MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw4847285 | 2025-05-19 22:35:35+00:00
I love the Big Five. It is a framework with a lot of explanatory power.

The Big Five are demonstrably not personality types because each trait is normally distributed. The biggest mistake that the MBTI makes is drawing a line right down the middle of each spectrum and turning it into a binary. So you get absurd scenarios like the 49% introvert and the 51% extrovert having less in common with eachother than with more extreme types.

The second biggest mistake is that the Big Five traits are totally independent of each other. Someone can be very open to experience and extremely neurotic which leads to behaviors that do not really make sense in terms of the common sense understanding of personality as a single "type" that is encoded in the MBTI. Relatedly, the third biggest mistake is that there is no dimension for neuroticism in the MBTI. This mistake was so bad that they fixed it by adding a fifth dimension for turbulence.

I would be interested in somebody trying to map Big Five onto the choice of programming languages, but then you face the challenge of trying to boil a complex decision down to human temperament. I would bet you $100 that two people with opposite "personalities" can both end up loving Python for very different reasons. Or, what if somebody is average across the board, the most likely scenario. What programming language are they going to gravitate towards?

Sorry you just shared a link to an article and I went off, but this is a topic that really gets me fired up.
by falcor84 | 2025-05-19 22:35:54+00:00
I'll just put this here:

> And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.

> What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.

- Plato quoting Socrates in "Phaedrus", circa 370 BCE
by steamrolled | 2025-05-19 22:36:55+00:00
The old internet is still there, it just hasn't scaled as quickly as everything else. And frankly, we have a role to play if we want to preserve and nourish it. You say you liked the site. Drop the author a thank you note. Amplify it beyond pressing the "up" arrow on HN. It's not just about the author: show others that this kind of stuff is valued.

Today, the signals young content creators get is that they can make dumb videos on YouTube or TikTok and get 10M subscribers and ad revenue, or set up a geeky blog that will get 100 views a month. But it's not Google or TikTok that did this: it's the content consumers.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-19 22:37:25+00:00
> How does anyone fail at this in the modern era?

Most probably some ancient legacy mainframe or whatnot other integration that nobody really has the time and budget to clean up and migrate to something more modern.

The larger the company, the larger the risk for ossification of anything deemed "business critical" because even a minuscule outage of one hour now is six if not seven figures worth of "lost" time.
by dsr_ | 2025-05-19 22:38:39+00:00
Hrm. You should pivot to making an Electric Monk.

"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."

- Douglas Adams.
by walrus01 | 2025-05-19 22:38:41+00:00
There's also the big cable MSO that is the combined RCN, Wave, Grande (now being rebranded as Astound), also owned/run by some wall street finance types.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&channel=ent...

Then you've got things like Canada's Bell buying a controlling interest in Ziply, which acquired Frontier Northwest 4-5 years ago.
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-19 22:39:06+00:00
Funny enough, I don't actually think the money is quite the problem that people think it is.

Look at the early days of YC. Single digit millions a year was enough to stimulate the growth of a whole ecosystem of startups! Some startups are inherently capital-intensive but most don't need that much money to get to the point of basic viability. There are plenty of private individuals in Europe who could support a $10M a year incubator by themselves, not to mention the many institutions that could do this. And yet... there is no European YC and there never was.

I think it's cultural. Go talk to the top students at the top universities in the US and Europe and you will notice plenty of talent on both sides of the Atlantic - yet far different levels of ambition. Now run an experiment; pay ten of those students a hundred EUR/USD to tell everyone that they're dropping out and starting a startup. Watch the parents' reaction. Watch the professors' reaction. Watch the reaction from their doctor, their baker, their crush, their garbageman.

You already know the result, of course, it's obvious. That's your problem; and by comparison, the money hardly matters.
by acdha | 2025-05-19 22:39:29+00:00
I haven’t seen DEI programs which set “race quotas”. It was things like making sure they did outreach to wider groups, had job requirements which matched the work, and made efforts to avoid nebulous “culture fit” judgements which tended to cut against people who weren’t like the existing employees (this often benefits even white guys if, for example, it avoids age discrimination or lower ratings for someone who goes home to their family after work instead of grabbing beers with the other 20-something single people).
by mslev | 2025-05-19 22:40:02+00:00
The new design looks great, and I always love following Troy's updates (although sometimes with semi-morbid curiosity).

I do find the timeline to be a little confusing- it seems to be ordered from earliest breach to most recent, but the dates on the timeline don't match that, as they seem to be when the data was leaked?

Display: breach date Ordering: breach published date?

