MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by armedgorilla | 2025-05-16 13:10:14+00:00
I run a small software team at a small biotech working on diseases with small patient populations, and the answer is yes x 1000. The issue is that in drug companies, software isn't the product, so SWEs will never make as much money nor be as much of a priority as in tech-proper.

There are two categories of software we need help with:

1. Salesforce for science. We don't have big data in terms of volume; we have big data in terms of heterogeneity. Tons of small data sets that need context to be interpreted, including measuring uncertainty. This software, often called an eLN or LIMS, is offered by expensive vendors who each have their custom, locked-in implementations. Every organization needs customization on top of this that can be developed and change with the changing direction of the bench scientists.

2. Informatics tools. Much of the heavier computational tools (bioinformatics, molecular dynamics, stats) were developed by academic labs, who don't have the training or incentives to create sustainable software. Alternatively, they are made by vendors who write software on short-term contracts, so they don't have expertise in house. Our mass spec vendor told us to put their analysis servers on our Citrix so employees could access it. Citrix! If you can convince those vendor to hire you and rewrite their software, please do.

Despite cool tools like alphafold making headlines, the software needs in drug development are more mundane. We need people who are excited to sit down with bench scientists and help them figure out how very normal tools can be applied to their work.
by PopAlongKid | 2025-05-16 13:10:17+00:00
The version I installed was under an up-to-date version of Windows 10.

It works OK for http web sites, but for https, it pops up an alert:

Netscape 7.0 and s.yimg.com cannot communicate securely because they have no common encryption algorithms.

(this was for the Yahoo! page, it's the same message for other sites as well). I haven't tried anything else.

I also haven't tried (and don't plan to) using the bundled email client, which was the precursor to Thunderbird.
by _rpxpx | 2025-05-16 13:10:23+00:00
Suicide rates are not a good metric of mental illness: they are a function of several things, most obviously opportunity and access to a means. E.g., in the UK, farmers have a disproportionately high rate of suicide because they have unusually ready access to guns. This post also distinguishes itself in speaking arrogantly about teens without bothering to check any record of what they have to say themselves. I think movements like "Luddite Club" are only going to accelerate, and they will be led by young women. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opinion/teen-luddite-smar...
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-16 13:11:03+00:00
Yeah Lua optimizes array tables for performance as long as they're arrays. That's the only optimization I'm aware of. I get why they didn't just add arrays, to keep the syntax and semantics clean, simple, and unambiguous. I just don't like it. If you take that to its extreme, you get Lisp. Natural human languages are messy and full of warts, but they work despite that, or perhaps because of that, because human life is messy and warty. "Pure" languages never can or do catch on. My favorite language right now is unironically TypeScript despite all its baggage.
by axus | 2025-05-16 13:11:11+00:00
How much money did they save over 5-10 years through this illegal or unethical behavior?

If "Rocket Company" averaged 30 machines per month, max $1600 per month let's say $600k / year before discount. Maybe kept 3 million dollars over 10 years. I imagine the only way Vates will get paid for their service is if control is taken from the operational groups doing the actual work and "abstracted" to a centralized IT group.
by arp242 | 2025-05-16 13:11:28+00:00
This post seems to be a McNamara fallacy: "if it can't be quantified and measured then its irrelevant and can be ignored".

Look, I don't have any answers here. I'm not involved with teens. I don't really know much about this and maybe the author is correct. But I can spot a bad argument, and fixating only on suicide data and dismissing everything else as "unreliable" (based on a single small study) doesn't seem the right approach.

