MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yellowapple | 2025-04-24 15:27:36+00:00
The problem with updated_at and updated_by is that a given record could experience multiple updates by multiple people at multiple times, and you'd only have visibility into the most recent.

The logical conclusion here is to log the updates (and creations and deletions and undeletions and such) themselves:

CREATE TABLE foo_log (id, foo_id, whodunnit, action, performed_at, column_1, column_2, -- ... column_n);

Technically you don't even need the "foo" table anymore, since you can reconstruct its contents by pulling the most recent transaction for a given foo_id and discarding the reconstructed record if the most recent action on it was a deletion. Probably still a good idea to create a view or somesuch for the sake of convenience, but the point of this is that the log itself becomes the record of truth - and while this approach does cost some disk space (due to duplicated data) and read performance (due to the more complex query involved), it's invaluable for tracking down a record's full lifecycle. Even better if you can enforce append-only access to that table.

This is a pretty typical approach for things like bookkeeping and inventory management (though usually those are tracking the deltas between the old and new states, instead of recording the updated states directly as the above example would imply).
by zaccusl | 2025-04-24 15:27:39+00:00
Agree Democrats are largely ineffective and incompetent.

But countering propaganda is way harder than spreading propaganda. It's easier to spread all over right-wing media that Democrats are working tirelessly to protect an MS13 gang member than to protect due process and the rule of law for all Americans while defending a man that most likely has no ties to MS13 or crime in general and was wrongly deported.

It's like the Fox news defamation case loss against Dominion. They spread those lies (while knowing they were lies) for weeks and millions of Americans believed them. Those same Americans have no idea they paid close to a $1 billion settlement for those lies.

Propaganda fits nicely in 3 sentence memes that are designed to invoke fear and emotion but is hard to counter without long and sometimes complex explanations that involve nuance.

How many conservative still believe there are public elementary classrooms that have litter boxes for kids to identify as cats?

Americans still think other countries pay for Trump's tariffs. Why? Because it's easy for Trump to tweet lies 40 times per day about how good tariffs are and it's finely time for these countries "to pay their fair share". How easy is it to counter with a rational and thoughtful economic discussion of why the tariffs will fail to achieve any stated goal?
by pavon | 2025-04-24 15:27:48+00:00
Ha, I'm trying to remember where I learned that as well. I know we covered it in drafting where we learned an 8.5x11 A paper is half a sheet of 11x17 B paper which is half a sheet of 17x22 C paper, and so on. But I thought I knew the size of A paper long before that, and that it was common knowledge, though I can't think of where or why I would have needed to know. Then again I also know that legal paper is 8.5x14 even though I have never had to use it.
by eadmund | 2025-04-24 15:28:05+00:00
> Metric is already used in areas where it actually matters (e.g. STEM)

Using French Revolutionary units doesn’t really matter in STEM, either: one can conduct science just as well in any units one wishes. One unit of measure is not more scientific than another. For example, degrees Kelvin and Rankine measure the same thing with different units. If anything, the Rankine degrees are more precise!
by brap | 2025-04-24 15:28:11+00:00
Fun game. I just had 7, then 3, then I gave up after 30. And those 2 friend “posts” were 1. someone sharing a page’s post, and 2. a friend posting what appears to be an automated happy birthday on someone else’s wall. I did not see any actual content from friends at all.

Most stuff on FB seems to be 1. pages I don’t follow 2. ads 3. posts from groups I no longer care about 4. random people who are not my friends but somehow I still get to see their posts in my feed (not even popular posts) 5. sometimes, some uninteresting activity by an actual friend (commented on something, shared something) 6. occasionally a friend’s IG story pops up (I guess these are automatically cross-posted to FB or something)
by pixl97 | 2025-04-24 15:28:11+00:00
Hello, my family has property with nat gas and some oil wells on it, and I've been out in the field with relatives that work in the industry.

