MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amiga386 | 2025-04-11 15:37:53+00:00
As a comparison, Maggie Thatcher imported communist Polish coal in the 1980s and just stopped paying British miners. It saved the country a fortune - it got the same quality and amount of coal for far less money - and sent entire segments of the country into a death spiral from which they'd never recover.

Similarly, the windfall of finding oil off the coast of Scotland in the 1970s made fat stacks of cash for Britain. Maggie Thatcher did not spend that on deindustrialising Scotland. She did not spend it, like the Norwegians, on a sovereign wealth fund that would benefit everyone in the country. Instead, she spent it on revitalising the old docklands of London, and now they're the epicentre of high finance, where the UK makes most of its money in financial services -- mainly for the people who work in that industry, and the South East of England where they live.

These choices ruined the lives of large swathes of the country. But they hugely benefitted the country overall. Were they good choices or not?
by crusade_not_now | 2025-04-11 15:37:56+00:00
Shocked at anyone thinking either this is the only thing I'm concerned about as a citizen or that bigger problems make this egregious attack on consent/autonomy a non-issue or that it's not all a part of same problem and fighting back in every way possible isn't fruitful.

I narrowed the scope of this post so I could get responses pertaining to the scope that I narrowed it down to.
by financetechbro | 2025-04-11 15:38:04+00:00
Following the announcement of Trumps plan for the biggest military budget EVER [trump voice] of $1T (previously in the $800B range)[1]… good thing DOGE has cut all the other waste. I am personally thankful that we’ll get to experience the age of maximum government efficiency and spending constraint

[1] https://www.defensenews.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/04/0...
by crdrost | 2025-04-11 15:38:23+00:00
No, although you do see that in set theory, but this is a specific idea about the type signatures and encodings.

List type:

type Stack<x> = null | {first: x, rest: Stack<x>}

The church encoding of a data structure, is to go through all of these cases separated by |, and define a handler for each one, and then define a function which accepts all those handlers and calls the appropriate one for its case:

type StackF<x> = <z>( ifNull: (n: null) => z, ifItem: (first: x, rest: z) => z ) => z;

The Scott encoding is actually a little more practical, and has `rest: StackF<x>` in that second handler, but that's not what we have here.

Now the point is that a unit type like `null` that only has one possible value, that first handler can actually be simplified to just `ifNull: z`. Similarly if we consider a list of nulls, we would get

type NullStackF = <z>( ifEnd: z, ifItem: (rest: z) => z ) => z;

And after swapping the arguments and currying, you get precisely the type of the Church numerals.

The Church encoding of a list is effectively replacing that list with its reduce function, so that's why I am saying that it's basically Array prototype.reduce on an Array<null> type. (I actually think it's reduceRight but this type is symmetric under .reverse() so who gives a darn). So it's

const zero_ = f => [].reduce(f) const one_ = f => [null].reduce(f) const two_ = f => [null, null].reduce(f)

in JS. But if you had just Scott-encoded the numbers instead, you would have had no problems with pred() but you need the Y combinator to actually use the numerals for something interesting:

type ScottNum = <z>(next: (rest: ScottNum) => z) => (z: z) => z; const zero: ScottNum = _f => x => x const one: ScottNum = f => _x => f(zero) const two: ScottNum = f => _x => f(one) function succ(n: ScottNum): ScottNum { return f => _x => f(n) } function pred(n: ScottNum): ScottNum { return n((x: ScottNum) => x)(zero) } function church<z>(n: ScottNum, f: (z: z) => z): (z: z) => z { return z => n(m => f(church(m, f)(z)))(z) }
by bumby | 2025-04-11 15:38:56+00:00
A counter point:

Salary should be decent, but I’m not wholly convinced it needs to be at “market rate.” By having reasonable rates but below “market” value, you are likely creating a selection bias for people who are in it for the mission more than they are in it for the money. I think that’s a good thing.

