MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by distant_meadow | 2025-04-08 15:43:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I built RankPoll (https://rankpoll.me) to solve the "where should we eat?" problem. My friends and I used StrawPoll, but it always devolved into strategic voting. People would pick their "safe" second choice instead of their actual preference to avoid splitting the vote.

While exploring alternatives, I found several ranked-choice polling sites using Instant Runoff or score voting. But after diving into voting theory, I became convinced that Condorcet methods were superior. These methods select the option that would win head-to-head against every other option (when such a "Condorcet winner" exists).

Key features: - No account required - Mobile-friendly drag-and-drop interface - Real-time results with detailed analytics - Compare results across multiple voting systems - Full Condorcet analysis showing all pairwise matchups

We've been using it for a few months now to settle dinner debates, plan watch parties, and choose meeting times. The results have been great: no more strategic voting, and everyone feels their true preferences are properly considered.

I'd love feedback from the HN community, especially from those interested in voting theory or anyone who's faced similar group decision-making challenges.
by smusamashah | 2025-04-08 15:43:32+00:00
I am waiting for when I could provide these a scene snippet from "Hitchhiker's Guide To Galaxy" (or any book) and it could draw that for me. The gold planets, the waking up on the beach, total perspective vortex etc.

I like the book, but there are quite a few scenes which are quite hard to visualize and make sense. An image generator that can follow that language and detail will be amazing. Even more awesome will be if it remains consistent in follow ups.
by soupfordummies | 2025-04-08 15:43:37+00:00
Reading the prompts reminds me of this interesting short story from Steven Millhauser called "Cat 'N Mouse"[1]

Would be really cool to just use this (or parts of it) as one of the prompts and see what results.

[1] - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/04/19/cat-n-mouse
by samspot | 2025-04-08 15:43:52+00:00
Great comment, and I love the thought process. My answer to the question: What is the difference? Humans and corporations are exceedingly predictable. We know what they both want, generally. We also rely on human issues as a limiting factor.

For an AI controlled corporation, I don't know what it wants or what to expect. And if decision making happens at the speed of light, by the time we have any warning it may be too late to react. Usually with human concerns, we get lots of warnings but wait longer than we should to respond.
by csense | 2025-04-08 15:43:57+00:00
As far as dynamic behavior, why can't you just do physics simulations?

From my understanding of chemistry you don't really need to model inner shell electrons at all. And you can get pretty far without needing quantum physics (e.g. "water is an electrical dipole" is a sufficient model, you don't need to think about the orbital structures of hydrogen and oxygen).
by Teever | 2025-04-08 15:44:33+00:00
I don't understand why everyone on HN is so enamored with beautiful looking Apple hardware but doesn't understand that this stuff is made by people and machines that are also made by people.

At the end of the day if you want quality products and innovation you need to pay for it.

Outsourcing this ability to other countries saves you money up front but it costs you the institutional knowledge to do it at home and all the costs that losing this entails.
by keybored | 2025-04-08 15:44:40+00:00
> “The first time I ever did it, the person started freaking out and cursing,” said Leggio.

That one weird trick to get the North Korean NPC to malfunction!

But I’m sure that the NPCs who honestly believed that the North Koreans honestly believed that they found a unicorn will think this is both hilarious and completely true.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-08 15:44:47+00:00
>If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work.

Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching on languages or stacks with "year of on the job experience". So white lies are the only way to pass through that initial filter and get to a technical person who will judge your knowledge less superficially.

>What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified?

Please stop arguing in bad faith. Switching to a different tech stack is not the same as switching to doing brain surgery. No offence, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes form a position of privilege who never had to endure poverty and unemployment.

So please stop over-dramatizing the hurting people part. As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview and both parties are happy and getting their expected value out of it, who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and what not?
by whimsicalism | 2025-04-08 15:45:39+00:00
actually, foreign capital and foreign investment is good - and fair play before the law facilitates that.

securitization and anti-globalization makes us all poorer, worse off, and more prone to conflict. lawfare is an addictive drug and can lead to serious outcomes, as history in Brazil shows any number of times - like even with the current president.
by jfengel | 2025-04-08 15:45:44+00:00
Their theory is that when people pay less in income taxes, they will have more money to spend, thus boosting sales tax collections.

Well, that's certainly a theory. I'd love to see their models.

At first blush I don't see how than can work without a 100% sales tax. For a 5% sales tax, If you save $1 in taxes, you buy $.95 worth of goods and pay an additional $.05 in sales tax. That's going to replace only 5% of your tax revenue.

