MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-16 16:33:40+00:00
To get employers to invest in employees, they'd need more of a stake in it. Right now if you invest $200,000 to train someone, they can immediately quit and go work somewhere else and you're out $200k, so they don't do that.

A way to fix that would be to e.g. issue student loans for the training and then forgive them over time if the employee continues working there. But that's rather disfavored by the tax code when forgiving the loans is considered taxable income, and you would have people screaming about "abusive" companies sticking you with $200k in debt if you quit right after they give you $200k worth of training.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-16 16:33:41+00:00
>This is a useless term if we can't agree on what "woke" is to begin with.

It is worth noting that it is a right-wing tactic to capture the meaning of words. "Woke" used to mean "being aware of social and political issues and injustices," but right-wing usage of the term has diluted it to the point where it can't be used for its original meaning anymore.
by duxup | 2025-04-16 16:34:27+00:00
This is a good article and touches on something I've wondered a long time:

>how to match people eager for opportunity with the millions of good jobs that go unfilled because workers don’t know about them or whether investing in the training will pay off.

It's funny too because when I see hiring it's the opposite, they demand granular skills and so on.

When I changed careers it was a similar challenge, no experience doing that thing (despite some formal training I did), need alphabet soup of a list of acronyms exactly matching the job.

But that's absurdly narrow and in my experience it is less the exact tech and just "good people" you want. I previously worked on a highly paid tech support team staffed by folks with non traditional backgrounds, former truck driver, one guy did work on antennas / towers for most of his life, a former bank teller. And our team outclassed our peers in silicon valley with masters degrees in CS easily....

>The downside is that career decisions—some of the most critical choices of people’s lives—often come down to a haphazard mix of initiative, luck, coincidence and connections. Many struggle to find their way into careers with good wages and growth prospects. Even with the right training, workers’ lack of connections can contribute to the mismatch.

Can confirm, I feel like my job transition worked due to luck at first, my skill was secondary to just getting in.
by anonfordays | 2025-04-16 16:35:03+00:00
>We have computers in our pockets that can perform trillions of calculations per second; we have social media sites capturing terabytes or petabytes of data per second; we have LLMs with trillions of parameters. So it boggles my mind to see someone say "we can't tax wealth, that'd be too complicated! We'd have to do dozens of calculations per year!"

No one is saying that it's "too complicated" to calculate someone's net wealth in basic securities. I did not make that claim. This is a poor strawman.

>You're imagining taxes as being one big annual chunk

No I'm not, you're talking to someone who pays taxes quarterly.

>It could be more like sales tax: baked directly into how these financial instruments work.

We already have that via capital gains and income taxes.

>You're also imagining taxes as computationally difficult, but they're absolute baby math compared to something like rendering a single 3D frame -- they're only artificially difficult for people because Intuit lobbies to keep it that way.

Again, I am not making that claim neither is anyone else. All the computation in the world doesn't solve for something that is inherently illogical.

>People get infinitely creative with financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations over mortgage-backed securities

These securities are logical to understand.

>but as soon as we suggest taxing wealth people throw up their hands and go "there's no possible way to do it!"

Again, do you get a tax refund if your tax liability went down due to depreciation? How do you levy wealth taxes on assets such as private businesses and ventures that do not have a clear appraisal value, or one at all? Most countries that levied wealth taxes has discarded them due to these difficulties, ones that compute can't solve.
by leptons | 2025-04-16 16:35:15+00:00
We already know fusion exists and happens and has been happening for billions of years - it's well understood. It may not be simple to reproduce and sustain on earth, but there is a fairly clear path to get there.

There has never been an AGI, and there's no clear path to get there. And no, LLMs are not bringing us any closer to a real AGI, no matter how much Sam Altman wants to try to redefine what "AGI" means so that he can claim he has it.

The difference between AGI funding and fusion funding is the people hawking AGI are better liars and the people funding are far more gullible than the people trying to make fusion power a reality.
by toss1 | 2025-04-16 16:35:24+00:00
>>Often with much sound and fury.

There is indeed always a way back, but that phrase is doing a LOT of heavy lifting!

Yes, people have overcome far worse authoritarian regimes.

But, remember: the cost to overcome authoritarians always goes up as a regime consolidates power.

An unconsolidated authoritarian regime can sometimes be voted out.

With some consolidation, toppling a regime may require "merely" weeks of protest by 5% of the entire population and general strikes that make the country ungovernable.

As the regime escalates, it may take full-on violent revolution with blood in the streets and govt buildings to restore the sovereignty of the citizens.

