MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonymars | 2025-04-24 15:08:48+00:00
The missing ingredient is usually "competition"

Same thing with the "private sector is always better" religion - if there's no meaningful competition, you end up no choice coupled with a profit motive, vs. no choice but I can at least nominally vote and be represented

ISPs are usually a good example in the US. My old apartment had one provider, and wouldn't you know it, at my new apartment with multiple providers, I got five times the bandwidth for half the price.

See also: enshittification
by hylaride | 2025-04-24 15:09:01+00:00
My personal opinion is that we should cautiously move forward with the F-35 and either way start moving to diversify future orders long-term.

The Gripen is wrong for Canada unless we actually do think we'll be invaded by the US and need to operate away from runways (and even then let's be honest, we will only repel an invasion from the United States if we go full-on gorilla warfare and insurgency). For the North we need planes with the range for expanses of the north and ideally two engines (though single engine planes are much more reliable enough now). We may want to consider acquiring AWACS capabilities, especially if China starts mucking around up there (they claim to be serious about doing that).

If money were no object and Trump wasn't ruining everything, ideally we'd have F-35s for force projection and a side order of new F-18 Super Hornets (and maybe a few F-18G Growlers - though the latest block of Gripens do have a respectable electronic warfare suite) to keep up patrols in the North.

The only practical alternatives are the Rafael and Eurofighter which are fine planes in their own right for their generations, but have supply lines across an ocean and have some compromises that are not ideal for Canada (the F-18 is larger and has a more powerful radar, which is better suited for long-range interception). Canada should seriously look at joining Europe's next-gen fighter project, though.

All of this is just for planes, too. We need to start taking the north seriously and that means more naval capability, which is a whole other story. At the time I thought Harper's announcements on it were a waste of time, but he was right - the tragedy is they were only paying it lip service failed to deliver.
by jjulius | 2025-04-24 15:09:06+00:00
>During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.

I find this very interesting. Yes, there has been a decline, but even before this decline, this data suggests that users "viewing content posted by 'friends'" was only at 22% on FB and 11% on IG. That feels incredibly low to begin with to me, and suggests that it already wasn't about friends. I wonder what the longer trend looks like.
by TheGRS | 2025-04-24 15:09:08+00:00
I think that loyalty counts when the decision-makers are more localized. People who show up and demonstrate that they care will generally get the bonuses from their direct managers or higher up managers who recognize the effort (because it happened to cross their path somehow). But these monetary decisions are more and more just calculations on a spreadsheet - here's your 3% annual pay increase and we can allocate 10% of the workforce gets a larger raise to ensure 80% retention. When the layoffs come it has nothing to do loyalty and often has little to do with competence in the role. Hopefully the guy with the spreadsheet is considering whether they can continue to run the business with certain individuals or not, but I don't think it ever gets that granular. This is the MBA era of business.
by skydhash | 2025-04-24 15:09:10+00:00
> it is what people wanted though, from Facebook.

I doubt that. In my entourage, Facebook was always thought as a social hub for internet presence. Like maintaining a web site, but with less tediousness. So you fill it up with personal details, then share happenings with your friends. And just like an hub, it's the entry way for more specific stuff, like messenger for DM, groups for social activities, pages for personal or business activities. The feed was just a way to get updates for stuff that's happening around you.
by reaperducer | 2025-04-24 15:09:16+00:00
ask USPS to do a 301 Moved Permanently or 308 Permanent Redirect.

The USPS doesn't honor either 301 or 308. As someone who moves just about every year, and fills out the paperwork to get my 301s and 308s for free, instead of paying a third-party service, I can tell you that the 301/308 at USPS is only good for one year.

