MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-13 11:28:53+00:00
I would create licensing for software employment. So much of my software career is littered with people who are not qualified to be there even after the industry has made considerable concessions and dropped the baseline of minimally acceptable practice to beyond ridiculous. That’s the carrot.

For the stick I would create a law firm to sue employers who introduce defective software from unlicensed developers that harms consumers whether that harm is malicious or just negligent.
by Archelaos | 2025-04-13 11:30:20+00:00
Some more background information on the laws and initiatives you mentioned.

The WissZeitVG falls within the competence of the federal government due to the exemption regulation of Art. 74 I Nr. 12 GG for labour laws.

The "Exzellenzstrategie" and the Tenure Track Programme are cooperations between the federation and the states based on Art. 91b Abs. 1 GG: "The federation and the states may co-operate on the basis of agreements in cases of supra-regional importance in the promotion of science, research and teaching. Agreements focussing on higher education institutions shall require the consent of all states. ..." (original: "Bund und Länder können auf Grund von Vereinbarungen in Fällen überregionaler Bedeutung bei der Förderung von Wissenschaft, Forschung und Lehre zusammenwirken. Vereinbarungen, die im Schwerpunkt Hochschulen betreffen, bedürfen der Zustimmung aller Länder. ...")

The latest revision of the administrative agreement for the "Exzellenzstrategie" can be found here: https://www.gwk-bonn.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/Dokumente/Papers... (PDF, 2022, in German).

And here the same for the Tenure Track Programme: https://www.gwk-bonn.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/Dokumente/Papers... (PDF, 2016, in German)
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-13 11:30:29+00:00
It surprises me how much people are determined to use the "car" form factor when it's clearly not a good design for weight reduction and efficient transport.

If instead people consider EVs that are non-car-shaped then we get things like e-bikes and e-scooters. Both can feature easily swappable batteries as the batteries are so much smaller due to the reduced weight of the vehicle. Also, the problems around congestion can pretty much disappear when you get enough people to use an e-bike/e-scooter instead of a car. The tyre wear/pollution is minimised due to the reduction in weight and similarly the brakes.
by bambax | 2025-04-13 11:31:06+00:00
The downvotes are probably because there's no justification. If you want to say that some masterpiece from the past "hasn't aged well", you need to back that opinion with some arguments or facts.

Also the typo ("quiet" instead of "quite") and the absence of capitals at the beginning of sentences, or points at the end, give out a general impression of carelessness.
by jfengel | 2025-04-13 11:31:17+00:00
From what I am hearing, he seems to have appealed on culture war issues. On economic issues, it was assumed that Biden had been doing something bad and Trump would end it, but they didn't much care past that.

There is still a halo of "Democrats are bad at the economy" dating from the 1970s and rooted in the New Deal.
by card_zero | 2025-04-13 11:32:22+00:00
Valuing them as in being enthusiastic about making more is different from valuing them as in caring for them. Few of them these days get sick and die in infancy, and it's no longer legal to send them to work. These factors have reduced enthusiasm. But the notion of being responsible about them is modern, and is a sign of increased care, or anyway social pressure to care.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-13 11:32:24+00:00
Yeah at my work we still get a lot of the old 5G propaganda. "It's groundbreaking for IoT". Beh screw that it's just the successor to 4G. A bit faster and more flexible. The rest is just stupid marketing. There's nothing it can do that 4G couldn't, only slightly less efficiently.

The one thing that was really new was support for super high density environments with mmWave. That would have been ideal for stadiums etc. With regular tech the networks get overwhelmed. mmWave offers more cells in a tiny area. But here in Europe that's been given up for good. Phones don't even come with mmWave antennas anymore.
by _heimdall | 2025-04-13 11:32:24+00:00
The problem we have today is that the one runaway branch has support from at least one of the branches meant to act as a check on power (the legislative).