I think it might be clearer to order + display the published date, and in the cards themselves show the breach date in a standard way.
by mmooss | 2025-05-19 22:40:05+00:00
> The reality is that the economy cannot occupy all these specialists

What is that based on? I haven't heard of any such problem, other than from people who are trying to cut education funding or social mobility.

> and still requires a ton of fungible generalists.

Undergraduate college degree holders are generalists. Nobody considers you a specialist, or will hire you as such, because of your undergraduate degree. Maybe some engineering degrees, but really you need a masters degree for almost every specialist job.

> even from a societal perspective you would think that with more knowledge we would become more tolerant, more rational etc etc. Well how did that work out?

Despite the recent reactionary backlash, we still far ahead of where we were 50 years ago and even more ahead of where we were a century ago. The evidence is overwhelmingly the other way.
by slg | 2025-05-19 22:40:11+00:00
>those humans scientifically established (usually pretty obvious at birth) to have XX chromosomes

It is entirely possible your heart is in the right place, but this specific comment gives it away that you haven't actually looked at this issue too closely. There are "scientifically established" reasons why this issue is a lot more complicated than the anti-trans folks always make it out to be, even if we completely ignore the existence of trans people. Look up Swyer Syndrome[1] for example.

[1] - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/swyer-syndrom...
by XorNot | 2025-05-19 22:40:52+00:00
The benefit seems fictional though. When is the user going to have all the bytes in memory but only have an io.Reader? Probably never. If I have a reader it's because the bytes are coming from something which itself does not make that promise. Like the most common application would be an os.File.

If I do have all the bytes in memory, then I have a []byte array, know I have it, and can use the []byte interface you must've implemented internally to use this speed up.
by SLWW | 2025-05-19 22:41:02+00:00
what?

Why not just use different passwords for different things. I'd recommend something like privacy.com so you can generate a bunch of one-use cc cards when doing shopping on sites you don't trust and the like.

Also don't willingly give up valuable personal information unless it's absolutely necessary, it's also not illegal to give online services outright false information (incorrect birthdates for example) which, in the event of a future data breach of that service, now at least those who would plan to benefit from your personal information might have some difficulties resetting important accs and the like.

You just gotta be smart, it's not about being powerless, HIBP and the service is just one tool to make you aware of what's out there before it gets used against you. (I would highly recommend setting up notifications for important e-mail addresses)
by megous | 2025-05-19 22:41:32+00:00
Yes. It would then be upon the government to do something about it, which would create some controversy, penalties for MS, and a political debate.

Same for refusing orders. It may change nothing, like in this story:

> One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in > a certain house ... and to blow up the house with them. > The sapper refused ... The commander then ordered his > men to put the old women in the house and the evil deed > was done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Dawayima_massacre

But people sometimes still do it.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-05-19 22:44:08+00:00
Very cool.

Small bug report: I've been pwnd a few dozens times, and my timeline is not in calendar order. I see Adobe (October 2013), then LinkedIn (May 2012), then Dropbox (June 2012), then Lastfm (March 2012), then some 2016 ones, then Kickstarter in 2014, and then after that they start being more in order of the listed dates.
by bmgxyz | 2025-05-19 22:44:18+00:00
Writing code _has_ helped me feel better on some bad days. Even looking back at old projects brings me contentment and reassurance sometimes. On its own, it can't provide the happiness that a balanced life can, but craft and achievement are definitely pleasing. I would consider it an essential part of a good life, regardless of what the actual activity is.

This is different from meaningless work that brings you nothing except a paycheck, which I agree is important to minimize or eliminate. We should apply machines to this kind of work as much as we can, except in cases where the work itself doesn't need to exist.
by limbero | 2025-05-19 22:45:04+00:00
In a literal sense, I agree with almost everything you wrote. He does not want to directly make the claim that he believes affirmations are magically affecting reality. He aims the text at people predisposed to certain types of woo. And he wants to convince those people to try his other type of woo. He doesn't say what he himself actually believes.

Where I differ from you in my take on this is that I also weigh what isn't there. He doesn't provide any form of alternate explanation. Nowhere does he say anything that comes close to "I don't believe that affirmations work this way" or anything of the like. I also don't agree that his hedges clarify anything, rather they muddy the waters.

He presents a thesis, presents other people's arguments for that thesis, presents no arguments against, and then explains that he lives his life in a way consistent with believing in that thesis. The hedges fill one function: to make it harder to argue against him. If the arguments aren't his, the chapter stands even if the arguments fall.