You can probably get a money-multiplier effect: some of that $.95 gets paid to local workers, who also buy more stuff, and pay sales taxes. But that's going to have rapidly diminishing returns.

I suppose we'll find out.
by markus_zhang | 2025-04-08 15:45:52+00:00
(just a disclaimer that I do not agree or disagree with this bringing back manufacturing to the US, the discussion is solely based on the supposition that Trump wants to bring it back)

Once the purge is done in the public and private sectors (yeah you can imagine that such interest groups exist everywhere), Trump and his allies need to install competitive people to create and execute policies to "bring manufacturing back".

Failing either of the two (purging and reinstalling competitive policy makers) fails the job.
by throwanem | 2025-04-08 15:45:58+00:00
Okay, that's reasonable, I see value there and have worked productively with similar systems in pure CSS and relatively lightweight Sass. The next thing I'd like to see addressed is why something so conceptually straightforward still needs so heavyweight a build step that it has to care what ISA it runs on.

(Full disclosure, I haven't worked with Tailwind since 2020 or so. Though I was obviously not too favorably impressed by it, I don't recall it having problems like this then, which if anything I'd expect to have been exacerbated by the Apple CPU architecture transition then ongoing.)
by pjc50 | 2025-04-08 15:45:59+00:00
> Do we build boats or planes or cars? Do we make computer chips or garments or appliances?

I mean .. obviously yes? It's just that you don't make all the chips and cars on the planet. Or even all the locally used ones.

The US is mostly an astonishingly wealthy country that has somehow convinced itself that it's in the middle of a decline, while simultaneously avoiding facing up to any of the QoL questions which people routinely fight over on HN where the US average or poorer citizen might actually be worse off.
by whatshisface | 2025-04-08 15:46:01+00:00
There are a lot of manufacturing jobs. In fact, the "Manufacturing" category is four times larger (12M vs 4M) in terms of employment than "Information." The primary interests of people working in manufacturing are higher pay and better working conditions.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=50&eid=4881#s...
by hwillis | 2025-04-08 15:46:04+00:00
Not really. Mostly they are built by machines. Extremely skilled machinists work in research or niche development, where they can solve new problems. Very skilled operators can tram a machine better, or eke out more repeatable clamping, and make slightly more accuracy out of an established process.

Their time is much better spent creating new processes or making low-run jigs and things.
by didericis | 2025-04-08 15:46:14+00:00
Because a rising power (China) backed a country (Russia) which didn’t bow to the dominant power (USA) that enables international trade, and intentionally blowing up international trade agreements now allows the USA more time to rebuild strategic supply chains to counter further violations of the international order.

If the USA doesn’t have a secure industrial base and can’t reliably enforce the international order then there is no international trade.
by hliyan | 2025-04-08 15:46:26+00:00
You're not, and thank goodness for that. I hired about 10 engineers during the past six months, and as far as I could tell, at least 9 out of 10 didn't use AI in the interview process, as in, they demonstrated in day to day work, the same level of proficiency they demonstrated in the interview. If that's because they continue to use AI in day to day work, I have no problem with it as long as they don't exfiltrate IP and data in the process.
by margalabargala | 2025-04-08 15:46:35+00:00
Firstly, the number of people who cannot be a software engineer is not actually very large. There are a lot of really shitty software engineers out there. Unlike being a doctor or a lawyer, you don't have to pass a test that requires actually knowing material, you simply have to be able to convince someone to give you a job banging on a keyboard, which does not necessarily require one to have technical skills.

Not everyone can be a good software engineer, sure.

Among people who cannot be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a good software engineer, there are also very few people who can be a good machinist.

Competent machinists require an extremely similar set of problem-solving skills as competent software engineers.

Bolting a bumper to a Ford is different from manufacturing the metal shape of the bumper itself, and a competent machinist is the person who both figures out how to turn a piece of raw metal into a piece of bumper-shaped metal, and also the person who figures out how to do so in an easily replicable way.
by ffsm8 | 2025-04-08 15:47:00+00:00
But the sentence is about people coding in their free time vs not doing so... If you take an issue with that, you argue that self taught people that don't code in their free time are better at coding the the people that do - or people with formal training that don't code in their free time being better at it vs people that have formal training and do...

I just pointed out that removing classes entirely would still get you experiences people. Even if they'd likely be better if they code and get formal training. I stated that very plainly
by wrboyce | 2025-04-08 15:48:06+00:00
I love the idea, but I feel like I have to say that I’ve got a pretty solid idea of what the total perspective vortex would look like for someone being subjected to it. When I first read the books I immediately had a visual and that has never changed when I’ve read them again (and again…).

