MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crent | 2025-04-04 14:56:21+00:00
I'm glad you shared your experience because I've dealt with this for decades. It's usually a small snippet, 15 seconds or less, of a song that just loops over and over for me.

What I do to combat this, and other "brain noise", is also to listen to music but I use headphones with high volume. I also listen to the same playlist repeatedly so it's not distracting and instead quiets that loud part of my brain to allow me to focus.
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-04-04 14:57:08+00:00
You have to understand, in modern Britain bureaucracy is the point.

Everybody is lazy, nothing works, and nobody is going to do anything about it because doing something would require fighting an army of bureaucrats. And, dear reader, who would blame you for not doing that?

I had British Telecom around to fix a wiring issue. The rental agency said they'd be coming by on Thursday or Friday and I should pick. Simultaneously, I get a text from BT that they'll be by on Wednesday. The gent shows up Tuesday. I ALSO get a call on Friday (while I'm at work): "Mate, I'm about 15 minutes away from your house...".

Everything is like this. Everything.
by goldfish3 | 2025-04-04 14:57:13+00:00
If there's no due process for everyone, that distinction literally does not matter in the slightest!

Dozens of citizens could have been sent into slave labor for all we know, and no judge has been able to provide the constitutionally mandated oversight. It has been upheld many times and for hundreds of years that the Due Process clause applies to non-citizens for this reason.
by markussss | 2025-04-04 14:57:13+00:00
You are right, these quirks are not something you struggle with very often. The only one that has been troublesome at some point during my now 8 years as a professional, mainly Javascript with Vue, web developer is the automatic semicolon insertion example.

The simplest fixes for it is to just insert semicolons yourself, always use const, and not start any lines with [ or (.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-04 14:57:28+00:00
Is that a new feeling?

I figure the people who want the US to withdraw from the global stage have been working on Trump ever since 1987 when he paid for that full page pro-tariff ad in the New York Times. Power hungry maniacs are a dime a dozen, but ones that are also hell bent on committing economic suicide are a scarce resource and need to be nurtured with care if you want them to actually do it.

It's what I'd do if the US was bullying me around. It's a well tested play (refined during the US interventions in South America in the 70's and 80's).
by ARandumGuy | 2025-04-04 14:57:33+00:00
It's possible. The wealthy are a lot better positioned to make a lot of money during a bear market then the average person, as they can afford to buy a lot of stocks when they're cheap. Just look how much money billionaires like Bezos or Musk made during COVID.

But even if that's their plan, that doesn't mean they're executing it competently. The specific tariff amounts do not seem well thought through, and fighting a trade war against literally every other country in the world seems like a bad idea.

There's an idea called Hanlon's Razor which states "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". It's a good rule of thumb, but it implies that malice/stupidity is an either/or choice. I think that the Trump tariffs are a malicious plan executed stupidly, and if nothing changes the effects will be catastrophic.
by physicsguy | 2025-04-04 14:57:47+00:00
I'm other side of Nottingham and have to say that things aren't that bad either.

I made my peace with not earning London salaries but being able to comfortably live in a nice area and pay off my mortgage early a long time ago.

My parents weren't of the University generation, so I'm ~better off than they were at the same point in our lives. On the other hand, we're worse off than my in-laws would have been at the same time, because of housing. But housing is a fixable problem. The government just needs to legislate to allow the building of more of it. Even in London, the real answer, whether politicians want to say it or not, is the densification of suburbs - allow redevelopment of suburban areas into higher density developments, and prices will come down.
by NilMostChill | 2025-04-04 14:57:58+00:00
So given you didn't address any other part of the reply am i to assume you agree ?

Future consequences and poor outcomes based on current day incompetence and mismanagement ?

To address your reply:

If you don't know the phrase "there is no ethical consumption" then looking it up might be interesting reading for you, it's a large part of the plot from the last half of "the good place", if that helps at all.