It’s like the idea that politicians should be allowed to trade stocks or else you won’t get the “best” talent. I’d argue I don’t want politicians whose primary motivation is financial gain.
by _mlbt | 2025-04-11 15:38:58+00:00
People always say that, but it’s not really been completely true.

< 3.1 Bad

3.1 Good

3.11 WfW Good

NT 3.5 Okay

95 Good

NT 4.0 Good

98 Good

Me Bad

2000 Good

XP Good

Vista Bad

7 Good

8 Bad

8.1 Okay

10 Good

11 Bad

There just really isn’t a pattern to it.
by IshKebab | 2025-04-11 15:39:08+00:00
Rightly so. The idea that all software should be packaged for all distros, and that you shouldn't want to use the latest version of software is clearly ludicrous. It only seems vaguely reasonable because it's what's always been done.

If Linux had evolved a more sensible system and someone came along and suggested "no actually I think each distro should have its own package format and they should all be responsible for packaging all software in the world, and they should use old versions too for stability" they would rightly be laughed out of the room.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-11 15:39:21+00:00
> it would take a lot to convince me that at least 80% of them don’t cost an order of magnitude (or more) more than they should.

I have enough friends who work in University systems and government roles (both similarly heavy in red tape) to know that many of these institutions would also spend an order of magnitude doing it in house.

It’s misleading to compare to an idealistic efficient organization with no red tape, because government jobs are very heavy on red tape. That’s where most of the inefficiency gets spent, whether it’s done in house or by consultants.
by smegma2 | 2025-04-11 15:39:36+00:00
> Alphabet's Waymo was also having humans take over for some of the driving as well.

Not sure if this used to be the case but today Waymos can’t be controlled remotely by humans, only ‘guided’: https://www.govtech.com/transportation/waymo-robotaxis-getti... (ctrl+f “cannot be controlled”)
by artimaeis | 2025-04-11 15:39:40+00:00
Seems like a variant of the cycle of geeks, mops, and sociopaths: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths.

Since more of our culture is in online, advertising-dominated spaces -- the forces of capital have a lot of incentive to ensure smooth growth straight to the sociopath phase.

Maybe the key is just accepting the cycle of it all and ensuring there's always cool new places for creative/enthusiastic people to do their thing.
by zackmorris | 2025-04-11 15:40:04+00:00
If we're comparing prolific programmers with pragmatic programmers, I wonder if there's an analog on the management side?

I look at our leaders today - our CEOS, elected officials, presidents and their lieutenants like Elon Musk - and I see a narrow sampling of humanity chosen for high executive function but little else. Who consider humanity's greatest virtues like empathy to be liabilities. Where is the self-awareness, the doubt, even the shame that brings wisdom?

I worry that this tireless race towards maximization of efficiency and reduction of cost above all else is driving the whole world towards ensh@ttification. When we could so easily take a step back, breathe, and find outside-the-box solutions beyond the zero-sum game of the status quo. If only they would let us..
by kurthr | 2025-04-11 15:40:19+00:00
In this case, "democratized" means "enshittified".

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I don't doubt that LLMs can make programmers more productive. It's happening today, and I expect it will continue to improve, but it requires knowing what code they should generate, what the actual goals are, and how it should be tested. It can generate standard solutions to standard problems with standard bugs. That's fine they're a tool.

What the inexperienced expect them to do is read their mind, and implement what they want without testing (other than did it crash the first time I used it). Unfortunately, knowing the questions to ask is at least half of the problem, which by definition the inexperienced don't know how to do. You can already see that with vibecoding prompts to "write clear comments", "don't write bugs", and "use best practices".

So why does it lead to the enshitification of the programming experience? Because regular folks will be led to believe (Startrek movie Wargames hacker style) that this is how things are done. The will accept and expect rehashed garbage UI and implementations without security or corner case checking, because that's what they always get when they press a button and wait a minute. Now, why can't YOU stupid programmer, get the same results faster? I told you I wanted a cool game that would make me lots of money fast with no bugs!