To get around this, I used to use a 305: Use Proxy, but then my UPS Store of choice closed, and I was back to 301/308 land.
by riehwvfbk | 2025-04-24 15:09:50+00:00
That's right, they do not deserve loyalty. All of these things hijack our loyalty to people in the name of some higher-order goal. Sports team and TV show loyalty is there to get us to consume more. Loyalty to a country gets us to be reliable cogs in someone else's grand project. Loyalty to a philosophy gets us to be a cult leader's acolyte.

Skip the substitute and go for the real thing: loyalty to people. You can still join grand projects, but do it consciously rather than on instinct.
by stonemetal12 | 2025-04-24 15:09:50+00:00
I hate that quote, it is so trite and stupid.

What poor person wouldn't want to have provided more for their family. What scientist would say I discovered enough. What engineer would say I built enough.

When you are alone who or what do you think about? People have different goals, dreams and desires. Claiming yours are the only ones worthy of pursuing seems rather arrogant.
by pc86 | 2025-04-24 15:10:03+00:00
"It looks the same" is completely different than having been directly extracted from digital source.

If the digital source is the only thing that can be copyrighted, then you have to prove the digital source is what was used inappropriately. If you can't prove that, either because it didn't happen or because there's no technological way to prove it, then you can't prove copyright infringement.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-24 15:10:13+00:00
> multi-government lab

What are you talking about? The Wuhan Institute of Virology is firmly located on sovereign Chinese territory. In fact, the main reason why any serious scientist should still give the lab leak theory the time of day is due to the fact that China was so cagey with what was going on at the WIV. If this lab was multi-governmental we would have the data China withheld and the lab leak theory wouldn't have any shadow to lie in.

Furthermore, the real problem with the lab leak theory is that it does not matter whether or not it is true. If COVID-19 originated from animal sources, then we should regulate wet markets, crack down on the endangered animal trade, and stop doing gain-of-function research. If COVID-19 originated from a lab, then we should stop doing gain-of-function research, regulate wet markets, and crack down on the endangered animal trade. All of those things are very prudent things to do if you want to slow down the introduction of novel pathogens.
by Hilift | 2025-04-24 15:10:30+00:00
META creates $70 billion per year in NET profit. Mark Zuckerberg is the best business person in the history of business. He's an angel to investors and advertisers. Vanguard has 43 million shares of TSLA. They lost $10 billion in stock depreciation since peak in December 2024. Vanguard has 191 million shares of META valued at $101 billion. No one is losing money on META.
by mancerayder | 2025-04-24 15:10:35+00:00
>I haven't seen much of a bias towards seeking out a predisposition to loyalty in employees except among authoritarian small business owner types who invariably underpay.

It's easy. Some red flags:

"This is not a 9 to 5 job, you should know that. But that's normal in this industry"

"We're looking for people who are passionate about their work"

"I won't sugarcoat it, there are good and bad weeks" in terms of workload and hours

"We see a gap in your resume here a decade ago - may I ask why you took time off during this time"

etc

Those are signals.

There's a normalization of sociopathy in the hiring process. That's how we filter. Or maybe it's just financial services?
by em-bee | 2025-04-24 15:10:44+00:00
i feel you, but these downsides have nothing to do with a linux phone, but with your friends privacy preferences. i am trying to be like that friend, except that i keep more communications channels open. i mean, verifying contacts face to face is one thing, but then we ought to at least have one unverified channel to arrange a meeting or a video chat.

also there are more safe options, like deltachat that don't depend on a phone at all. if we live in the same city we could have regular hangouts where we'd be able to meet without any prior arrangements. or if we know each other well enough you know where i live, or have contact to family members.

this is a matter of priority. i keep using the chinese wechat despite privacy concerns because it is the only way to stay in touch with friends and family in china. i long refused to use it, but as a consequence some friends from that time are now lost.

but outside of china matrix and deltachat are the best options even with android. and matrix unfortunately isn't even that good[1]. it still fails some times, and it is difficult to maintain a server and keep it spam free.

