MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by taylodl | 2025-05-19 16:45:05+00:00
If the U.S. becomes irrelevant in the future, which seems increasingly likely, it will be due to the gross incompetence of American leadership and their ignorance of international markets and business. It's astonishing that a nation that built the modern world and dominated global markets is now retreating from that legacy, led by someone who appears to misunderstand it entirely and instead pines for the failed policies of the 19th century. This is a recipe for disaster and long-term irrelevance.

Importantly, China's rise is not a result of its command economy, and America's decline is not because it embraces open markets. The issue lies in leadership, vision, and the ability to adapt, not in the fundamental structure of a free-market system.
by mplewis9z | 2025-05-19 16:45:35+00:00
Capital One’s personal lending is also notorious for targeting the mid-to-low end of credit card customers. They routinely deny people for credit cards if it looks like the applicant pays off their cards in full every month - they love a customer with a credit profile that has no negative marks but with a moderate debt-to-income ratio that means they’ll get those sweet interest payments.
by keybored | 2025-05-19 16:45:43+00:00
Two levels into the comments on the topic of sedentary behavior in itself—time spent sedentary, even if you also exercise—and the whole topic has been memory-holed, replaced with the off-topic point about exercising.

The novel point on this topic (relative to mainstream knowledge[1]) is that exercise is not enough. Being non-sedentary (less so) is also important. You should have both as part of your “lifestyle”.

[1] Ostensibly this book that you mentioned tells about the benefits of exercise. I suppose that’s still a well-guarded secret?
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-05-19 16:45:48+00:00
> Oh boy, more nanny software. This future blows.

I think this topic is a little bit more complicated: this is rather a balancing of the model between

1. "giving the best possible advice to the respective person given their circumstances" vs

2. "giving the most precise answer to the query to the user"

(if you ask me: the best decision would in my opinion be to give the user a choice for this, but this would be overtaxing to many users)

- Freedom-loving people will hate it if they don't get 2

- On the other hand, many people would like to actually get the advice that is most helpful to them (i.e. 1), and not the one that may answer their question exactly, but is likely a bad idea for them
by nicksergeant | 2025-05-19 16:45:52+00:00
I am 100% in agreement here. I operate a couple large Next.js apps and in the last year we've had to deal with Next.js 14 -> 15 which introduced a ton of breaking cache changes, Next.js pages -> app router, React 18 -> 19, Eslint 8 -> 9, and Tailwind 3 -> 4.

It's honestly been a nightmare, and I wish I had just built in Django instead. The Tailwind 3 -> 4 migration was probably among the most painful, which I was not expecting.
by aEJ04Izw5HYm | 2025-05-19 16:46:22+00:00
These are notes from me defending the following positions at a debate. Can any hackers do a better job defending or attacking any of these positions?

* AI-driven experiments will soon replace traditional research: False

* Adaptive, personalized interfaces should be the default standard for all digital products: True

* “Web” must evolve from static pages into immersive app-like experiences: False

* Seamless cross-platform UX: start on mobile, to web, finish in AR/VR: True

* Speed-touch-gesture-driven interfaces will eclipse screen-based Graphical UI: True
by goda90 | 2025-05-19 16:46:23+00:00
I work in software where bugs can be very disruptive for the end user's very important job. Typescript was a godsend over JavaScript. I've blamed issues on changes where the developer clearly didn't grok the area they were changing. And I've witnessed dependency hell slowing down the development process. I've come to the conclusions OP did from professional experience that provides negative feedback, not some past psychology from my personal life.

There are certainly cases where you wouldn't get that negative feedback for your software, so you would never feel the need for those things. And maybe in that case you can move faster without them, but you should be careful taking those beliefs into other domains.
by egypturnash | 2025-05-19 16:46:24+00:00
Just moving away from what your body decided to be allergic to when you were a kid with a bored immune system seems to help a lot, I moved from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast and my allergies receded a lot. I eventually moved back to where I grew up and they didn't really return except on days when the whole city's collective nose is running because all the trees are having an orgy up in there.
by xitang | 2025-05-19 16:46:46+00:00
This is a great question! I think it is something that the platform can potentially address in the future via community inputs, e.g. people can report they have submitted to this position but never heard back within a week/few weeks. The more a position gets reported, the more indication that it is a ghost job. I am open for ideas here.