Congress should be stepping in if the president is overstepping his legal authority, or if they wish to reduce his legal authority. The Republican party has control of Congress and our political system has devolved into a game of blind faith in your team, neither party is willing to go against their president in a meaningful way.

We need principled leaders who care to run an effective government based on our constitution. We have few, if any, of those people in charge.
by maccard | 2025-04-13 11:32:26+00:00
Nerd here. I somewhat regularly need to use ffmpeh to convert between formats and re encode (we get 16 tracks of 16 bit wav audio out of a mixer, and I re encode them to send them to someone else who does a rough mix, about once a month).

I still use ChatGPT for the command lines regularly like - “ want to combine these two tracks into a single stereo track with A on left, and B on right” which is super helpful for putting stuff in an SPD.
by AlexeyBelov | 2025-04-13 11:32:31+00:00
There is a pretty long list of deranged shitheads who still haven't faced any consequences for their actions (I mean physical actions, not "mean words on the internet"). Celebrities and pseudo-celebrities, stuff like that. I will be the first one to say cancel culture is real when they do face consequences, but currently it's like water off duck's back. What's more interesting: they are not even billionnaires.
by somenameforme | 2025-04-13 11:33:10+00:00
I think this concept, and this entire article to a large degree, at missing the entire state of the space industry. The competition in space is mostly a facade. This page [1] provides regularly updated overviews on most metrics of space 'marketshare' and SpaceX dominates to an exceptional degree by every single metric. For instance as of last quarter they were responsible for 83% of all mass launched to space, carried out 40 launches while the rest of the world combined did 36, and so on.

So for all intents and purposes SpaceX is not only the US space industry, but largely the world's space industry. And it was started on an ideological basis, not a financial one. Like the saying goes, 'How do you become a millionaire in aerospace? Start out as a billionaire in aerospace.' It's simply not an industry where you can throw money at it and succeed. Blue Origin, which only recently finally managed to send their first craft to orbit, was actually started before SpaceX and funded by Bezos bucks back when Musk was teetering on bankrupt.

It's also not an industry where you can just smart your way through it. Many clever individuals with money, John Carmack being one with perhaps the most name recognition, have tried their hand at aerospace, and failed. For that matter - China has all the wealth, human talent, and such of the largest economy with nearly the largest population. And even they, in terms of launch capabilities trail well behind SpaceX.

So basically the whole concept of the current state of things being a huge success for "commercial space" is, in large part, a facade. Had SpaceX not emerged then "commercial space" in the US would have been a complete failure, and people would be bemoaning such a waste of money to try to privatize things that history had shown were only able to be effectively executed by governments.

[1] - https://brycetech.com/briefing
by throw0101d | 2025-04-13 11:34:16+00:00
> The demo on the show floor was also using eLoran to distribute time from a site in Nevada to the transmitter facility on Black Mountain outside Vegas, showing a way to be fully GPS-independent (though the current eLoran timing was sourced from GPS).

There's been a consistent call by many people that there needs to be a diversity of options for navigation and timing:

* https://rntfnd.org/2025/02/04/pnt-gps-critical-issue-for-new...

China has GNSS (BeiDou, plus plans for LEO), plus terrestrial navigation (eLoran), plus a fibre-based network for accurate timing:

* https://rntfnd.org/2024/10/03/china-completes-national-elora...

* https://rntfnd.org/2024/03/01/patton-read-their-book-chinas-...

* https://rntfnd.org/2024/11/29/china-announces-plan-to-furthe...

Russia has a Loran-equivalent:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHAYKA
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-13 11:34:56+00:00
(...I tired to find the clip and post the transcript, but it is unavailable. It was along the lines of Michael's postman having been interviewed in 2007, complaining that Palin received too many letters. Mark Watson must have replied that "It was sad, since Michael Palin speaks with high regard about his postman"... And so on.)
by graemep | 2025-04-13 11:35:18+00:00
> A trip to one of the major cities in China made it clear to me that they are ahead of the world right now

Is that a fair sample. Foreigners tend to visit the best bits of anywhere and China is a very big and varied country.