I’m not sure what that says about either of us, but I would say that your definitive “quite hard to visualise” statement is very much subjective.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-08 15:48:42+00:00
> Switching to a tech stack is not the same as switching to brain surgery.

SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people. Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

> Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching with "year of on the job experience".

I don't think this is always the case, as long as it's on the resume (skills + personal projects + YoE). Then, the technical person can judge your knowledge less superficially. It worked for me!

> So white lies are the only way.

It's actually just a regular lie: You'd be harming people by telling it.

> No offense, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes from a position of privilege

This is actually an offensive thing for you to say, because you are claiming I have attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy, all of which are false. Please focus on substance over name-calling.

> [added later] ...never had to endure poverty and unemployment...

I encourage you to explore empathy regarding the poverty and unemployment you'd be causing for a better-qualified applicant who was passed over due to lies, and not just towards yourself.

We are all people, you are not more important than them, and poverty and unemployment is no worse for you than it is for them.

> [added later] As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview...

We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview.
by tialaramex | 2025-04-08 15:48:43+00:00
This doesn't make sense as a prioritization.

Oh no, my government might be run by nazis -> Let's make the government services crap

The nazis don't need to use your crap government services, so you're just pointlessly making things worse, this is the same delusion as "But it's illegal". Why on Earth would crooks care whether what they're doing is legal?

I suggest:

Oh no, my government might be run by nazis -> Ensure this does not happen OR leave
by dfxm12 | 2025-04-08 15:48:52+00:00
Knowledge changes. I don't think wisdom necessarily changes. Maybe this is a philosophical discussion, but I think that is once of the key differences of knowledge and wisdom. However, I do think it is false that people necessarily accumulate wisdom with age. I know wise and unwise people of all ages, including people who think they're wise only because they're old.

when I look at voting patterns in particular, I find myself pessimistic that the elderly are wiser than average

Don't stop there, look at the US elected representatives! Washington is, from a lot of angles, a gerontocracy, and I don't think anyone would consider it "wise". The world has passed a lot of these folks by and even aside from that, their stubbornness to not step aside has in cases meant that they predictably die in office, so their seats go unfilled for a while, leaving people unrepresented...
by deng | 2025-04-08 15:49:12+00:00
Maybe things have improved with the YouTube Kids app. Previously, I was not able to manually chose channels that were fine to watch, and there was still a ton of trash there, although Google claims it is manually curated.

The main problem is when children get older and YouTube Kids is simply not a good fit anymore (my children refer to it as "Baby Youtube"). The way I remember it, I would consider the content to be applicable for children up to maybe 6 or 7 years? Until that age, I did at least casually monitor what my children watched anyway and didn't just leave them alone with a tablet.

The regular Youtube has a "content setting" for parents with categories like "9+" and "13+", but when I actually tried this, these categories were an absolute joke and still contained a ton of adult content, especially all the influencer gaming grifts, the right-wing "manosphere" bullshit, and so on. It is obvious that some AI does the filtering here, and we all know how well that works.

How do you set up YouTube in a way that only an explicit list of channels can be watched, without the possibility to trivially circumvent this by simply opening a browser and going to youtube.com directly without being logged in?

Freetube allows me to

- set up a list of channels that are OK

- disable the search box

- set up a PIN so that the configuration cannot be changed.

The installed browser is simply using a different filtered DNS and will not be able to connect to youtube.com directly.

This also has the advantage that I don't even need a Google account for anything.
by sbarre | 2025-04-08 15:49:13+00:00
Maybe I misunderstood your original post, I thought you meant your comments here on HN, not a personal website you control.

Others have said it already but when you are posting here on a public website, I would argue that you are effectively consenting that your content is now available for consumption by site visitors.

"Site visitors" may include people, systems, software, etc..

I think it would be pretty impractical for every visitor to the site to have to seek consent from each poster before making use of the content. That would literally break the Internet.
by wduquette | 2025-04-08 15:49:43+00:00
When I was in school, many decades ago, I was constantly told that I should turn off the music while studying. I always ignored that advice, and to this day while I'm working (I'm a software engineer) I almost always have music playing. I'll pick instrumental music if I'm having trouble focusing; but I usually prefer upbeat music with lyrics.

I've never been diagnosed with ADHD, etc.; when I was young, being "autistic" meant being almost or nearly non-functional. But I've had my suspicions.
by iLemming | 2025-04-08 15:50:29+00:00
I think you're shifting the focus to an entirely different matter, and honestly, I'm not sure I can wholeheartedly agree with you. I've seen many young, motivated beginners who performed exceptionally well, even teaching veterans with their fresh perspectives.