I do have hope that some people will learn to be more clear in their descriptions of things, but guess what, english isn't really the language for that.
by jfengel | 2025-04-11 15:40:21+00:00
Plenty of places have the "free exchange of ideas". Americans like to pat ourselves on the back for it, but we really don't do it better here than elsewhere. Europeans have more free speech than "free speech advocates" like to claim; we Americans have a ton of ways to shut down free speech that we prefer to ignore.

We've always been tribal. We fought a civil war over our tribalism, and we never really got over it. We tell ourselves that we're a "big, bold, beautiful" tribe precisely because we're not, and we're hoping to talk ourselves out of that.

Tech is certainly exacerbating that. We techies like to tell ourselves that we're purely meritocratic, but that's mostly because we've always come from a fairly narrow slice of tribe. As more excluded people try to get in, the underlying distrust of others comes to the fore.

I think one of America's key virtues is our ability to ignore each other. We expanded into "empty" space during the 19th century. (It wasn't empty, but hush.) In our cities, we developed the virtue of politely pretending each other didn't exist. The online domain removes the necessity of that virtue, and our underlying dislike expresses itself.

All of which would be OK, if it weren't for democracy. Democracy is a tool by which we get to force our opinions on each other. If it were just limited to sniping at each other on Facebook, we'd be fine. Even "canceling" each other is OK: it's a big empty space, and you can find some other place to be.

But now, people's opinions intrude on the real world. It's one thing to say you don't like a group; it's another to have them physically removed. When you "raise tough questions", you might be helping protect people, or threatening their life, liberty, and property.

Rather than being a "big tribe", I'd say that our key virtue is being live-and-let-live. But that conflicts with America's other key virtue: our love of getting ahead, and fear of being unjustly held back. The latter encourages is to innovate and become wealthy, but it also indulges our underlying dislike of each other.
by reaperducer | 2025-04-11 15:40:29+00:00
Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting.

That's the currently-fashionable revisionist history. But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff. He was also good at marketing.

I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations,

I suggest going back and re-reading some of the print interviews he gave to technical publications. There's no question he knew what he was talking about.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-11 15:40:29+00:00
I mean, it's my computer. I should ultimately be in control of how a document renders. I might need larger text due to poor eyesight, or need to use a screen reader. Or I might just be irritated that the web developer just up and decided that light gray on dark gray text looked cool (it doesn't, it barely can be read). Or I might want to scroll with my keyboard because a mouse is painful to my RSI. If I go out of the way and set up accessibility settings, I would expect all applications on my device (including the web browser) to respect those settings.
by morkalork | 2025-04-11 15:41:04+00:00
You know what, you're tight. Just plain normal evil. The eerie thing is I can't recall the last time I saw it phrased like that before today, and now I've seen it used twice in a few hours in two totally different spaces: https://bsky.app/profile/islan-kleinknecht.bsky.social/post/...
by masswerk | 2025-04-11 15:41:06+00:00
I think, part of the fiasco is about that engagement posters are not really welcomed on Bluesky. And, "What’s fueling your creativity right now?” is a pure engagement post, contributing nothing on its side of the conversation. Hence, it's more like another attempt to harvest Adobe's subscribers. — For X/Twitter-bound marketing it's probably fine, at least, much what we had become used to, but it totally fails the Bluesky community. (Lesson leaned: not all social media are the same.)
by bluGill | 2025-04-11 15:41:30+00:00
No sane company wants to work that way. Just in Time is a great thing, you shouldn't be over nighting anything you should be working so that you know when you need each part months in advance. If you can get a part in China faster it is because someone has expensive inventory and that is a bad sign in general. You do of course need some emergency supply and such, and retail customers don't plan in advance well - but a business shouldn't be buying retail anyway.
by patcon | 2025-04-11 15:41:37+00:00
> for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about what they talk about

Assuming they are akin to grad students, these "fresh graduates" likely have more intersectional knowledge than long-time deep domain experts. I've worked in grant funding landscape, and one of the biggest challenges is that:

1. Experts have deep knowledge, but don't keep up outside their field, and yet have the most power in distributing funds that bet on future innovation and 2. Grad students have very little power to direct funds, but straddle more fields and are better positioned to see new intersections emerge.