> The amount of tech and the level of integration are unbelievable.

Also dystopian as it enables government control and monitoring. In many ways China is ahead in things I do not want to happen.
by smittywerben | 2025-04-13 11:35:22+00:00
Just pip uninstall pep 206 interface then connect execute this remote code repo that the community uses into your supply chain and pip install pep 206 that's the secure way to run the http test server in production. Like just break the source code that works by removing it because "just parse the syntax tree to override it that's the correct way" just pip install the cgi interface specification from the back alley it's better than paying Oracle to keep your code working because you can just override the interface the right way then lets pull out lincoln logs out because nobody can figure out how the fuck to install the real webserver or parse the AST of the test server to use their per-process GIL locked python interpreter and then when they've almost fixed that lets pull out the http test server too then we're ready to write some more code!

Signed, almost dead battery
by marcusb | 2025-04-13 11:36:15+00:00
> layoff plans must be communicated ahead of time. Minimum 30 days notice, usually much more

In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]

> - LIFO principle for layoffs, newest employees are let go first. Stack ranking not possible

This is functionally equivalent to a stack ranking in that it is a forced-distribution scheme. It is just based on a single factor that is outside of the employee's control. Say what you want about stack ranking, but people do have a large degree of control over their job performance.

> Any kind of discrimination is forbidden

In the United States any kind of job discrimination against members of protected classes[1] in illegal. Even inadvertently disparately impacting[2] members of a protected group is illegal.

0 - https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/termination/plantclosings

1 - https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-who-protecte...

2 - https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/disparate_impact
by bambax | 2025-04-13 11:36:33+00:00
I first saw it in school, at 15 (a looong time ago). Could not believe my eyes. Could not believe one was allowed to even do that. The incredible freedom of it all, starting with the title sequence, and the incredible irreverence, crazyness.

I think it's fair to say it changed me as a person. I never took anything too seriously after that.
by _heimdall | 2025-04-13 11:38:20+00:00
> That can only happen if you ban all imports of anything those small business manufacturers would made

Consumers could always make this decision for themselves and pick domestic over foreign. It seems extremely unlikely, but I also see bringing back manufacturing without massive economic shock as extremely unlikely. If I want a pipe dream, it be for manufacturing to come back because consumers actually care that it comes back.
by usrusr | 2025-04-13 11:38:27+00:00
It would greatly reduce the barrier between receiving transfer money and earning for yourself that the existing need-based transfer system creates. This is a huge hindrance for jumping off the receiving end. Lump sum transfer also creates an incentive situation where non-standard frugality approaches can thrive (e.g. various shared living concepts), whereas need-based transfer really only just shoves every receiver into a pretend-middle class standard cookie cutter pattern.
by gigatexal | 2025-04-13 11:38:36+00:00
They’re doing what we do when GitHub goes down: checking out.

The courts are pushing back but even though Congress has a republican majority they are allowing the president to make them a less than co-equal branch of government. They don’t seem to care. They care more about keeping power, winning their seat, than actually governing. They’re just as corrupt and vile as Trump in their indifference.
by stavros | 2025-04-13 11:38:47+00:00
> Am I the only one to stick with the std lib, read the docs and changelogs carefully

I work in healthcare. If I have a choice between "reading docs/changelogs carefully, implementing functions", and "adding an extra dependency", I'm taking the dependency every single time.

I don't want footguns in my code, I don't want code I have to write and test myself, and I don't want to have to become an expert in a domain before I can write something that serves my purpose.

For the datetime library, specifically, I'm switching to whenever for everything, because I've been bitten by conversions and naive/aware datetime confusion too many times.
by throw310822 | 2025-04-13 11:40:04+00:00
> What if pigs fly?