Sometimes, companies shift engineers whenever they can before layoffs, and sometimes, they let go folks to rehire or hire back folks that were laid off if rehire proves difficult. I am not sure why companies do this but have seem it happens.
by alecco | 2025-05-19 16:46:49+00:00
Great idea and I think they should 10x it, but... the person in charge according to the article is EIB President Nadia Calviño. She is a Spanish career politician and a socialist lawyer with background in media and broadcasting. They rarely put in charge experienced people or at least engineers. It's so sad to see the EU crumble due to a cast of career bureaucrats squeezing it to its last drop. There are so many great universities and researchers to build things.
by noitpmeder | 2025-05-19 16:47:00+00:00
This is so spot on. The fact that there isn't a single image showing an ACTUAL comparison, even of small samples, is a massive red flag for a company that is advocating the "aesthetic" properties of it's product.

Then, even worse, they RELY ENTIRELY ON UNLABELED AI GENERATED IMAGES.

I cannot imagine a better way to say "there's a high chance everything we've promised is fake news". Just make sure to squint before looking at our ad copy!
by gsaussy | 2025-05-19 16:47:01+00:00
Yes the final product will preserve the wood grain in some form. The paper has a few images of the final product. They basically boil out all the non-cellulose and compress what remains into a smaller form. I assume the strength is that a super board of the same size would be made of several boards' worth of wood fibers. I haven't read enough yet, but I wonder if this substantially lowers weight / strength. Right now, steel is required for tall buildings because there is an upper limit to how high you can go before wood buckles. There are no 300 m trees after all.

fwiw, I first thought this was going to be some innovation in glue, which allows manufacturers to turn wood chips and sawdust into MDF, OSB, and particle board. These are typically weaker than sawyered beams of the same size because the glue is not as strong as the cellulose fibers that run the length of a beam. (However, they are getting applied more and more in the construction in the US because it is crazy expensive to find a tree that can produce thick enough 40 ft beams, but you can easily get enough sawdust to make an even thicker, precut MDF board.) But I thought no shot, because if you can make glue that is stronger than cellulose, then why bother with the wood?
by Scene_Cast2 | 2025-05-19 16:47:11+00:00
I tried doing some vibe coding on a greenfield project (using gemini 2.5 pro + cline). On one hand - super impressive, a major productivity booster (even compared to using a non-integrated LLM chat interface).

I noticed that LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt. One easy example is that I noticed them breaking abstractions (putting things where they don't belong). Unfortunately, there's not that much self-retrospection on these aspects if you ask about the quality of the code or if there are any better ways of doing it. Of course, if you pick up that something is in the wrong spot and prompt better, they'll pick up on it immediately.

I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single evening. (Previously, as a heavy LLM user including coding tasks, I was averaging maybe $20 a month.)
by swisniewski | 2025-05-19 16:47:11+00:00
There's a much simpler way to do this:

If you want your library to operate on bytes, then rather than taking in an io.Reader and trying to figure out how to get bytes out of it the most efficient way, why not just have the library taken in []byte rather than io.Reader?

If someone has a complex reader and needs to extract to a temporary buffer, they can do that. But if like in the author's case you already have []byte, then just pass that it rather than trying to wrap it.

I think the issue here is that the author is adding more complexity to the interface than needed.

If you need a []byte, take in a []byte. Your callers should be able to figure out how to get you that when they need to.

With go, the answer is usually "just do the simple thing and you will have a good time".
by saltcured | 2025-05-19 16:47:17+00:00
Hmm, could this whole side-thread be summarized as: a meta thing rich people can do is wield larger sums of money without hitting the same "qualitative boundary exceeded" circuit trips that regular people might hit?