In small fields they'll typically have larger tanks from the 1,000 to 10,000 gallon size. Wells typically also produce some water and small amounts of nat gas so they'll have some way to either store or burn the gas, and they'll either separate the water on site for disposal, or have a mixed oil/water product that is seperated at a later stage.

If the node isn't on a pipeline a vacuum/pump truck will show up either when the alerting systems hit a particular level, or when a particular interval of time has passed to ensure the equipment is still working.

Modern bulk pump trucks are simply the fastest way to move the product. No one in it for profit is going to move the unrefined product in amounts that small. It's not valuable enough.
by TuxSH | 2025-04-24 15:28:32+00:00
No, you can't do that either: https://godbolt.org/z/vzdTMazx7 : error: '__builtin_bit_cast' is not a constant expression because 'char' is a pointer type

Here the `constexpr` keyword means the function might be called in a constant-evaluated context. f doesn't need to have all its statements be able to be evaluated in constexpr, only those which are actually used are. You need to explicitly instantiate a constexpr variable to test this.

cppreference is very clear* about this, regarding bit_cast: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/numeric/bit_cast
by ta8903 | 2025-04-24 15:28:34+00:00
It's like the classic argument about IRC vs Discord. IRC is more convoluted to use, the clients are subpar, you need to set up a BNC to receive messages when offline, but Discord requires you to give up your phone number.

Some people find IRC less accessible, but I find having a phone number that I'm willing to give to a third party is a much more difficult requirement.
by aetherspawn | 2025-04-24 15:28:41+00:00
Is Cursor actually good though? I get so frustrated at how confidently it spews out the completely wrong approach.

When I ask it to spit out Svelte config files or something like that, I end up having to read the docs myself anyway because it can’t be trusted, for instance it will spew out tons of lines to configure every parameter as something that looks like the default when all it needs to do is follow the documentation that just uses defaults()

And it goes out of its way to “optimise” things that actually picks the wrong options versus the defaults which are fine.
by AlbinoDrought | 2025-04-24 15:28:43+00:00
The Free Software Foundation closed their office at 51 Franklin St in August 2024 [1]. Their new mailing address is on 31 Milk Street [2].

If this test was reproduced today, we may see different results ;)

[1]: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-office-closing-party

[2]: https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/mailing
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-24 15:28:44+00:00
That's just not the case though.

Buyers and sellers both want to hedge and they're both happy to give up some potential upside of getting one over on the other guy in exchange for stability.

As you mentioned, timeframes and volumes often don't match up perfectly. So enter the speculators. They provide a lot of the liquidity. And they get paid for it. Like they make a 1yr bet and 12 1mo counter bets and do that enough that the wins and losses smooth out and they make a few pennies on the dollar.

The futures market is basically a cyclone of financialization whipping around an eye of "actual business doing actual things" that needs to smooth out volatility (because you can't make a huge investment in a volatile market or you might get screwed into not being able to make payroll some quarter even though what you're up to is solvent any given year).

You can apply the same model to financial goods (and you often want to because the solvency of all sorts of banking activities is predicated on market conditions the same way that industrial activity is dependent upon commodity prices and you can't have good stuff going tits up because of a bad quarter)

But at the end of the day you need some core of participants who at the limit are willing to pay to limit/cap/reduce risk and volatility otherwise there's no market because the whole market is bets and counter bets about how that core activity will turn out.

At the end of the day there is a legitimate business need to hedge against future uncertainty. Everything else in the futures market derives from this, though sometimes the paths are nonsensical.
by ctoth | 2025-04-24 15:28:53+00:00
I'm sorry but I fail to see how I could have any envy, passion, or love if I am dead. If these things are important in any way, then literally changing whether or not someone experiences these things seems important? You can't have the one without the other.

Also I'm not sure where Rationalists or transhumanists said "it would be cool to live way longer" and you read "get rid of love." That seems like a weird failure of your own imagination. You can't have love if you're dead, so the transhumanists want you to live longer and... experience more love!
by vel0city | 2025-04-24 15:28:57+00:00
> Why can't you just put them in your pocket?