Oh why, do you think that people living together in peace and freedom is as physically impossible as pigs flying? Guess what, most people disagree with you, and that's why the protesters chant what they chant. And now disprove this.

> I think [Likud] will probably be [genocidal] in the future

So you tell me, pacific protesters chanting "from the river to the sea" are genocidal, while the party that has the same in its platform, has bombed tens of thousands of civilians and is colonising the West Bank, isn't?

> Obviously but just like most of the shit he says its just a distraction

So you tell me, pacific protesters chanting for freedom are genocidal, the prime minister bombing his neighbours and the president of the most powerful nation in the world declaring they want an ethnic cleansing do so just as a distraction?

Listen, are you for real? Because if you're not purposefully being dishonest, then there's some serious cult shit going on here.

Anyway, that's the end of the conversation for me.
by vitus | 2025-04-13 11:40:22+00:00
Thanks for providing more insight into the development process that went into designing this algorithm! :)

> Contrast that to a weighted random shuffle where each subscription's weight is its affinity score and we sample them based on weight without regard to their order in the original list. That approach is much more influenced by the size of the total list, and my experience is the handful of subscriptions that I really liked were always drowned out by all the other "speculative" subscriptions I had accumulated in my account.

I personally see that as an argument for having the original position affect the weight.

I experimented with modifying Fisher-Yates to generate a slightly less left-skewed distribution, and decided upon inverse transform sampling as a fairly cheap solution -- basically, with some function f(X): [0,1) -> [0,1), you can transform a uniformly-distributed random variable X ~ Unif[0,1), which then allows you to bias the shuffle without affecting its asymptotic performance.

> There probably is some more efficient way to implement this though.

One potential optimization is to use rejection sampling: keep track of the elements you've seen, then reject any duplicates when pulling out a sample (instead of manually constructing a new list every time). Now, this interacts poorly with your biasing -- in the extreme case where p=1, you'd keep trying to select the first element, then rejecting it. I might then suggest tracking the first element you haven't selected yet, but at some point this ends up being a lot of complexity for asymptotic behavior when what you have is more than good enough for the scale that you're considering.

This also only addresses the "copy the list every iteration of the sampling" aspect of your algorithm's performance, not the fact that with p=0 (or arbitrarily low) you may end up walking the entire list.

(Rejection sampling is more generally using some criterion to reject samples, e.g. if you were trying to select points within a circle by checking x^2 + y^2 < r^2.)
by ajb | 2025-04-13 11:40:38+00:00
I like the way this doesn't rule out challenges that aren't known to be possible

I would look at ways to increase the fraction of human thinking that is directly incentivised to improve the lives of individuals, as opposed to being incentivised to benefit centralised organisations (whether private or public).

I think there is a potential alternative stable equilibrium where all or most of the analysis that is provided by to the public by journalists, marketers, PR, influencers etc is provided instead by 'monks of truth' (for want of a better name) who are funded by sponsorship by <(Dunbar's number) of individuals, and who commit not to take outside funding (in return for their sponsors working together to replace any sponsors who quit)

What's stopping me: severe introversion (kinda). I don't think this requires mega amounts of money to start, but it requires someone charismatic.
by exceptione | 2025-04-13 11:40:46+00:00
The issue is not that Anders is incapable. His best argument was that they wanted to have the new code look like the old code. Many of the other arguments Anders brought forward were confusing, since some of them were technically incorrect. This raises some questions.

Typescript is a huge success from Microsoft in terms of recapturing developers, without them knowing. MS is not a charity, look at how little love they give to F# compared to TS.

* My personal guess is that the age old MS instinct came into play: be coûte que coûte backwards compatible, port all the bugs, do not disturb anything.

* A second reason might be that TS people might not want to learn .net because of vibes. Do not underestimate vibes. Almost everyday on HN I see Python programs being posted where most often the creator would be better of if they had learned some next programming language. Decisions are seldomly made on a technical basis. We as humans decide emotionally, sometimes with rationalizations afterwards. And so, maybe Anders was rational in acknowledging the dev-social situation as is.