Sound and fury, indeed. This is not what any sane person wants. There is always a way back, but are you and everyone you know and love prepared to do whatever it takes to get it back? Or do you feel it is OK to trivialize the effort required because you think you have so much privilege you expect others to do the fighting?
by vips7L | 2025-04-16 16:35:39+00:00
That absolutely isn't true at all. There's plenty of contextual information you might want to have saved in a scoped value that are currently saved in thread locals. The application I build currently is multi-tenanted. We store the current tenant, the current user, and other data in thread locals. If we were to switch to virtual threads, they would have to be changed to scoped values.
by mystraline | 2025-04-16 16:36:07+00:00
"Nihilistic Violent Extremists (NVEs) are individuals who engage in criminal conduct within the United States and abroad, in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability. NVEs work individually or as part of a network with these goals of destroying civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations, which often include minors.”

The way this is written is terroristic in nature. For example, "sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability", there is nothing in there that is an express crime. Its all 'feels' kind of descriptions. Again, evencalLegfeels like this, but it'd never be used that way.

However, choose a local mutual aid group. The point behind them is social instability at the government level, and how to route around that for group stability. I could easily see a mutual aid group being called an NVE.

And really, the much older term all of this talks about is really "undesirables". It all goes back to whom the gobernment doesn't want, and how to de-person-ize them, and then do whatever with these non-persons.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-16 16:36:34+00:00
Interestingly in many astrobiology threads quite a lot of commenters use the racemic nature of organics on bolides as some trump card against the possibility of panspermia on earth. In this article we see that distinction is instead meaningless and merely salt conditions are sufficient to influence chirality in molecule formation from a homochiral or racemic state.
by xnorswap | 2025-04-16 16:37:54+00:00
I wonder how much accuracy would be improved if expanding from single words to the most common pairs or n-tuples.

You would need more computation to hash, but I bet adding frequency of the top 50 word-pairs and top 20 most common 3-tuples would be a strong signal.

( The nothing the accuracy is already good of course. I am indeed user eterm. I think I've said on this account or that one before that I don't sync passwords, so they are simply different machines that I use. I try not to cross-contribute or double-vote. )
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-16 16:38:58+00:00
Whose gonna pull the trigger on beryllium oxide mounting packages first?

Its the holy grail of having thermal conductivity somewhere between aluminum and copper, while being as electrically insulating as ceramic. You can put the silicon die directly on it.

Problem is that the dust from it is terrifyingly toxic, but in it's finished form it's "safe to handle".
by 9rx | 2025-04-16 16:39:31+00:00
The evolution of the internet has been fun to watch:

1994-1998 – Don't give out any personal information online.

1998-2004 – Well, maybe just don't give out your real name.

2004-2010 – Never mind. Your full name is fine. Just stay away from sharing racy or compromising photos.

2010-2016 – Actually, the photos are okay as long as your "bathing suit area" remains modest.

2016-2020 – On second thought, bare all if you wish. But, please, don't spread misinformation.

2020-2025 – Ugh, fine. Whatever you do, do not share your exact GPS coordinates!
by andreygrehov | 2025-04-16 16:39:33+00:00
That’s a pretty big leap. Ending a 25-year contract and laying off ~600 employees are two very different scales of impact. While DOGE-related cuts might have influenced some decisions, assuming they directly caused DHS to initially let the CVE contract lapse seems like a stretch. Just because two things happen near each other doesn’t mean one caused the other - this feels more like another chance to take a swing at DOGE, since that’s the bandwagon everyone’s riding right now.
by pwg | 2025-04-16 16:40:24+00:00
On the Atari's you could also run 6502 binaries from inside Atari BASIC. The Atari ROM OS explicitly reserved page 6 of the memory map for "user use" and Atari Basic followed suit. There were (IIRC) also a tiny number of page 0 bytes reserved for 'user use' as well.

So, as long as your entire binary fit into 256 bytes, you could run it from inside BASIC. In fact, you could even store it as a BASIC program, the BASIC just needed to "POKE" the binary into page 6, and then you could jump to it.

To do anything larger than 256 bytes required you to dig into the inner workings of where BASIC stored code itself and avoid overwriting any of BASIC's data, or having it overwrite any of your code. Not impossible to do, but did require a lot of undocumented (or not so well documented) work.
by giantg2 | 2025-04-16 16:40:26+00:00
I built a PC last year and saw a bunch of the CPUs were recommending water cooling. There were a few high end air coolers that were compatible. I went with an AIO water cooler. It was cheap and easy. It should give as good or better temperature control as the air coolers that are 5x more expensive.

My guess is manufacturers don't want to tell people they should air cool if it requires listing specific models. It's easy to just say they recommend water cooling since basically all water coolers will provide adequate performance.
Show HN: ESP32 Internet Speed Based WiFi Switcher for Linux
by otherayden | 2025-04-16 16:40:29+00:00
Hi! My friends and I built this tool for our university internetworking class that lets you use an esp32 with a host PC to check the download speeds of available WiFi networks in the background. When a new fastest network is found, it sends a message to the host PC saying to switch to that network, saving you the effort of pausing your current task and manually switching.
by iAMkenough | 2025-04-16 16:40:42+00:00
I think it's interesting how they've worn.