In addition "mental health" is complex and most people suffering from poor mental health don't commit suicide. There are different types of "mental heath" problems one can have, and it seems entirely plausible that some lead to relatively high rates of suicide and others have much lower rates.
by coldpie | 2025-05-16 13:11:42+00:00
Yeah, there's no good guys in this fight. Apple may be behaving badly, but Epic broke the terms they agreed to, tried to use the courts to force Apple to change their App Store business model, and even kicked off a public PR campaign trashing Apple... and now they're whining because Apple is not treating them nicely after all that? You went nuclear on Apple, Epic. That's not going to make them interested in having you as a business partner.
by Koshima | 2025-05-16 13:12:56+00:00
Interesting question. While I don't see a complete calendar overhaul anytime soon, I wonder if we'll see more region-specific tweaks to better align with local cultures and work patterns. For example, some Middle Eastern countries have already shifted their weekends to better sync with global markets. Maybe future tweaks will focus on optimizing productivity or aligning with the natural rhythms of remote work.
by traspler | 2025-05-16 13:13:01+00:00
The title is a bit misleading, Apple did not reject the submission, just not approved it (yet). I know ignoring a submission is practically the same as blocking or rejecting it; but I think this case is already messy enough so that these things should be read with more nuance.

Also the situation is much more complicated. In the EU, Fortnite has been available for a while through their own Epic Games AppStore. This submission seems to have been for both, the EU distribution and the US AppStore. I am surprised that such a situation is even possible, I thought if you opt-in your app/account for EU alternative AppStores you are kind of blocked from the standard AppStore submission as the requirements for the alternative distribution path are different from the AppStore. At the same time it seems to give Epic more arguments for pressure on Apple as sabotaging the release in the EU might be against the DMA laws.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-16 13:13:38+00:00
You're not the only one. David Baron's note certainly applies: https://bholley.net/blog/2015/must-be-this-tall-to-write-mul...

In a language conceived for this kind of work it's not as easy as you'd like. In most languages you're going to write nonsense which has no coherent meaning whatsoever. Experiments show that humans can't successfully understand non-trivial programs unless they exhibit Sequential Consistency - that is, they can be understood as if (which is not reality) all the things which happen do happen in some particular order. This is not the reality of how the machine works, for subtle reasons, but without it merely human programmers are like "Eh, no idea, I guess everything is computer?". It's really easy to write concurrent programs which do not satisfy this requirement in most of these languages, you just can't debug them or reason about what they do - a disaster.

As I understand it Python without the GIL will enable more programs that lose SC.
by krosaen | 2025-05-16 13:14:15+00:00
I find this product appealing, but aren't you taking on full liability when using it? Not having the company I buy a product like this from have any liability seems like bad incentives and makes me nervous, currently wouldn't drive with my family in the car especially. For instance, what if there was a bug that caused the system to make an abrupt right turn off the road? Seems highly unlikely, but again, if they are confident it is safe, can they not have some legal skin in the game to prove it?
by threeseed | 2025-05-16 13:14:23+00:00
> There’s a good chance he’s fully aware — and totally fine with it

Why would you think that a CEO would involve himself in matters like this ?

Especially given that whichever aerospace company it is would be far more concerned with issues like tariffs, geopolitics, recession risks etc than whether or not a company is using an open source versus a community edition of some forgettable infrastructure component.

Also choosing to pursue legal action instead of simply blocking them from downloading more free trials seems childish and short sighted.
by sofixa | 2025-05-16 13:15:00+00:00
> The primary purpose of a bank is to issue debt. That’s why they were created

Yes

> A bank has to be able to “print” money to issue debt

Absolutely not, especially not in the context which you just said ("that's why they were created"). When the banking industry started in various Italian city states, money was state issued and backed by precious metals, and banks didn't create any new money supply. They gave loans, invested, kept deposits, etc. but without touching the money supply, which was managed by sovereigns and sovereign states.
by beeforpork | 2025-05-16 13:15:03+00:00
My native language is German, and I don't know whether I like it. It is the most natural to me, so no judgement -- I cannot look at it from the outside. Well, of course I like it, because I can express myself best with it.

Anyway, I absolute love Afrikaans. I also like droëwors, but that's a different topic. You should have a look at Icelandic -- it is the opposite of Afrikaans on the morphological complexity scale of Germanic languages. Quite a bit more going on with endings and such than in German. And yet it is weirdly familiar, because it is, well, also Germanic.
by os2warpman | 2025-05-16 13:15:28+00:00
My family is from Washington County, Indiana.

The western-most parts of the Washington county are further west than the easternmost parts of some of the counties that are in America/Chicago.