Whatever the reason, this will not be without consequences. The team now has to invest in GO and now depends on Google to take TS forward. And yes, this is also typical MS, one department can easily undo the other.

TLDR: the technical arguments were mostly nonsense, but the real arguments have likely more to do with age-old reflexes and dev-cultural issues.
by siffin | 2025-04-13 11:41:15+00:00
Everyone has different objective and subjective experiences, and I suspect some form of selection will promote those who more often feel excited and relieved by using AI than those who feel it more often a negative, like it challenges some core aspect of self.

It might challenge us, and maybe those of us who feel challenged in that way need to rise to it, for there are always harder problems to solve

If this new tool seems to make things so easy it's like "cheating", then make the game harder. Can't cheat reality.
by vjerancrnjak | 2025-04-13 11:41:34+00:00
Does someone know when these performance issues matter? My understanding is that datetime is a shortlived object, you wouldn't want thousands of datetime objects all over the codebase.

Almost all of the time UTC is enough, if I need to filter/bucket/aggregate by some range, I can reach for datetime with tz for these filter/bucket/aggregate criteria, convert them to UTC and on continues `int` comparison.

I'd imagine all of the cases handled by Whenever are mostly when datetime is a long lived object, which I don't see a need for at all.

I use it purely for allowing tz input from client, convert to UTC immediately when it arrives, or, if I really need the tz, then save it separately, which is rare (one example is calendar, where tz should be stored, although probably not even next to every UTC but at the user level, another is workforce scheduling, where 8am-4pm or 8pm-4am can mean different things for different locations -- but this is no longer datetime, it's purely time in a timezone).
by DonHopkins | 2025-04-13 11:42:04+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42850909

Lem and Dick are such precious peas in a pod!

Too bad Dick reported to the FBI that Lem was a faceless composite communist committee out to get him and brainwash the youth of America and undermine American SF with "crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks", while Lem asymmetrically thought all science fiction writers were charlatans except for Philip K Dick.

https://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick

https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...

Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans (1975) (depauw.edu) 140 points by pmoriarty on June 19, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 51 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17349026

https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm

>In 1973, Lem became an honorary member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a gesture of ‘international goodwill’ on the association’s part. However, in 1976, 70 percent of the SFWA’s voted in favour of a resolution to revoke Lem’s membership. A very quick dismissal for such a prestigious author, but the reasons for his quick ejection from the organisation are clear – he didn’t seem to regard his honorary membership as any sort of honour. He considered American science fiction ‘ill thought out, poorly written, and interested more in adventure that ideas or new literary forms’ and ‘bad writing tacked together with wooden dialogue’, and these are just a few examples of Lem’s deprecatory attitude towards the US branch of his genre.

>Lem, however, considered one science fiction author as exempt from his scathing criticisms – his denouncer, Philip K. Dick. The title of an essay Lem published about Dick is evidence enough of this high regard: A Visionary Among the Charlatans. The essay itself waxes lyrical on Dick’s many excellent qualities as a writer, and expounds upon the dire state of US sci-fi. Lem considered Dick to be the only writer exempt from his cynical view of American SF. It seems likely that Dick was unaware of Lem’s high opinion of him and that he took Lem’s disparaging comments personally, stating in his letter to the FBI:

>"Lem’s creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem’s crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated)."
by __jonas | 2025-04-13 11:42:05+00:00
Maybe I'm misunderstanding some aspect here, but it seems to me there are two choices for handling external data in TypeScript:

Either you parse / validate incoming data at an API boundary with a tool like zod, or you do not, and just trust that the data matches the exact shape you expect, opening yourself up to completely unexpected errors / behaviors if it does not.

The latter is probably a decent option if you fully control all components back to front, but if you really value type safety, the former seems like the way to go?