible for a surge of detained foreign visitors at the border in prison like conditions, sometimes with limited access to their embassies.

They disavowed NATO, saying Europe would have to be responsible for its own security.

I could go on, but China is in fact a more reliable and a more responsible world actor than the US now.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-24 13:34:56+00:00
This is oversimplifying; European EV tariffs are company specific and (formally) aim to counteract state subsidies.

From a an average voter perspective, "sacrificing" local industry for a (temporary?) 20% discount on EVs is not too popular anyway, and neither is it gonna meaningfully save the planet IMO.

Tariff levels are basically the same as US import tariffs on pickup trucks, so not especially high, either.
by gilbetron | 2025-04-24 13:35:18+00:00
What do you do if you "hallucinate" and write the wrong code? Or if the docs/tutorial you read is out of date or incorrect or for a different version than you expect?

That's not a jab, but a serious question. We act like people don't "hallucinate" all the time - modern software engineering devops is all about putting in guardrails to detect such "hallucinations".
by xoa | 2025-04-24 13:35:19+00:00
Agreed, in general I'm disappointed that so many government regulations (on both sides of both ponds, this is one issue that's pretty universal) are just simplistic hard coded numbers. Even with carve outs I think that's much worse vs more focused, thoughtful reactive criteria. Like:

>And the mixed feeling is stronger for things like manufacturers that needs to provide support for the os for 5 years and more.

What I'd have liked to see for this (and still would) is that support is tied to control, ie, as a principle power being intimately linked with responsibility, not some ""big tech"" or not thing either. So maybe have some absolute bare minimum like 3 months unless bankrupt, but then link it to whether product owners are able to install alternate OS, access the source code etc. If a manufacturer wants to throw out some hardware and also give me all the source code and any certificate store access required for me and/or the community of fellow owners to alter and maintain it as we wish, then I'm completely fine with a very short (or possibly even zero) required support period on the software side. Conversely if a company (like Apple) wishes to profit by locking down a device very heavily, then they should also be forced to pay for all support costs for as long as they do. And I'd make that indefinite also, like, Apple would NEVER be able to stop supporting a device that they didn't at least offer alternative OS install capability for. If they wanted to EOL an iPhone after 7-10 years, they'd have to unlock the bootloader as part of that.

IMO that would most properly align all the incentives and then let various players small to large experiment with the best solutions, and for consumers to react in turn. Full open do-anything and walled gardens would both be allowed, but no profiting while externalizing the downsides.