Anyway ,it's the same idea but taken to it's logical conclusion, everything everyone does is causing harm in some way somewhere down the chain and therefore it's impossible to do anything without some harm being caused.

If that's your point then i agree, but specifically here i was pointing out the direct point to point link between removing monetary aid and the deaths of people relying upon that aid.

You asked for costs on money and lives, and while i think billions and millions were hyperbole there are still directly attributable deaths, even now.

The key part here is the "directly"

The difference between "physically taking away someones food until they starve to death" vs "participating in a societal structure that routinely lets people starve to death" one is direct taking an action to achieve an outcome, the other is not.

I think those numbers will grow significantly larger in relatively short order, i think it's naive to think DOGE is running on any platform of competence but it's entirely possible i'm wrong.

However, there's not a lot of evidence i am wrong,
by sestep | 2025-04-04 14:58:08+00:00
I'm probably just missing something obvious, but in this scenario with really long names, doesn't that just mean all code will be extremely verbose? Or are you saying there'd be some way to have shorter bindings to those longer names within a specific context? But then what would that look like? Typically we use modules to denote contexts within which you can import longer fully-qualified names with shorter aliases.
by echelon_musk | 2025-04-04 14:58:24+00:00
There was a TV show made in the 1980s called The End of Empire [0] which is (mostly) available on YouTube. It chronicles what happened in India, Palestine, Iran, Egypt, Cyprus, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Singapore etc. and may be of interest to those musing about Britain's decline.

I learned about it from watching Coup 53 [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2WaMdGl0uw&list=PLanJEt7jLo...

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1984135
by simpaticoder | 2025-04-04 14:58:35+00:00
Your comment inspires me to write an essay titled "What's wrong with hypocrisy?" because it seems like no-one really cares about it anymore. It's like the concept itself has lost meaning. Hypocrisy a big, abstract word that has the audacity to refer to other big abstract words like "character" and "virtue" and "fairness". Now many people accused of hypocrisy say "so what?". What's going on there? It has the feel of a situation where someone says your software has memory leaks, and you say "so?" not knowing what that even means. "Hypocrisy" and "memory leaks" share the notion of a characterization of a set of flaws that can and will show themselves in many disparate ways. Powerful signals to a specialist, and noise for a generalist. And not just noise, but a signal against the critic as an elitist snob that uses words and concepts no-one understands.
by kevstev | 2025-04-04 14:58:40+00:00
I would be shocked if anyone is really looking for anything practical out of this, its more of a lab exercise that lets you learn by actually doing things. I learn best this way. It's one thing to draw a circuit, or even put it in a simulator, but the act of hooking up the chips, and watching the blinking lights really sticks with me, and far more deeply ingrains the concepts in my head. And while the 8-bit kit is expensive, and time consuming, I found it worthwhile. There is probably a lot more value to be had in the 6502 series though, if for no other reason that the 6502 is iconic, and it was something of a thrill to me to really understand at a basic level the chip that powered the NES I spent so many hours with.
by jfengel | 2025-04-04 14:58:58+00:00
Advertising can work. Reputable advertising firms track the numbers. You've always got correlation-causation problems, but there's too much data for it to be a coincidence.

There are two problems:

1. Even for reputable firms, they don't know beforehand what works. As the famous quote goes, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” That was over a century ago, but it's still true.

2. There are a lot of disreputable advertisers. So many that you can easily miss that any sincere advertising exists. And even the reputable advertisers are forced to use tactics that they wouldn't use in an environment with less noise.

Banning all advertising is a baby/bathwater situation. I promise you that there is a baby in there, and you'd notice if we threw out that ocean-sized bathtub. And then you'd want to build up a new advertising mode... and you'd find it a challenge to do in a way that is simultaneously effective and fair.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-04-04 14:59:05+00:00
Again, it comes down to how you define "Right" doesn't it?

Clearly Christian theology and other strains of thought think otherwise... that there's an ethical/moral "rightness" which can be judged independent of what the powerful say.