[1] matrix is getting better, but the key handling is complex, and at least one seurity minded friend rejected it in disgust last year when for unknown reasons at one point the encryption between us failed and we could not talk to each other. it's a problem when even tech oriented people privacy minded people reject matrix.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-24 15:10:48+00:00
Not everyone wants to or has the intestinal fortitude to start their own business. Most people just want to do the job that excites them, not have a job running a business. Also, not everyone gets into the industry in order to maximize their income.

There will always be junior (and senior, for that matter, but this is about juniors) devs wanting to get hired. The industry would be stupid to avoid hiring them.
by anonymousiam | 2025-04-24 15:11:18+00:00
[trying to confuse an android]

Spock: Logic is a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow. Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad. Are you sure your circuits are registering correctly? Your ears are green.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708432/quotes/?item=qt0406609
by netsharc | 2025-04-24 15:11:20+00:00
What a disgustingly ass-kissing take. To pull the Godwin: Hitler built the autobahn, should I thank him for allowing me the thrill of going 200km/h (I need a better car...), sure 17++ million of lives(1) were ruined, but whatever!

And yes your beloved communication medium helped the Burmese commit genocide...

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victims_of_Nazi_Germany
by strict9 | 2025-04-24 15:11:32+00:00
What a great article.

>Without something to look at, people have to look at the each other. With that comes a lot of subconscious (and conscious) reading into reactions. Pauses in the conversation are awkward because you’re just staring at each other.

As an introverted person who overthinks and often avoids eye contact and body language, I usually stay away from social events not tied to something specific. But enjoy the ones tied to a specific interest, like a museum. I now have a better understanding of why.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-04-24 15:11:32+00:00
Product packaging? Where do you see the package for a phone? I haven't seen a box for a phone before I bought it before, even in the 90's when I sold phones at RadioShack they were kept under lock and key. In fact every phone I have purchased in the last 15 years or so has been second hand via eBay or direct from Google and shipped. Even at the Apple store you can't see a package.
by AIPedant | 2025-04-24 15:12:23+00:00
I was outraged to learn that the test is basically a combination of multiple-choice and true-false. What a misleading pile of crap this study is!

a) Doing well on multiple-choice tests does not really imply anything about doing well in a real lab setting, especially for an AI.

b) Using multiple-choice tests to compare LLMs to humans has an obvious flaw: LLMs are probably superhuman at guessing multiple-choice answers based on superficial statistics! We all learned as children that there are ways to game multiple-choice questions even if you have no idea what the answer is.

c) It is just unacceptably lazy for AI researchers to do this. They aren't teachers on a tight deadline. There is no justification whatsoever for AI researchers to use Scantrons.

I am truly disgusted with the poor scientific rigor in AI research. So depressing.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-04-24 15:12:27+00:00
>Companies aren't people

All companies on planet Earth, since the dawn of history, have in fact been people. None were composed of elephants or aardvarks or sea urchins. It is not anthropomorphization to say this, they are literally people. This is why so many of their behaviors and idiosyncrasies are human, because companies are human.

> The root cause is the political corruption that

A common refrain from the sort of person who hopes to recruit others into their own political crusades. These things are not the root causes, but even if they were, it's essentially impossible to do anything about it.
by 7589447636 | 2025-04-24 15:12:47+00:00
> It is a stubborn refusal to see that one could be programming something much more sophisticated if they could use these iteration loops efficiently

Programming something more sophisticated with AI? AI is pretty much useless if you're doing anything somewhat novel. What it excels at is vomiting code that has already been written a million times so you can build yet another Electron cross-platform app.
by sanderjd | 2025-04-24 15:12:51+00:00
This is actually one of the great entrepreneurship lessons of my career, which I think about a lot.

Around 2009, as smart phones were on their exponential leg up, and when I was still pretty new in the workplace, I remember thinking (and talking with my coworkers) about how messaging and chat rooms were really well suited to the technology landscape. But I lamented "too bad the space is already too crowded with options for anyone to use anything new.