Experience in our field is a double-edged sword - at times it can feel like a burden that pushes intuition away from the objectives. After all - we're all junior SEs - whenever we need to start a new project - we have to learn or at least refresh our knowledge. Just because a kid fresh from college doesn't know how to use Makefiles, can't write C without memory leaks, or hasn't used Vim keybindings and panics when seeing Emacs, doesn't mean they lack programming talent.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-04-08 15:50:40+00:00
Rich in what, exactly? Inflated stock prices? Inflated home prices? Empty processed-food calories? Are we the richest in recently-built public infrastructure or intellectual property (or both!!)? Maybe we're the richest in collateralized debt obligations?

No one in the United States feels rich, when we look around, we don't see wealth or prosperity. We suspect, though we'd feel silly to say it out loud, that if anyone ever busted into Fort Knox and looked in the vaults, those would be empty of the gold that it was once famous for.

>What's the US supposed to look like after this purge?

I imagine we'll look like what we really have been for a long while, instead of this illusion that everyone has of us.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-08 15:51:22+00:00
> No, I believe we're talking about switching our role from consumer in the global economy to producer. What do you think the Chinese could even buy with all the trade deficit cash they're squirreling away, when we don't make anything? Some large chunk of it is buying up stock, real estate, etc. Give them something else to buy.

Meanwhile over at the People's Daily, someone starts to type up "Why should we accept the Americans stealing good Chinese manufacturing jobs?"

> for most people in the United States

Now we start to talk about income inequality, and who exactly is having a nice life; but the minute you mention some of the policies of less unequal European countries, Americans go absolutely bananas and call you a communist. You might as well suggest doing something about the mass shootings, that's even more unpopular.
by isaacremuant | 2025-04-08 15:52:01+00:00
Having a product manager saying what "devs" should do is part of your problem.

Your tech leads should get to say what you work on a be very aligned with business needs but also understand where tradeoffs are worth it.

The article does make good points 1-4 which basically boils down to "there is an incentive gap and no one will want to sacrifice themselves to pick up this slack".
by iamjackg | 2025-04-08 15:52:28+00:00
Yeah, this one is tough. I tried doing today's puzzle and I immediately knew the full solution, so I guess the designer's dilemma is whether or not to allow Wheel of Fortune-style "I would like to give the full answer", and if so how to score it. Did you do as much "work" as somebody who solved all the puzzles? I would argue not, so it should probably be scored less, but how much?
by incomingpain | 2025-04-08 15:52:42+00:00
>I feel that the European understanding has largely been that the US and Europe share a "sphere of influence." We thought we were on the same side, the side of democracy, freedom, and free trade.

From my pov the EU left those things behind. France is a recent example where they banned the front runner marine le pen from running. This is after a suspicious move to remove democratic options in order to defeat her in the last election?

France also had the ability to warrantlessly do home searches? How about wearing a mortal kombat mask or burka in public? If I were to wear my mandalorian helmet in public, it would cost me $150?

If you wanted to wear a vest and protest in paris you cant do that? they bring in the military and round up those protestors? they use force to end protests that the government doesnt approve of?

How about free trade? Has France ratified CETA with Canada? They overwhelmingly opposed it in their senate?

>Obviously, there were always disagreements, but they were mostly limited to local decisions.

I beat up on France but much of the EU has seemingly abandoned freedom.

>Nobody expected a US president who effectively behaves in the way you would expect a Russian asset to behave. In hindsight, this was wrong, but I don't think it was obvious that one could or should predict this during Clinton, Bush 2, Obama, or even Trump's first term.

I'm not from USA but this Trump = Russian hoax stuff was very well dispelled. He maintained all the sanctions on Russia. His moves recently greatly harm Russia and China.
by hinkley | 2025-04-08 15:52:52+00:00
Solar and wind have economies of scale and always have.

How Big Projects Get Done describes roads, wind and solar as three of the top five projects types for likelihood to come in on time and on budget.

Why? The first pour and the last pour on making a road are substantially the same. The people working on it get better at doing so as they go. They iterate on the process and reduce waste. Solar and wind are installing the same structures 10, 20, 50 times so they go fast once they start and the scope can be adjusted up or down as long as you have contracts in place.

Building a nuclear plant takes for-fucking-ever, there are a million different tasks to do, and they are built so far apart that getting the same team to build another means a long commute and a different local government to contend with every time. So budgeting is difficult.