To be clear, I'm not arguing for that position. I just am pointing out in part why the Democrats and liberals are so pathetically unable to confront this situation. They thought they were part of a gentleman's club, and they could all take turns ruling according to a set of rules.
by HenryBemis | 2025-04-04 14:59:20+00:00
But but but.. sir.. he went to Joe Rogan.. he had a live chat with Musk and 350m live watchers (I think _that_ was the day that Trump decided to make Musk his wing-man.. an audience of 350m live watchers is a staggering number!)

Keeping it impersonal (and only understanding/analyzing "how" the elections were won/lost), I think that "Trump didn't win". Instead "Democrats lost", took a risky bet and to quote the meme "the risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math". [0]

[0]: https://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/963/073/e2...

EDIT: I think it was Bill Burr that said on his (latest) SNL monologue "you would think that after the assassination attempt they would just give it to him" (because yes, that was a critical security failure, and so badly designed (the "security" of the event") that one could easily be tricked into thinking that it was purposeful)(a proper Hanlon's razor)
by skydhash | 2025-04-04 14:59:42+00:00
> It is 5x if you are already a senior SE knowing your programming language really well, constantly suggesting good architecture yourself ("seed files" is a brilliant idea), and not accepting any slop / asking to rewrite things if something is not up to your standards (of course, every piece of code should be reviewed).

If you know the programming language really well, that usually means you know what libraries are useful, memorized common patterns, and have some project samples laying out. The actual speed improvement would be on typing the code, but it's usually the activity that requires the least time on any successful project. And unless you're a slow typist, I can't see 5x there.

If you're lacking in fundamental, then it's just a skill issue, and I'd be suspicious of the result.
Show HN: An intentionally annoying app to break doomscrolling
by nullderef | 2025-04-04 14:59:59+00:00
Based on personal struggles, I built an app that shows annoying things on my phone when I doomscroll. This includes dancing cats, the screen time police, or rain.

Social media is great as long as you don't overuse it -- I learn and connect with friends thanks to it. But it's too easy to get hooked.

When you open addictive apps, SpeedBump gives you a few options: 2, 5, 15, 30 minutes. The more you want to use, the more you have to wait before opening. Once time's up, it starts to annoy you a lot. There's no way to extend the timer without breaking your streak; you'll have to take a 15 min break.

I used Compose Multiplatform. It's been very fun to develop and actually works for me.

Check it out here and let me know what you think: https://speedbumpapp.com/ :)
by mapt | 2025-04-04 14:59:59+00:00
Columbia has an endowment that stands (pre- Liberation Day) at 15 billion dollars.

They kowtowed to some of the militant Zionist interests involved in that endowment in order to attain a fractionally higher return, and betrayed their students.

They kowtowed to the fascist administration on the grounds that it was threatening 400 million dollars in grants, and betrayed their students to the point of facilitating a project to unilaterally deport many of them based on Constitutionally protected quasi-private speech.

At this point I don't think they want or deserve to be called a university. Let's go with "Tax-exempt investment fund".
by FeepingCreature | 2025-04-04 15:00:00+00:00
AI actually doesn't really work for the "a couple days" scale yet. As a heavy AI user, this sort of iterative correction would usually be priced in in a 10-minute AI session. That said-

> Acting like a LLM now :P

Hey, if we're going to be like that, it sure sounds like you gave the employee an incomplete spec so you could then blame it for failing. So... at least I'm not acting like a PM :P
by yawnxyz | 2025-04-04 15:00:18+00:00
The road from finding a new molecule with antibiotic properties to passing Phase 3 is... long, arduous and not worth it.

And if you do spend the $1bn to get there, you end up like Achaogen. For anyone in this field, read this teardown of Achaogen: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03452-0
by Henchman21 | 2025-04-04 15:00:22+00:00
Instead we get banks that refuse to even police their own systems. We get bank fraud relabeled as “identity theft”.

On the one hand I didn’t vote for Trump, don’t want any of what he’s doing to happen. At all.