But all of today's major messaging successes became household names after that! What I learned from this is that I have a tendency to think that trends are played out already, when actually I'm early in the adoption curve.
by t43562 | 2025-04-24 15:13:00+00:00
At school I used to play marbles. I had no skill whatsoever so I did "set ups" where I put a marble down and other kids threw theirs from a standard distance to hit it. If they missed the marble was mine. More valued marbles got more chances.

I got "marble rich" because I knew who the good players were and when one came a long I put my foot over my marble. Once you knew the trick it was impossible not to win on average and be a few marbles better off every day. Even a slight positive over a few weeks turns into a lot.

At a certain point I stopped finding this desirable and felt a bit guilty about it - the marbles were of no use to me really and it was enough to know that I had the trick of succeeding.

I wonder if this is roughly how people get wealthy in real life other than that they don't think "enough".
by vel0city | 2025-04-24 15:13:46+00:00
People lose wallets. People lose car keys.

My PaaK car has a backup passphrase to start it. I can be used in a pinch if my phone isn't working. I can't say the same if I lose my car key.

If I go on a long trip I'm likely to bring multiple car keys and multiple payment methods. This is still true if I'm doing PaaK.
by tialaramex | 2025-04-24 15:14:05+00:00
It is definitely not the case that magically safer is slower. IMO too often the attitude from WG21 (the c++ language committee) has been "Some fast things are unsafe, therefore if we make our language more unsafe it will go faster" which... that's not how implication works.

As a very high level example, take sorting. Rust's standard library provides you both a stable and unstable sort, as does your C++ standard library.

The C++ standard promises these sorts have O(n log n) performance, it's unclear in modern C++ if having a nonsensical ordering† is Undefined Behaviour (as it was in older versions) or outright IFNDR (much worse than UB) but the real world effect will be similar anyway

Rust promises that these sorts work as expected, if you provide nonsensical ordering, obviously it can't very well "sort" things the way you asked, but we don't need to kill your neighbour's cats and wipe the hard disk either, so, it will either give you back the same things in... some order or it will report the fatal error in your software.

The Rust option here is clearly much safer right? So, how much performance is this costing? Actually, it's faster. So C++ is choosing slower and worse. What's the upside?

† For example what about if I insist that Red < Green, but also Green < Red, and furthermore Red == Green is true, but so is Red != Green, however neither Green == Red nor Green != Red are true!
Ask HN: Assessment tools for early employees/CTOs?
by flave | 2025-04-24 15:14:19+00:00
Does anyone have any suggestions for a simple, reasonably quick (for the candidate) service focusing on 'core skills' like aptitude, reasoning, communication and personality type?

We're in the process of hiring our first hire - this is a software engineer who will ideally grow into a CTO and a co-founder.

The market for 'candidate assessment' is very corporate and includes things like anti-cheating systems and tech tests - I think both of these would be off-putting, useless and condescending for the type of candidates I'm trying to attract.
by wyclif | 2025-04-24 15:15:19+00:00
When I was 18 years old and a new classical guitar student, I was very fortunate to hear the Maestro in concert. I even got to meet him briefly afterward because my music professor had some connection to him.

I was blown away at the time by what was possible and that, even though he was very old at the time and had to be led out onstage by the arm, needed help getting seated, and had the guitar placed in his lap, what he could still play was so far advanced of anyone in my class who were all in attendance.

The temptation (and I have felt this many times since then after hearing various guitarists) could have been "I should just quit now because I'll never be that good." But I'm glad I didn't succumb to that and decided that "I'd rather not sound like anyone else" and still feeling pleasure and accomplishment from playing on my own terms.
by the_af | 2025-04-24 15:15:22+00:00
Sadly for me, there's another use case for Facebook: special interest groups (as in niche groups for hobbies).

When the Great Migration away from phpbb forums and bulletin boards happened, lots of these groups moved to Facebook. I loathed it, but joining the migration was the only way of keeping up with stuff that interested me.