It feels like a bit of a tautology, but I think has some reality to it as well. When you're steeped in a more frugal mindset, it can be hard to remain rational or detached when analyzing consumption patterns "just a few orders of magnitude" larger...
by some_random | 2025-05-19 16:47:46+00:00
Someone posted what's probably the study it's based on below, it looks to be Figure 2d and 10e. As suggested, it's just darkened in a nice looking way (without stain) which frankly doesn't seem like it's necessarily a good thing.

https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/documnts/pdf2018/fpl_2018_song00...
by closeparen | 2025-05-19 16:48:13+00:00
One reason this happens: the product is slightly different in every country due to market and regulatory nuances. Therefore the source content is different in every country also. We are not going to push every (country, language) permutation through legal review. Therefore we have a few "Accept-Language" values we respect for each IP geolocation. If it's not on the list, you get the country's default.
by BeetleB | 2025-05-19 16:48:26+00:00
As I said, they won't make you better at applying statistics (or programming) - just at recall.

Disciplines like programming, math, and well any technical discipline require both memory and analytical abilities. SR takes care of only the former. The barrier I kept running up against was forgetting definitions and theorems in math - especially if it had been a year or longer since I last used them. This helps mitigate that problem.

> Let's say I put pathlib.Path().iterdir() in my Anki card, what would be the point of that for someone who is happily using glob or rglob?

That's for you to answer - if you prefer doing it with glob/rglob, that's fine. For me, the card was "What is a better way to traverse directories/files than os.walk?".

The next time I reach for os.walk, I'm reminded there is a better way.

OK, let's be real. It doesn't always work. Perhaps only 30% of such cards lead to actual behavior change. In a typical scenario (70% of the time), I'll get the card right, but using os.walk won't trigger the part of my brain that says "Oh, there's a better way". Still, it's a very low price to get that 30%. And the bonus is if I see someone else's code where he uses scandir, I'll immediately know what it is for.

> However knowing why and when recall is important would be crucial instead of knowing bare formula.

Obviously. You'd have to find a way to embed that into a different card.
by al_borland | 2025-05-19 16:49:01+00:00
I guess I was just thinking about federal taxes. As long as I can remember, even when I wasn’t making much, I remembered state being less and I didn’t may much attention to it.

Looking into it more, I was ignoring sales tax and some of those other, as they are more indirect, but consumption taxes will hit harder for those with less… it’s just not as easy to quantify.

Looking at big more it seems like the split between federal/state taxes for the bottom 20% may be 20/80, while for the rich it’s flipped at 90/10.

While all this is interesting, and has opened my eyes a little in this area… I would still stand by the latter half my original statement. The wealth is created elsewhere before taxes even come into the picture. The local taxes can hit a point of being very low impact long before someone hits the 1% or is considered wealthy, and that isn’t turning anyone into a billionaire.
by Boogie_Man | 2025-05-19 16:49:02+00:00
This is the correct answer. Discover has a payment network, which will afford Capital One the option to issue cards without relying on Visa or MasterCard. This is what Amex does.

I would assume primarily domestic cards (platinum, quicksilver, savor) will start being issued on the discover network, while travel cards (venture series) will not (initially) because of the high domestic and low international acceptance rate of Discover cards.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-19 16:49:21+00:00
There is nothing fascist there.

That's the core regalian powers at the heart of the state. Basically, a state is there to ensure laws can be voted, that they are fairly enforced and that things can stay that way. This notably means that people are safe in the broadest sense. They are not going to be mugged, murdered or dispossessed. That also means that the state has the mean to stay a state without becoming part of the next door state, which is to say, has an army to defend itself. A state which can't guarantee that is a failed state (or a former state if it was invaded).