But on the other hand I’d be happy to light the match that sets alight the house of cards thats been built. Everything about life in the US seems like its built on a foundation of lies.

In my frustration, I may have digressed a bit :)
by ryandrake | 2025-04-04 15:00:22+00:00
Yea, it's not like the people who voted for (or accept) this are just going to vanish in 4 years. This is all happening because a significant number of people affirmatively vote for this to happen, plus a similar-sized number of people who don't vote, and are therefore indicating they are OK with whatever happens. This roughly 66% of eligible voters are still going to be here in 4 years.
by gghhzzgghhzz | 2025-04-04 15:00:35+00:00
> Govt debt to gdp is up against the 100% barrier. Looking at central bank balance sheet, it does look like you just avoided bankruptcy.

A country cannot go bankrupt. After the war the debt to gdp ratio was 250%, and from that position the government nationalised 20% of industry, built houses, create the NHS and welfare state and developed a nuclear programme.

> corporate tax rate of 25%

on profit yes, but if you are big enough you declare as little profit as possible.

> personal income tax of 45%

that's the highest band there is, payable only on income over £125,140

> sales tax of 20% Yikes.

well it's a tax on added value on every step thorough the retail chain, collectable by the end retailer. It's zero rate on food and child clothes and some other things.

Taxes are indeed on the wrong places in many cases: e.g. dividend tax on unearned income should be equalised with income tax, income tax thresholds should be increased in line with inflation / wages and not frozen as they currently are. but I don't think overall tax burden is the issue here.
by freedomben | 2025-04-04 15:00:44+00:00
You really don't see a problem with this? I consider myself more on the left, but this practice has always seemed highly antithetical to liberal values to me.

If somebody in their off hours says something assinine, and telling (some might call that "snitching to") their employer in a public forum like Twitter (in a clear attempt to get a social media frenzy going to ultimately get them fired) is a good thing, then wouldn't it logically follow that an employer should not only be permitted but actively encouraged to monitor employees 100% of the time so they can fire them if they ever step out of the corporate line? Amazon does this to many low-level employees just on-the-job and most people think that's creepy and unfair, I can't imagine extending that to off-hours as well. At a minimum wouldn't it follow that it would be great for employers to set up a snitch line so anybody could (even anonymously) call to make reports on people? Is that a world you'd want to live in?

On the next line, let's say the person is fired from their job for a gross tweet. Should they be able to get a new job after that? If so, how does the previous history get erased so the prospective new employers don't see it and avoid them (this very type of thing is by the way, a huge problem for formerly incarcerated people especially felons). Add in that there was no trial, no standard of evidence, no due process, just a swinging axe from an executioner. Should this person (and often their families) just be relegated to extreme poverty the rest of their lives? Blacklisted from employment like the communists in Hollywood were?
by anentropic | 2025-04-04 15:00:44+00:00
Quick feedback:

Would love to see some sort of architecture overview in the docs

The top-level docs have a section on "Deploying workers" but I think there are more components than that?

It's cool there's a Helm chart but the docs don't really say what resources it would deploy

https://docs.hatchet.run/self-hosting/docker-compose

...shows four different Hatchet services plus, unexpectedly, both a Postgres server and RabbitMQ. Can't see anywhere that describes what each one of those does

Also in much of the docs it's not very clear where the boundary between Hatchet Cloud and Hatchet the self-hostable OSS part lies
by proaralyst | 2025-04-04 15:00:54+00:00
I don't see planning mentioned much in the article or comments. The Town and Country Planning act is a large cause of high development costs in the UK. Roads, rail, public works, nuclear power stations, onshore renewables and above all housing have all suffered significantly because getting things approved is so difficult.