Modern car keys, even cut ones, are often giant behemoths of keys. They need transponders for the immobilizer. They choose to integrate the remote into it, and either way I'd probably still have the remote on the same keychain. They're annoying and uncomfortable to have in my pocket. If I have a choice to not have to have an expensive big giant chunk of plastic in my pocket every moment I'm out of my house or choose to have that giant expensive chunk of plastic in my pocket every moment, which do you think I'd rather choose?

And then if I have to actually take it out of my pocket and stick it into things? Even more annoying when there's the option of just not having to do that. Why would I prefer to have to take this annoying chunk of plastic out of my pocket every time I want to get into and start my car?

Imagine if every time you wanted to open your fridge you had to fish out a key from your pocket, put it in a cylinder, and turn it. Imagine if every time you wanted to flush out your toilet you had to do a couple of extra steps just because. To turn on the sink, you have to do this extra little pattern before you just lift the handle! Sounds great, why not add a bunch of extra little steps to everything in your life when you don't have to.

Its like I'm talking to the people in the cave. You don't even see how nice it is to just not have to carry the car key because its been just so ingrained into your life, that you accept it as something normal and expected. Who wouldn't want to carry around a $200 chunk of plastic half the size of a baseball in their pocket everywhere they go that does nothing but unlock and start their car?!

Its freeing to not have to carry a ton of junk with you everywhere you go.
by pc86 | 2025-04-24 15:28:59+00:00
I like the thought of this but how does it work in practice?

The company treats me well and preserves my job while I'm planning not to leave. Until they don't. Because once the transaction is more trouble than its worth - either financially, or politically, or interpersonally - I'm gone. But if I am planning to leave, the company doesn't know that and treats me the exact same way.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-04-24 15:29:28+00:00
At my first job, we'd occasionally have old people showing up to pay their water bill (with checks, of course!) because 20 years previously, the local water utility occupied the same building that we were in. They were generally pretty upset because we had no idea where the water company was and they were paying in person because the bill was late, and their water could potentially be shut off.
by jp57 | 2025-04-24 15:30:14+00:00
I find it interesting how starkly bimodal attitudes toward employer loyalty are.

There is a middle ground between getting a company logo tattoo on one hand and on the other being a clock puncher, who fulfills the minimum job requirements and begrudges any request to put in extra effort.

It's possible, even admirable, to be diligent and take pride in one's work for reasons other than drinking the company kool-aid. It's possible to be diligent and work hard, and still leave if you are mistreated.

Yes, employment is inherently transactional, but for jobs like software engineering, machine learning engineering and other high education jobs, the aggregate of the transaction is much closer to a year of work than an hour or day of work. Also, the terms of the transaction often include a variable bonus for performance, as judged by the employer. It seems reasonable to incent people to work harder by offering more compensation in return. It's up to everyone to decide whether the terms of the transaction work for them, but there isn't One True Way™ for everyone regarding company loyalty.

It's also possible to be loyal to the people you work with--even your boss, if she merits it--without being loyal to The Company. I've worked in great teams in companies that have a reputation for being shitty employers. In one case, that didn't stop me from leaving because the job wasn't the right fit for my family and my wife was unhappy. I felt somewhat bad about leaving, but I still left.

Mixed feelings are okay.
by throwaway290 | 2025-04-24 15:30:43+00:00
> you'd have to believe that in February of last year, they were busy writing a dice-guessing game and a rock-paper-scissors implementation

Or teaching their kid. Or it was their friend. Etc.