Each have strengths. Being naive has advantages to the learner that the expert can extract from simply by having them around

So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies
by Molitor5901 | 2025-04-11 15:41:41+00:00
I work in public policy so can add a few thoughts, but I must preface by saying this is a big lift and it will take a long time, at least a year or more. With that said, here we go:

The FTC is your #1 target. They regulate consumer protection and deceptive practices online. Bureau of Consumer Protection, especially Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, and the Technology Enforcement Division.

I would suggest reaching out to the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection. I don't see in my public databases an easy way to contact them, but the Director is Benjamin M. Wiseman. I hesitate to publish contact information for him but if you did some Googling you could probably find it. Alternatively, call (202) 326-2222 and ask for his office.

Before you do.. I strongly encourage you to write out less than 3/4 of a page of what you want, what you want to happen, and why. You may not get a meeting but if you send an email and politely ask for a short Zoom or phone call to discuss, they will generally try to make time for you.

Ultimately, however, you're going to need classic "noise and numbers" - lots of people to hammer the same message.

However, it's a little more complicated than that. First, the President has ordered that for each new regulation there must be at least 2 rescinded. So to get what you want in play will take a new regulation, or a new law, which the latter is just not worth your time.

Start with the Privacy and Identity Protection Division, talk to them, get their thoughts, and ask questions.

One more caveat and this is critical: Have an ask. Not just "fix this" but "Will you research this," "Please speak to your Director about a new regulation," something so that you have a reason to "check back" on that ask. Having an appropriate, measurable, incremental ask is absolutely key. Then settle in and just work the issue person by person, convincing others to your cause.

This is a bit simplified but it's how lobbyists and advocates do it every day across the country. I wish you the absolute best of luck because it is a good issue.

Edit: Also contact EFF. They have lobbyists who might already be working on this issue, and can use you as an expert or consumer advocate.
by IshKebab | 2025-04-11 15:41:51+00:00
It's really not. At least on Android they have some automated vetting but that's about it. Any human vetting is mostly for business reasons.

Also Windows and Mac have existed for decades and there's zero vetting there. Yeah malware exists but its easy to avoid and easily worth the benefit of actually being able to get up-to-date software from anywhere.
by swiftcoder | 2025-04-11 15:42:11+00:00
> Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction

This is a big part of it. Measuring how long someone stares at the screen is easy. It is in many cases a reasonable proxy for satisfaction - provided you mostly only care about the user as a source of revenue.

The social medias have demonstrated fairly concretely that it's a poor proxy if you care about the user's wellbeing. But they already got their bag, so they are hardly incentivised to fix that now.
by nicbou | 2025-04-11 15:42:23+00:00
I feel strongly like this about Google Maps. The underlying product is nothing short of miraculous, but the UI is infuriating. If I create a route, my markers disappear. Clicking on the map doesn't show businessses anymore. Why can't I navigate to another city and browse the map at the same time? Why hasn't Maps graduated to the equivalent of tabbed browsing?

Every trip, I'm reminded of how disappointing Google Maps is. Simple things like trying to find a laptop-friendly cafe and getting random cafes represented by a close up picture of someone's cappuccino. Realising that I'm driving 10 kilometres to do a U-turn. Having no way to bypass a blocked road. The very clunky waypoint management. Aagh!

I want quality of life improvements more than I want new features. It's weird that a company with so much resources can't create powerful tools.
by nimbius | 2025-04-11 15:42:30+00:00
>Virtual machines are often seen as slow, expensive, bloated and outdated.

by whom?

I tend to loathe firecracker posts because theyre all just thinly veiled ads for Amazon services.