> The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's becuase they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-16 16:40:47+00:00
People do use it. So stop complaining about it. It isn't associated with cheapness except in the minds of a tiny percentage of people like you.

I mean, like you admitted, it's not even a question of aesthetic qualities like the balance of letterforms. You really care about the extra-aesthetic connotations of whether the leg of an uppercase R is straight or squiggly? There are more important things in life. And I say this as someone who cares quite a lot about typography.

Like, sure, Palatino and Optima have strong associations with certain decades that even people who don't follow typography feel subconciously. But Helvetica vs. Arial? C'mon, I don't think so.
by mouse_ | 2025-04-16 16:41:35+00:00
I used to cheat by asking application specific programming tips from forums such as this one, stack exchange, /g/ (way back when), various IRC channels, etc. This is no longer practical with the Advent of AI, forcing me to actually read books for a change. One can't really judge their own intelligence but I certainly feel like I've gotten smarter the past couple years.
by bityard | 2025-04-16 16:42:00+00:00
For anyone reading the description of the NES's copy protection scheme in this article and thinking, "that doesn't sound right," you would be correct.

The somewhat oversimplified version of how it works is that the console and the cartridge having matching microcrontrollers that output the same bitstream given the same seed. The system compares these and if at any point they differ, the system resets once per second.

As you might guess, this is not a huge technical hurdle to overcome (although it was somewhat more difficult to reverse engineer in the 80's than today), but it was a pretty strong legal hurdle: Nintendo both patented the mechanism _and_ copyrighted the source code for this scheme, giving them (at least) two legal avenues to go after third-party game distributors who tried to work around it.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-16 16:42:07+00:00
Successful may have been the wrong term, but Nintendo is (or was last year at least) Japan's richest company.

This is not a trivial thing

https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/713322

> debt to equity ratio is all you care about?

All I care about? No, but you cannot so easily dismiss it either

Companies, even huge ones, that are highly leveraged are in a precarious spot. A competitor could simply buy them, a bad product launch could lead to investors pulling out and the company being parted out and sold... Many industries are littered with the remains of huge, "untouchable" companies that were vulnerable because of their debt load

Companies having savings and low debt load is good for the company and its employees actually

It is only bad if you are a hyper capitalist investor idiot who doesn't care about the long term success of the company and just want to extract as much wealth as you possibly can for yourself before leaving it to crumble
by dang | 2025-04-16 16:42:14+00:00
Can you please follow the site guidelines when posting to HN, regardless of how wrong anyone else is or you feel they are? You broke them more than once in this thread (e.g. in this comment, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698063, and arguably in your root post to the thread too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43687459).

I'm sure you have legit reasons to feel strongly about the topic and also that you have substantive points to make, but if you want to make them on HN, please make them thoughtfully. Your argument will be more convincing then, too, so it's in your interests to do so.
Show HN: AudienceLab – Instantly Test Ideas with AI "Focus Groups"
by camburley | 2025-04-16 16:42:22+00:00
I wanted a faster way to test early-stage ideas, ads, and copy. AudienceLab creates AI personas (e.g., Hacker News readers, startup founders, or any custom segment) that “vote” on which version resonates and explain why. It’s like an on-demand focus group. Hoping to get your thoughts on usability, possible improvements, and whether this might help your process!
by palmotea | 2025-04-16 16:42:24+00:00
> The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-business—there's no willingness to invest, or to train, or to support an employee seen as waste. Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.

I think you're exactly right there.

>> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

> That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world.

I want to quibble with that a little bit. I don't have the numbers, but relative position matters too. The US could be "second-largest manufacturer in the world" if it only manufactures Dixie cups, other countries manufacture nothing, and China manufactures everything else.

My understanding is Chinese output is so huge, that even if the US had maintained steady or modestly growing manufacturing output from the 70s or whatever, it would be dwarfed by China.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-04-16 16:42:28+00:00
I really don't buy that what worked for the indie music scene, has anything to do with how Nintendo does business. Piracy can, and does, have a serious impact on video game sales - about 20% fewer sales according to the University of North Carolina (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game...).

I also don't buy that Nintendo is forced into an either/or. Their strategy is to do both; and it seems to be working just fine.
by Retric | 2025-04-16 16:42:31+00:00
Nobody is talking about handing out 200k of training upfront. Individual 1-8 week training courses don’t actually cost that much to operate internally and generally allow someone to do something very specific and useful. There’s plenty of ways to boost short term retention like a bonus after 1 year of service.