You're bending over backwards to judge it on reputation in a case where there would not be one. If it's nonsense on merit then criticize that
by esperent | 2025-04-24 15:30:48+00:00
> Yes, AI can suggest syntactically valid code that does the wrong thing

To be fair, I as a dev with ten or fifteen years experience I do that too. That's why I always have to through test the results of new code before pushing to production. People act as if using AI should remove that step, or alternatively, as if it suddenly got much more burdensome. But honestly it's the part that has changed least for me since adopting an AI in the loop workflow. At least the AIncan help with writing automated tests now which helps a bit.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-04-24 15:31:02+00:00
In light of competition being the missing ingredient, the question becomes how does one maintain ongoing competition in a system where the bigger of two competitors tends to win and the winner of two competitors tends to get bigger? That's exactly what happened here: Facebook was bigger than WhatsApp, and FB+WA is bigger than Insta, so FB+WA+Insta is a lot bigger than anyone else.

Back in the day when Microsoft was the one in the DoJ's sights someone compared it to a dog race. Dogs don't have jockeys, so you have to figure out some other way to induce them to run. The way most tracks (probably all, idk much about dog racing but it's a useful metaphor here) do that is by having a mechanical bunny that runs out ahead of the dogs and activates their prey drive. The bunny has to be ahead of the dogs, but not so far ahead that they don't think they can catch it and give up. That means that every once in a while a dog will get the timing just right, go extra hard, and actually catch the bunny. At that point, the race is over for everyone until someone steps in to shake the dog loose from the bunny and give everyone a reason to run again. Our system is like that: we have to encourage everyone to do everything they can to catch the bunny but also ensure that they never actually do. Bill Gates was the first person in my memory to catch the bunny, and needed to be shaken loose. Now it's Zuckerberg, and probably Google, that need to be pried off of their respective bunnies so that everyone else has something to chase.
by mindslight | 2025-04-24 15:32:15+00:00
So many terrible trends are driven purely by people's over reliance on mobile phones. When you're at a personal computer, it's not terribly hard to search for the same product on multiple web stores and see which one makes the most sense, or build up a cart over a few days to hit a shipping minimum. "Fast" shipping is overstated for Amazon and overrated for most purchases - on average, with the Sunk Cost Fallacy membership, it's maybe a day or two quicker than other web stores. If you really do need something urgently then it's worth it to spend a little effort comparing who can actually get it to you the quickest. And over time you build up a regular intuition of where to shop for various types of things, and for many things independent stores have much better curation. Weighing competitive options is only hard when you've disempowered yourself by using a tiny touch screen with an attacker-owned operating system.
Show HN: I made an AI copilot for Maps that answers open-ended map questions
by shekharupadhaya | 2025-04-24 15:32:52+00:00
Hi HN,

I made SmartMap — a tool where you ask an open-ended question on maps, like:

- "Where can I find coworking cafes with power sockets and Wi-Fi in Shibuya, Tokyo?" - "Places that inspired Studio Ghibli movies in Japan"

You can also ask it to plot interactive journeys, like: - "Places Alexandra David-Néel visited on her way to Lhasa" - "Train stops along the original Orient Express route"

It returns a live, interactive map with the results plotted as pins.

Originally built this to scratch my own itch while traveling and researching or learning about new places. SmartMap makes that step instant.

It’s far from perfect — the AI can return vague or duplicated results — but I’m refining the prompt pipeline and exploring structured datasets to improve accuracy.

Would love your feedback, especially around handling fuzzy results, fallback strategies, or general UX.

Try it (no signup): [https://smartmap.space](https://smartmap.space)
by dogleash | 2025-04-24 15:33:12+00:00
You did something good while working for the devil, people were right to be suspect. You gain no redemption points from pointing out the people describing facebook as evil misunderstand the precise bounds of facebook's evil.

Also, you didn't address parent's question about the uniqueness (or lackthereof) of Meta. Feeling targeted because people on the outside don't have the visibility to properly understand the nature of the evil is shared with at least 3/4 of the remaining FAANG letters.
by askonomm | 2025-04-24 15:33:52+00:00
Am Estonian, and from your list only the first one is with physical mail, though more and more people use virtual cards / Apple Pay instead of even owning a physical card. We can also withdraw cash from an ATM using Apple Pay, no need for a card.