Anything else is the cherry on the cake. Most states do a lot more because their citizen decided through laws this was a good thing - things like social security or education. If your state does these things for you, well, you should be grateful because they are in no way owed to you. You get them through the good will of the citizen who preceded you, the care of the civil servants that provide them to you and the continuously renewed commitment of your fellow citizen. If the French felt a bit less entitled and a bit more grateful, the country wouldn't be in the sorry state it's currently in.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-05-19 16:49:30+00:00
the regional ISP i worked for used to offer paid internships for L1 support/netops positions; i think they were technically a nonprofit but i'm not totally sure. paid more than washing dishes (but not much!) but to this day the best job i've ever had... even factoring in the asynchronous nature of tech support for dialup customers.

don't get me started on helping people configure eudora without remote tools. what a pain.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-05-19 16:49:32+00:00
I think at one point not too long ago that was more realistic than now.

For one thing the general interest is limited to those that actually pay attention to the cause & effect of economic conditions, and that may not even be the mainstream majority of Facebook readers and TV watchers. I do agree the more mainstream items, controversial or not, were kind of the antithesis of the intended HN readership.

Then rapidly over a period of months the economic landscape has changed in ways never seen for decades, last time it was anything like this was way before the internet or any tech startup scene of any kind.

Very suddenly what could very well be a majority of HN readers[0] may be finding that bullshit in Washington which they have always known was going on, and never thought would have risen to the level of threat that their own ambition and technology could not overcome, has now escalated to the point where for many, things which were completely within reach or coming close are now in doubt through no fault of their own. Whether that's education, career opportunities, or merely continued survival in the tech or financial world, even if they had been "all in" for years or just getting the foot in the door. The "general consensus" is that people can not expect to do as well going forward as they would have if stability could have been maintained, and that surely extends to HN, but it is not a general audience here.

The trick is to keep it from becoming a general audience while still allowing the kind of articles from non-tech sources, especially those having financial implications, that draw worthwhile comments of the kind that can't be found anywhere else.

Because things that didn't used to matter, now relate to technology startup and growth possibilities like never before.

Just because of bozos in Washington which have plainly reached a critical mass of lower intellect that was never endured before, not even decades ago. Regardless if they are all as cruel as Krugman makes them out to be or not. Some very successful and wealthy capitalists are even having that deer-in-the-headlights look themselves.

People on the left & right are all in for a toss-up, due to more unpredictability than ever in solid-state history.

Plenty will land on their feet and come out just fine, plenty will not.

And who else but HN readers would value the commentary of other HN readers over that of the commentary on general interest sites, even over the full articles when a potential entrepreneur is looking for insight into how that might effect their prospects which seemed so much more dependent on personal effort and technology. Like not that long ago, and virtually overnight there are surely some ventures where all the ambition and technology in the world won't help you now, compared to doom that can be handed down from above with the stroke of a pen.

[0] Especially ones who would really like to start new companies, or seek accelerator funding for little companies when they desire to build commitment for growth.

Edit: not my downvote BTW, corrective upvote actually
by ty6853 | 2025-05-19 16:49:58+00:00
Don't worry, we made qualified immunity so the government employees, also of whom are the people that enforce the lawsuits they are immune from, don't have to eat their own dogfood.

There is some seriously crazy stuff in America. Like guys who go around asking mom & pop shops to use a normally private bathroom "for an emergency", then sue the shit out of them because it's not considered handicap accessible and now that they let the public use it it is now a public bathroom. The effect is a lot of places would rather you shit yourself than open themselves up to lawsuit.
by mml | 2025-05-19 16:50:03+00:00
I've seen this video, he did a pretty good job, but his chemical treatment didn't penetrate at all. I suspect he would have benefitted from pressure cooker during that step. this is how treated lumber is treated to get full penetration of whatever chemicals they use.

given the depth the of the penetration, he basically case hardened it. you can see in the bullet tests that the interior laminations are much fatter than the exterior layers.
by gruez | 2025-05-19 16:50:14+00:00
...because the process started over a year ago, and just got regulatory approval last month? I'm not sure what you're expecting here. Unless that enforcement action specifically barred them from acquiring companies, why should they be prevented from acquiring companies? It's like asking why someone who was fined for speeding could still drive, when license suspension wasn't part of their punishment.