To me, that is basically arguing for the thesis, but in a roundabout and quite defensive way. What other point would you say that that chapter conveys?
by efilife | 2025-05-19 22:45:14+00:00
> OK, maybe there's a cultural or language disconnect here

I might be just shit at expressing my thoughts in English

> when the topic of death is addressed in this way: i.e., in a way that seems hyper-rationalist

This is why I kept pushing and asking - I thought that HN is all about logical thinking and not letting your emotions go through and think for you.

I don't know if you are still insisting that I broke the rules - you don't have to explain in which way I broke them, I understand that I don't understand. A simple yes or no would suffice, if I could ask you.

And thank you for taking the time for discussing this with me. Regardless of the answer for the above question I will refrain from talki
by toast0 | 2025-05-19 22:46:27+00:00
Well... at least you're self-aware. Cool travel collaboration things were probably old hat when I was working on one [1] in 2005. :P

I left the travel industry in 2011, but if any of my knowledge still applies, and you want to make some money... you need to do things to drive hotel bookings.

You probably need a catalog of hotels and places to visit anyway to help users plan things. But make sure you have a way for your users to book those hotels and you to get a commission. Make sure you're making landing pages for people to find with search engines. You'll probably want/need to pay to get people into those same landing pages, so you'll need to be tracking revenue at a very granular level, so you can bid higher on the pages that make you more money, and less (or not at all) on the pages that don't. And if you're in multiple commission programs (which you should be), you can be sure to highlight the ones that make you more money.

You may want to have something t help your users make airplane and car bookings too, but those margins are slim, so work on hotels first.

[1] https://lifehacker.com/yahoo-trip-planner-100875
by yubblegum | 2025-05-19 22:49:07+00:00
TIL.

Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifold

https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03552

For me, the most intriguing aspect of LLMs (and friends) are the embedding space and the geometry of the embedded manifolds. Curious if anyone has looked into comparative analysis of the geometry of the manifolds corresponding to distinct languages. Intuitively I see translations as a mapping from one language manifold to another, with expressions being paths on that manifold, which makes me wonder if there is a universal narrative language manifold that captures 'human expression semantics' in the same way as a "natural image manifold".
by desert_rue | 2025-05-19 22:49:57+00:00
I’m pretty sure the others are suggesting that you don’t generate the word list through coding but when you encounter words you don’t know. What helps us remember is context (“I saw that in the Doctor Who episode where the big bad is-“) where a word list doesn’t give that context.

Yes, you can crank through and memorize things without context. It is more painful and less effective overall.
by bane | 2025-05-19 22:50:48+00:00
When I did the equivalent "lets learn about stocks" at school, we opened the newspaper, found a stock, "invested" fake money in a ledger the teacher kept, and then cashed out at the end of three weeks after doing some rough calculations.

The equivalent for a real world person would have been to

1) know what a brokerage was

2) find one

3) drive there and fill out some paperwork to make the account

4) deposit a paper check or cash at the location

5) get a phone # with a specific broker at the brokerage

6) subscribe to a local paper with the stock section

7) watch one of several thousand stocks, and write down by hand the movement of the stocks to see if you could set a strategy

8) maybe buy subscriptions for some investment magazines, a few hundred dollars per year

9) decide the time is right, call your broker, leave a message with his secretary to get back to you

10) wait for that to happen, then place your order. your broker would then charge you a percentage (up to 3% of your trade!) as their fee

11) Angry men in a pit in NYC would yell at each other for hours to make the trade. The trade would be communicated on scraps of paper with hastily written numbers, then shouted over a phone on the trading floor

12) wait for your broker to send you physical mail with your certificates or a record of ownership showing that the trade closed several days after you placed it with him

13) go through a similar process to sell your stock certificates, but then have to self track capital gains for your taxes

Can you name a single reason why you think a poor person living paycheck-to-meal would even know about or wish to participate in this?

Things got better with the internet, which didn't exist for most people until I was an adult (I know because I helped start an ISP), it still cost $30 trade electronically and settlement still didn't happen for days. So somebody making hundreds of dollars a month would have to lose $30, just to make a bet of whatever they were able to scrimp together over months, in the hope it would turn into more than $30 so they could sell it and make money above the trading fee.

Again, why would a poor person, who may not even have a bank account, be a participant in this?