As for price changes regarding utilities (or really, anything) we get an e-mail from the service provider or from the landlord (who then gets an e-mail from the service provider). We also pay for utilities via an online bank transfer or automated subscription to the service provider or to the landlord via a bank transfer (who then pays via an online bank transfer or has an automated subscription).

Elderly people set up automatic subscription services in their local bank branch or by calling the bank, I have not heard of a single elderly person using mail to pay for anything.
by jbs789 | 2025-04-24 15:33:53+00:00
I found myself recently making decent superficial progress only to introduce a bug and had a system crash (unusual bc it’s python) bc I didn’t really understand how the package worked (bc I bypassed the docs for the AI examples). It did end up working out ok - I then went into the weeds and realised the AI has given me two examples that worked in isolation but not together - inconsistent API calls essentially. I do like understanding what I’m doing as much or more than getting it done, bc it always comes back to you, sooner or later.
by Ukv | 2025-04-24 15:33:53+00:00
I feel `skip` may have been a better name, but disagree with it being logically difficult to parse beyond that.

If I'm reading a loop and see

for x in y { if exclusions.contains(x) { skip; } if x.children.length == 0 { skip; } if os.file.exists(x.name) { skip; } ...

I instantly know that processing for those elements is skipped, and they won't be relevant for the rest of the loop.

Whereas if I see

for x in y { if !exclusions.contains(x) { if x.children.length != 0 { if !os.file.exists(x.name) { ...

I feel like there's still mental overload with not knowing where those `if` blocks end, and so having to keep the conditions in mind. It doesn't immediately tell me that the rest of the loop is being skipped.

The `log()` mistake seems no less likely to happen using early-returns in function instead, and I'd argue nesting checks actually introduces more room for that kind of error overall, where you append something at the end within the wrong set of brackets, compared to a flatter structure.
by jpambrun | 2025-04-24 15:33:57+00:00
I really like duckdb's notebooks for exploration and this feature makes them even more awesome, but the fact that I can't share, export or commit them into a git repo feels extremely limiting. It's neat-ish that it dodfoods and store them in a duckdb database. It even seems to stores historical versions, but I can't really do anything with it..
by alex1138 | 2025-04-24 15:34:32+00:00
Honestly it feels like a hostage situation

Like some engineer in the company begged Mark like, "Please, people are going to drop your product completely unless you give them some control" (remember Top Stories vs Most Recent?)

And Mark's like "yeah, ok, cool" (it'll be removed in 2 years when said engineer quits/is fired)
by vel0city | 2025-04-24 15:35:00+00:00
> Am I the only person in the world who leaves the phone at home if I'm not planning to use it?

But I would use it, even on a trip to get groceries. I'd use it as the source of the media I listen to in the car, so my audiobook starts playing wirelessly when I get in. My phone has the shopping list on it shared between my wife and I, so we always have it if either one of us decide to make a quick stop.
by graemep | 2025-04-24 15:35:12+00:00
> . If you lose your car keys on your trip, your trip is still a failure

I have my phone so i can phone for help. I have my wallet so I can pay for things.

> If I lose my phone it's the same bad day as if you lose yours, a potentially expensive device went missing

Nope, because its like everything that could happen to me happening at once.

You have a lot less backup.
by grishka | 2025-04-24 15:35:35+00:00
I'm also a millennial software engineer but I usually write stuff down to text files. I do use pen and paper to draw things if that helps my understanding of them. Like when there's geometry involved.

Sending letters isn't an alien concept to me either. I'm old enough to have done it regularly as a kid. I especially liked the part where you have to write the zip code in those machine-readable digits.
by skeltoac | 2025-04-24 15:35:40+00:00
Contracts are negotiable. Don’t like the numbers in paragraph twelve? Can’t agree to forfeit one of the rights listed in appendix G? Redline it and see what they say.

EULA, TOS, and Docusign have mostly forced people to forget their right to negotiate contracts because all they let you do is agree to the terms offered. So it seems natural today that people just want standard contracts for everything.

Lazyweb: what’s that story about the guy who redlined his credit card contract and the bank accepted it?