Firecracker is not included in the standard linux KVM/QEMU duo and has sparse documentation. you cannot deploy a firecracker image like a traditional VM. in fact there are no tools to assist in creating a firecracker VM, and the filesystem for the VM must be EXT4.

TL;DR: this is all fun stuff if youre 200% cloud, but most companies run a ton of on-prem vms as well.
by moring | 2025-04-11 15:42:59+00:00
Which part exactly?

Re-loading the page on navigating back would be done using cacheability headers. This is the most shaky part, and I'm not sure if it is possible today. If this does indeed not work, then this would be one of the "things that Javascript has solved that the non-JS web is still stuck with" I meantioned in my other post, i.e. one of the reasons that JS is more popular than non-JS pages today.

Identifying the order using an ID in the URL is standard practice everywhere.

When the order page gets requested, the server would take that ID, look the order up in the database and see that it is already submitted, responding with a page that has its submit button disabled.
by 7thaccount | 2025-04-11 15:43:12+00:00
I'm not talking about hardware devices. I'm talking about a very different combination of OS, hardware, and how applications are made and shared. Something closer to a Lisp/Smalltalk OS I guess, but that isn't really right either. Windows is a turd and Linux/Mac aren't perfect either. Sometimes I feel like it's turds all the way down. A lot of this is just my ignorance and hubris (I admit that), but I also feel like we somehow got off on the wrong foot and now we've built this terrifying and brittle tower of complexity.
by feoren | 2025-04-11 15:43:19+00:00
But those two tiers are not really competing with each other, are they? I'd wager that most people are fixed in one group: either they will never watch anything with ads (e.g. me), or they just don't care about seeing ads. The former group will never switch to the ad-supported tier -- they'll just cancel if the price gets too high -- so the only calculation is price vs. retention among that group. Similarly, the latter group will never pay extra for ad-free, so it's a completely different calculation. Why are the two prices in competition?
Show HN: Bitsform – A simple API to add human input to your automations
by William_relaise | 2025-04-11 15:44:54+00:00
Hi everyone,

I’m excited to share Bitsform, an API I’ve been working on to solve a pain point in automated workflows: what happens when they need a human to clarify, confirm, or provide missing info? Too often, they stall or make bad guesses, breaking the flow.

Bitsform tackles this by letting your automations generate micro-forms on the fly. You send a JSON, get back a link to a form, and share it via email, Slack, or wherever your workflow lives. It’s built to be lightweight and integrate seamlessly, so your processes keep moving without heavy lifting.

Some examples of what it can do:

- A support bot asks a customer to clarify a vague request.

- A billing system flags an unusual invoice and pings a manager for approval.

- A logistics tool confirms a delivery date with a client in one click.

This is a very early version – intentionally barebones. My goal isn’t to ship a polished product yet but to start simple and build it with real user feedback. I’d love for you to try it out, break it, and tell me what’s missing or what could be better.

Check it out here: https://bitsform.com

What do you think? Have you hit similar bottlenecks in your workflows? Any features you’d want in an API like this? Thanks for checking it out!
by CompuIves | 2025-04-11 15:45:05+00:00
Yes, that's right. The Firecracker team has written a fantastic doc about this as well: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main....

It's important to refresh entropy immediately after clone. Still, there can be code that didn't assume it could be cloned (even though there's always been `fork`, of course). Because of this, we don't live clone across workspaces for unlisted/private sandboxes and limit the use case to dev envs where no secrets are stored.
by jon-wood | 2025-04-11 15:45:34+00:00
I regularly do scan as you shop and have started to notice some patterns in auditing. If I change my mind on a product and remove it from the basket while shopping I'll get audited almost every time, similarly if I add a single onion (which is a weighed product) to my basket. I do enjoy the company line of asking "did you have trouble scanning anything" just before they do the check, which is blatantly a get out of jail free card to say "oh, yes, I did in fact have some trouble scanning that 42" TV that doesn't appear in the basket currently".