But the center of commerce, information, entertainment, and all other infrastructure for Washington County, Indiana is Louisville, KY (lollvole). Louisville is America/New York.

When you make an appointment at UofL Jewish you don't care when the sun rises and sets or when the sun is directly overhead-- you care that the clock on your kitchen wall matches the clock in the doctor's office.

Washington County used to be as remote and desolate as you can think of but nowadays it is practically a suburb of Louisville. Farms along 150 are being turned into subdivisions as quickly as farmers can die off so their kids can offload the land.

Same thing with the north west part of the state. Chicago suburbs want to be synced up with Chicago. The southwest part of the state, specifically grain elevator operators and other businesses, want to be synced up with the logistics hubs of St. Louis and Nashville.

Most of the rest of the state is farms. They don't care and just do what Indianapolis does.

I've never understood people who say we have the jacked-up time zones because of farmers. The number of farmers who look at the clock before starting work for the day can be counted on zero fingers.

I grew up with "fast time" and "slow time" and once you are accustomed to it, it takes about as much mental effort as blinking.

Internet people want things to be orderly. Consistent. Algorithmic.

REAL people want to make it to their appointments on time and want the only business serving the area for 150 miles to be open when they call.
by xinayder | 2025-05-16 13:15:39+00:00
The update to Android 15 was TERRIBLE. I updated it the past days, it's literally a bootleg copy of iOS interface. I despise it so much, much more than the move from Material Design to Material You. Everything occupies so much space, there is less information available for you, and important things like changing the music in your lock screen is confined to a tiny space.

At least they got the Expressive right in the name now, Material Expressive (HATE).
by mytailorisrich | 2025-05-16 13:15:58+00:00
Then you need an explicit check box "I have read and accept the T&C" and those T&Cs allow you to block an account, which is often the most effective option against abusers. If you go legal every time someone abuses a free trial you might as well give up free trials.

As things stand there is no point in going legal. Either let it slide or block them and use it for PR with a blog post and an HN submission (wait a minute ;)
by cge | 2025-05-16 13:16:28+00:00
>I also wonder if this will make the penalties for uploaders more severe since it becomes a commercial act

It's not clear whether this is even using a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency arrangement (assuming that would actually be private). What this appears to be presenting is a system where users will be pay, and be paid, to violate copyright, in a way that may well be easily traceable and linkable to real identities, and, for US users, likely even needs to be reported on tax returns even when just paying. The 'cup of coffee' statement entirely misses the point: the nature of the process changes when payments are involved.

Added to that are statements saying that they have systems to remove watermarks and protect the identity of users. If they're envisioning this being something researchers and students contribute to, that watermark removal system is likely to fail on many occasions, and people are potentially going to get themselves severely hurt.

I often feel like academic publishing and paper availability is somewhat of a cold war between researchers and publishers, where researchers practically need to violate copyright to research effectively, while publishers can't pursue those violations too severely, or they risk researchers ostracizing them, so we end up with unspoken understandings of acceptable violations. But a system like goes entirely outside of acceptable boundaries.

If a publisher came to a university and said, hey, this researcher put up the final copy of their own paper on their personal website in violation of copyright, the university might tell the researcher to replace the copy with a manuscript one. If a publisher comes to a university (or the police) and says they can show concrete evidence that one of their students is being paid through a foreign criminal organization to knowingly violate the terms of the university's subscriptions and likely criminally violate copyright, it seems like it could have a very different outcome.
by dspillett | 2025-05-16 13:17:09+00:00
> Does not compute. Why not name them?

Legal risk. If the company decides to be a litigious prick about being named & shamed they might not win, but before losing they'll cost the product owner a pile of time and, at least temporarily, money.

Stating the errant company's industry and size gives us plenty of information to make an educated guess, without actually stating the name. I suspect that this action blocks any useful future relationship as much as direct naming would, so that risk has been taken, but I also assume that no such beneficial relationship was likely to happen anyway so doing this is worth it to get the publicity, both through the story and perhaps a little cheeky marketing down the road (“as used extensively by the famous company we won't name, but you can guess”).