Now there's another Great Migration to Discord, which I won't follow. Real-time chat simply triggers my FOMO and is stressful to me. So any community that moves primarily to Discord will lose me as a member. I suppose nobody will miss me though.
by jc_811 | 2025-04-24 15:15:44+00:00
I don't know if their newsfeed algorithm is broken, or just grasping at straws, but whenever I log in (fairly often simply for FB marketplace) my feed is full of posts and recommendations for things that don't even make sense for me. For example hiking groups that are in a random mid-size city 2,000mi from me. Or student housing groups in a random international city.

I've tried to even provide feedback on them not being relevant, but they still always appear. I don't know, it really does seem that their newsfeed relevancy is fundamentally broken
by munchler | 2025-04-24 15:15:57+00:00
This is an excellent talk by Scott Aaronson, although it's not something that can be digested as quickly as the typical HN post. The summary slide at the end is perhaps a good introduction to the scope of the topic:

* In math, we are finite beings trying to apprehend the infinite

* The Busy Beaver function actually quantifies that (!)

* Even the finite can exceed the scope of the cosmos. That's where we need physics and complexity theory

* Quantum computers look like they're already slightly expanding the scope of what mathematical statements we can know

* Can we know even more than that? Depends what the ultimate laws of physics are
by gus_massa | 2025-04-24 15:15:58+00:00
> and if they say it was a credible accusation, [...], but our kids are just far too important to trust to the existing systems.

You mean dropping some hard earned human right like Presumption of Innocence?

You may think it doesn't apply to you, but the landlords and HOA can add a similar clause, because children must be safe at home too. And every software company may add the same clause because they (may) have a game division and children must be safe online too. And ...

Suddenly, any accusation that a non-professional fake-judge says is "credible" makes you an outcast of society.
by amszmidt | 2025-04-24 15:16:00+00:00
The only truth to the story is the missed email.

There is nothing "unmodular" about GCC -- considering that it supports plenty of architectures, operating systems, and languages.

The big difference, which people seem to miss in the context of the GNU project and GNU system, is that modularity is for free software projects. GCC is planty modular, and very easy to extend in any way shape or form .. if you abide by the license!

If you want to be a parasite on a project licensed under the GNU GPL, you will have a rough ride .. that is after all the whole idea of copyleft.
by klibertp | 2025-04-24 15:16:30+00:00
My bad, I mean source-level debugger. Something that allows you to step through forms as they are in the source, unexpanded and not decompiled. It should allow jumping to a line or over an expression, continuing to a point, seamlessly stepping into subroutines, and stepping out of expressions. It would be nice to have single-activation and conditional breakpoints. Variables in the executed portion of the code should be annotated with their values. Sometimes watchers - forms auto-evalled in each frame - are helpful, though these are implemented in some CLs, IIRC. SLY's stickers are close, but they are gathered during execution and replayed later, so the break-edit-recompile-redo workflow doesn't work with them. My experience debugging CL using SBCL and SLIME reminds me of debugging CoffeeScript in a browser before source maps were a thing... It's still 100% doable, just less convenient.
by sokoloff | 2025-04-24 15:16:58+00:00
Pick any of those 8 billion. Have them work half as hard. Have them have half as much talent. Do their outcomes remain the same , get better, or get worse?

You’re arguing that there are other factors that also influence outcomes (and that those other factors are stronger forces).

I agree with that point, but that’s not a refutation to the notion that the coefficients on talent and hard work are positive, nor a convincing argument that success is unrelated to those two factors.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-24 15:17:29+00:00
Or if you don't tend to bring your phone with you to do a bunch of errands. If all my locks were tied to my phone, I'd have to fish it out of the drawer whenever I go anywhere. OP said he "constantly" carries his phone with him, so maybe not a problem for him. Am I the only person in the world who leaves the phone at home if I'm not planning to use it?