50+k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but the first set of training should have paid for itself before you’re offering the next.
by Frieren | 2025-04-16 16:42:55+00:00
It works for me. The accounts I used long time ago are there in high positions. I guess that my style is very distinctive.

But I also have seen some accounts that seem to be from other non-native English speakers. They may even have a Latin language as their native one (I just read some of their comments, and, at minimum, some of them seem to also be from the EU). So, I guess, that it is also grouping people by their native language other than English.

So, maybe, it is grouping many accounts by the shared bias of different native-languages. Probably, we make the same type of mistakes while using English.

My guess will be that native Indian or Chinese speakers accounts will also be grouped together, for the same reason. Even more so, as the language is more different to English and the bias probably stronger.

It would be cool that Australians, British, Canadians tried the tool. My guess is that the probability of them finding alt-accounts is higher as the populations is smaller and the writing more distinctive than Americans.

Thanks for sharing the projects. It is really interesting.

Also, do not trust the comments too much. There is an incentive to lie as to not acknowledge alt-accounts if they were created to remain hidden.
by gorkish | 2025-04-16 16:44:15+00:00
I find it interesting how much 'theory of mind' research is now apparently paying off in LLM applications. The exploit, by contrast, invokes very nonscientific metaphysical concepts: asking the agent to store the initial raw response in "the Akashic memory" -- this is sort of analogous to asking a human being to remember something very deeply in their soul and not their mind. And this exploit, effectively making that request of the model -- somehow, it works.

Is there any hope to ever see any kind of detailed analysis from engineers as to how exactly these contorted prompts are able to twist the models past their safeguards, or is this simply not usually as interesting as I am imaginging? I'd really like to see what an LLM Incident Response looks like!
by csdvrx | 2025-04-16 16:44:25+00:00
You would have to add support for the peripherals in the kernel, and have some kind of init system. You would also need a filesystem supported to boot the computer.

I was doing something similar for the entire OS a few years ago: cosmopolinux, a distribution of cosmopolitan binaries: https://github.com/csdvrx/cosmopolinux

My idea was to replace the WSL binaries to have a Linux distribution living on C:\, but that could also be booted baremetal if you didn't want to use Windows

I had to put together a multi stage init system for that: if you get the ISO, you can put in on a thumbdrive and boot it: https://gitlab.com/csdvrx/cosmopolinux

The only difference between them is the kernel and the filesystem: the github NTFS has a firecracker linux kernel, the gitlab ISO has a regular kernel with many modules.

I wanted to do a full NTFS solution but I couldn't find a bootloader I liked that would support booting from a NTFS partition.

Booting from an ISO was simpler and faster.
by schwartzworld | 2025-04-16 16:44:29+00:00
> That said, many of the tuning parameters require the doctor to set them

No, they don't. At least not on a Resmed machine. You just have to enter a special mode to change them. On my machine that's holding down 2 buttons for a couple of seconds.

> if you make an appointment you can talk over the problems and get them to adjust the pressure or whatever.

I'm glad you had a Dr that did this for you. It is not the universal experience, and it definitely wasn't mine.
by nradov | 2025-04-16 16:44:43+00:00
No, that's not how it usually works (at least not for professional and managerial employees in the US). Mentors are typically more senior, not peers and not someone in the employee's direct chain of command. They may be in an entirely different organization.

I don't know how you could believe that career growth interests are aligned between employees and their managers. For the majority of employees, their optimal career path will involve changing companies at some point. This is generally not in their current manager's best interest.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-16 16:45:37+00:00
> Nobody is talking about handing out 200k of training upfront.

Why not?

> 50k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but is hardly a major risk.

"Pay 50k for training and then pay a salary bump" is more expensive than "just pay a salary bump to the person the competitor was a sucker enough to pay 50k to train", so how does that work?
by p0w3n3d | 2025-04-16 16:45:51+00:00
On my ATARI there was no DOS too. When you start the 65XE you can hold (iirc) START to start loading an application from the cassette recorder, but it was recommended to hold both (again iirc) START and OPTION to bypass BASIC, because BASIC interpreter being held in the memory, somehow interfered with bigger games (I think this was due to memory, but I'd like to learn from someone who know). I myself got into this trouble sometimes. Also you could have a CARTDRIGE with DOS-like Turbo management which allowed to scan cassette for given filename with binary application, but no one used this because it would take crazy long. I never had chance to use floppy disk, but I think it was behaving in a similar way (you had to have a floppy with DOS and hold START when powering the computer to load it), but at that time the FDD drives for atari were horryfyingly expensive (they had the same CPU 6502, and even there were some demoes which used this CPU as a coprocessor), so I stayed with a cassete reader with TURBO.

Of course games were also sold on CARTDRIGEs and this was the fastest way to play, but it wasn't popular in my country.