Most other affluent nations have some form of zoning instead, which make planning much much easier. Most other affluent nations have more central control over planning too, which makes consensus over megaprojects easier to reach.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-04-04 15:01:30+00:00
Antibiotics are not a deterrence because bacteria cannot be negotiated with. Similarly the concerns of fallout are minimal. The evolved resistance comes at a cost, evolving many resistances comes at many costs. There is a point where the bacteria cannot continue to evolve resistances yet remain competitive in the absence of the antibiotics.

AFAIK there is a new class of molecules specific to thwarting the resistance mechanism that makes the bacteria susceptible again in ways that cannot be out evolved. I'm looking for the general name for this technique - I do remember reading about it.
by hgomersall | 2025-04-04 15:01:37+00:00
As much as I despise what Maggie did, this quote is regularly misused and taken out of context. Her point, which I broadly agree with, is that the idea of hiding behind some notion of "society" is flawed because what that really means is a whole collection of real people doing real things. "Society" doesn't fix things; people fix things. If anything, I take this a call to action for everyone to be far _more_ civic minded. For sure, in the interview she makes some points that I disagree with, and certainly her prescriptions I think miss subtlety, but a hypothetical debate with her based on the "society" interview would not be around the core substance of what she's trying to say.

Whole quote here: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
by beepbooptheory | 2025-04-04 15:01:38+00:00
Someone might make a little game or fun experiment and might post it on here. Someone might write a blog post that is giving their opinion about a coding paradigm or framework and post it on here. I don't know if in any of those cases I am learning something, but they are still something I expect to see on HN frontpage. At least: I thought they were acceptable. But I guess thats not the case? Only educational things are technically HN worthy? I will take your word for it.

It's just a little bit of a bummer tbh, sometimes I just want to have fun or feel something or read a certain articulation of something... But I have other places I can find that kind of stuff I guess.

Thanks for your reply and your concern for propriety!
by soulofmischief | 2025-04-04 15:01:42+00:00
Not in my America.

I welcome any and all persons from anywhere in the world if they want to come and protest the American war machine

Our forefathers would be absolutely ashamed at what you just said. Protesting a totalitarian government that lacks proper representation is the most American thing you can possibly do, and that makes these immigrants more American than you will ever be, as long as you hold such views.

Edit: It seems you have edited your post in order to remove the extremely distasteful language you originally expressed. I assume you still hold such views or you'd not have expressed them to begin with, and as such my comment still stands.
by jMyles | 2025-04-04 15:01:49+00:00
The line of thinking you've displayed here is so obviously the inevitable trajectory of the internet; it's baffling that states are still clinging to denial.

> Now, what if I get the highest fidelity speakers and the highest fidelity microphone I can and play that song in my home. Then I use a deep learned denoiser to clean the signal and isolate the song’s true audio. Is this theft?

If the answer to this becomes "yes" for some motion down this spectrum, then it seems to me that it's tantamount to prohibiting general-purpose computing.

If you can evaluate any math of your fancy using hardware that you own, then indeed you can run this tooling, and indeed your thoughts can be repaired into something closely resembling the source material.
by lerno | 2025-04-04 15:01:51+00:00
I don't like to say "never", because other things make change that invalidates previous conclusions.

For example, let's say that for some reason macros were removed (this is very unlikely to happen, but as a thought experiment), then the symmetry between macro/fn definitions wouldn't be an argument anymore, and the question could be revisited.

Similar things have happened before: the optional type syntax changed from `int!` to the more mainstream `int?`. So why did I stick with `int!` for so long? Because initially it was called a "failable" and had different semantics. Revisiting this syntax after other changes to the syntax in 0.6.0, made it clear that `int?` was now fine to use.

So that's why I don't say never. But it would need for the situation to change in some way.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-04 15:01:56+00:00
The lack of repercussions from the first term all added together to give a sense of could do no wrong. Impeached twice, no convictions. Proposed the concept that a president cannot be held accountable except via conviction after impeachment. Pretty much proven true by SCOTUS.

Now, they've taken that cue and just turned the dial to an 11. There's currently very little resistance, and in the places where there is, they've just flat out ignored it. Of course the snowball is going to pick up speed