>Capital One announced in February 2024 that it had agreed to acquire Discover Financial in an all-stock deal worth $35.3 billion.[94]

>[...] The deal was approved by U.S. banking regulators in April 2025.[99]
by patcon | 2025-05-19 16:50:34+00:00
I don't suppose you're using LLMs for coding? The number of my older friends who've found energy for side-projects since LLM coding became a thing is very notable

In the most extreme case: a new father of twins just uses his IDE and home projector to put up the work on the wall and builds little things by voice and reading, as he's home with his daughters. It's pretty eye-opening.

Obviously, he won't want to divide his attention so obviously in the near future, but he's the sort who will likely be making things with and for them very early -- I imagine it will be like kids spending lots of time growing up in their father's woodshop.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-19 16:50:35+00:00
LLMs can't even not write React when you explicitly tell them not to write React in your Vue codebase. I still, with Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7 both, get this annoying ass interaction almost daily, despite a universe of context there that should make it obvious I don't want a React component in my Vue codebase.
Poll: Is This AI Wave Really That Disruptive? Where Do You Stand?
by bobosha | 2025-05-19 16:50:51+00:00
Is This AI Wave Really That Disruptive? Where Do You Stand? Over the past year, the narrative around AI in software development has shifted dramatically. Not long ago, the headlines were filled with optimism-AI copilots, productivity boosts, and promises of a new golden age for developers. Lately, though, the stories seem to focus more on disruption, job risk, and unintended consequences.

As a developer, do you feel this AI wave is truly as disruptive as it’s being portrayed? Or is the current climate just another hype cycle, amplified by media swings from “game-changer” to “doom and gloom”?

Have you personally felt your work or job prospects change because of AI in the last year?

Do you see AI as a net positive, a threat, or something more nuanced?

Are you more optimistic or anxious about the future of our profession compared to six months ago?
by snozolli | 2025-05-19 16:50:54+00:00
Russia took Chernobyl by force, then gave it back. They attacked Zaporizhzhia, seemingly only with small arms, and no reactor was damaged.

Compare that to the outright destruction of Ukrainian thermal and hydroelectric power plants: https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2024-04-17/rus...
Ask HN: Is AI inferencing on Teleco MECs viable?
by arjunrko | 2025-05-19 16:51:32+00:00
Hyperscaler operated MECs built at Teleco stations were supposed to be a revolution for low latency compute - gaming, metaverse etc. But this didn't materialize and a lot of telecos grandfathered the service. However the same system could be used for edge AI inference. Are there any major barriers for this? Anyone with first hand experience?
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-19 16:51:52+00:00
"If I haven't seen it, it's new to me."

I'm very happy to see the case being made for static typing. Dynamic types should be niche, and eventually they will be. Rails and Python only made them popular out of a reactionary minimalism thanks to types done wrong in C++ and Java ecosystems. New developers should read articles like this very early on. The more often they're written and posted, the sooner we can all move on from unnecessary type errors.
by rafram | 2025-05-19 16:52:01+00:00
let someArray = [1, 2, , 4]; console.log(as.numbers(someArray) === someArray); // => true for (let number of numbers) { // This should be safe because I know everything in the array is a number, right? console.log(number.toFixed(2)); // => TypeError: number is undefined }

I mean, it's probably fine if you're only ever getting your data from JSON.parse(). But I would hesitate to use this in production.
by daedrdev | 2025-05-19 16:52:29+00:00
This seems to somehow work fine on discord, where people ask the dumbest of questions on project discords yet get prompt responses even if it's just a link to a faq or wiki. I don't know how this happens, maybe something about the chat format or SO not retaining responders as well as discords do, but you really can see this it on discord servers for projects.