So, to help with your incredulity, why would somebody, who is from a poor family, with not a single person around them trading stocks, most without full-time employment, take a brief class when they were 10, retain those precious handful of classroom hours, until they get lucky enough to have disposable income decades later and suddenly decide "I'm going to trade ETFs" <insert rich yacht buying cat meme picture>

Most people don't work in companies with a 401k, or even with any benefits at all. Why would they be familiar with managing one? Next time you eat out, trade some tips with your waiter on how they diversify their retirement investments. Ask them which ETFs they like, and if any have especially low fees, or do they pursue a market segment strategy. What's their opinion on I-bonds? Maybe they have a prediction if Cathie Wood is a cook or not?
by protocolture | 2025-05-19 22:52:04+00:00
When I was in grade 2 we had a secret santa, but it was the competitive variant, where the "winners" were able to guess who gave them the gift.

So on the card I provided with my gift, I signed off the name of someone else in class, and partially erased it. Made sure it was still somewhat legible and then wrote "From your secret santa" beneath it.

They didn't believe the gift was from me even after the teacher provided them with the original draw, and their supposed gift giver identified someone else as their recipient.
by Zambyte | 2025-05-19 22:52:11+00:00
My comment is explaining how

> A good API should just accept either,e.g. the union of []byte and io.Reader.

could be done. Can you elaborate on how the fact that io.Reader is an interface lets you accept a []byte in the API? To my knowledge, the answer is: you can't. You have to wrap the []byte in an io.Reader, and you are at the exact problem described in the article.
by neilv | 2025-05-19 22:52:17+00:00
He should partner with a law firm, for class action lawsuits, for every breach due to negligence (which is probably all of them).

Tie in to a banking service, so you can do direct deposits to many millions of people, every time there's new settlements paid, and you'll be a folk hero.

Get lawyers who want negligent companies to actually regret the breaches, with judgements that hurt. (Rather than a small settlement that gets lawyers paid, but is only a small cost of doing business, which is preferable to doing business responsibly.)

Optional: Sell data of imminent lawsuits, to an investment firm.

Though, ideally, investors won't need this data, since everyone will know that a breach means a stock should take a hit. Isn't that how it should be.
by sourdoughness | 2025-05-19 22:52:41+00:00
We’re not talking about AI writing books about the systems, though. We’re talking about going from an undocumented codebase to a decently documented one, or one with 50% coverage going to 100%.

Those orgs that value high-quality documentation won’t have undocumented codebases to begin with.

And let’s face it, like writing code, writing docs does have a lot of repetitive, boring, boilerplate work, which I bet is exactly why it doesn’t get done. If an LLM is filling out your API schema docs, then you get to spend more time on the stuff that’s actually interesting.
by satisfice | 2025-05-19 22:53:01+00:00
As a software tester who takes pride in his vocation, I need to use words more carefully. I hope you will, too.

You are saying "it does work" for something that often seems to work, and for which you almost never carefully check to see that it is working (because that would be expensive). "Does" implies that it almost always actually works. That's not been my experience, nor, as I look around, does it seem to be anyone else's.
by herewego | 2025-05-19 22:54:07+00:00
You are stating a common misconception. That being that solar owners should be paying for anything other than the cost to push power into the distribution grid. The grid fees solar owners pay account for that. They should not be paid for supplying power at wholesale rates bc that assumes a wholesale power flow model, which is not physically applicable to solar owners who support the local distribution grid. If you look at the portion of the grid that a solar owner interacts with, how their power flows through it, the efficiencies of supplying that power locally are clear and should be at retail + distribution fees only. It’s the solar owners that are actually (marginally) subsidizing the non-solar owners in reality.

The utilities and ISO’s do not argue against this. They want to eliminate NEM 2.0 in favor of NEM 3.0 bc the difference in rates are to then be provided by alternative incentives such as battery pay-for-performance programs.

Disclaimer: I own an energy company that does C&I and Residential energy aggregation and participates in wholesale market energy supply and incentive programs.
Show HN: Rtrvr.ai – AI Web Agent and MCP Client within your own Browser [video]
by arjunchint | 2025-05-19 22:54:14+00:00
We are super excited to launch MCP integration capability, so that now you can easily combine doing an web agent task in your browser with calling an MCP Server.

So for example, just prompting: Go to Arjun Chintapalli's LinkedIn profile, get his email from contact info, and create an gmail draft to his email introducing him to rtrvr.ai using Zapier MCP tool
by acdha | 2025-05-19 22:54:21+00:00
I think that’s right, extending hiring to include retention. Tech workers had an almost two decade run of extremely high negotiating power and many used that to have more influence on company policies than most workers are allowed. There’s a theory that what we’re seeing now is more resentment about upsetting the power dynamic than any actual cost these guys suffered, and that’s compatible with e.g. those leaked group chats.