One thing I would definitely do at this point, now the company knows they have been detected, is to try¹ make sure all support for that company is on the lowest priority possible. Absolute minimum response time 24 hours. 24 working hours, especially if the issue seems urgent to them. No responses beyond automated ones outside of normal business hours. Never try to guess: any missing information in a support query gets queried and the subsequent clarifying responses are subject to the same 24+ working hour latency. If anyone tries the “we are a big company, you should prioritise this” thing, respond with “With an email address like that? Yeah, nah.” or more directly “We know, a big company who knows it is massively in breach of our licence, and yet we are still generously responding to you at all.”.

------

[1] They may of course have/find crafty ways to get around this too, but if they are determined to avoid doing the right thing at least make them work to avoid doing the right thing!
by catapart | 2025-05-16 13:17:12+00:00
Yeah; this all rings pretty sound to me. I've worked with 14-17 year olds most of my adult life and everything comes down to how the kid does in their "home" environment. More specifically, how their closest people treat them, rather than any action they are taking.

Kids - even 17 year olds - are infantalized and treated as if they don't have anything to contribute. They are "supposed" to just do what they are told and follow a "normal" path of going to school and then getting a job and working. A school where they aren't allowed to learn about what they are interested in, and can only learn the government-mandated testable knowledge. A job that will force them to wake up early and commute late and leave them with no time or energy to engage in the hobbies that they never actually cultivated because doing metalworking is too loud and doing programming is wasting time on a computer and flight training is too expensive and, and, and, and...

The amount of success I've had just VALIDATING kids is fucking incredible. Talk to them as if their idea is worth hearing, and then ask them questions that make them challenge their own ideas. Whether it's about a project they think would be cool, or about how they feel about something that happened with their parents. When they can devote time to think about it, without feeling like discussing it is an attack on anyone or an imposition to the listener - they sort shit out just like anyone else.

And whenever I find myself kind of marveling at - say - an 11 year old speaking with what feels like emotional intelligence beyond their years, I remember that in the early 1900s, 11 year old's might have been fucking floor managers at a textile industry, or pickaxe-swinging coal miners. Kids are entirely capable at 11 years old and it only comes out if you engage them in ways that hone that capability. Which should obviously NEVER be forced or coerced labor. But you can talk to them like they are adults.

In any case, I've been mentoring kids since before cell phones and not a damn thing has changed. If the kid's distracted, you don't need to worry about what is able to distract them - you need to worry about why they were bored enough (or preoccupied) to get distracted in the first place. And that's really the heart of the whole thing: people really want for the kids or the "mentally infirm" or the OTHER to have to do better when the simple truth is that the person needs to be doing better. The parent, the teacher, the mentor, the friend; they have to be meeting the HUMAN BEING (who happens to be a child) at their level rather than feeling disappointed that the kid didn't meet them at some other level.
by biorach | 2025-05-16 13:17:29+00:00
At this stage the cliched and clueless comments about embrace/extend/extinguish are tiresome and inevitable whenever Microsoft is mentioned.

A few decades ago MS did indeed have a playbook which they used to undermine open standards. Laying off some members of the Python team bears no resemblence whatsoever to that. At worst it will delay the improvement of free-threaded Python. That's all.

Your comment is lazy and unfounded.
by xinayder | 2025-05-16 13:17:59+00:00
They managed to connect me to an emotional level that I just want to throw my phone away and get a phone that supports postmarketOS. I despise the new designs so much, they are so useless and try to take away important information on the screen for absolutely no reason. While making everything round and trying so hard to copy iOS, but making a shitty job at it.
by perihelions | 2025-05-16 13:18:53+00:00
Hold up, doesn't this turn SciHub into a vehicle for transferring currency to its Russian ownership, and therefore to the Russian state? Is that not a feature of this cryptocoin?

Obligatory "I love SciHub and what it's accomplished for millions of people". But whatever Elbakyan's person character, she is still a citizen of a country that's at war.

edit: I'm not accusing Elbakyan's character or ideals in any way. Modern Russia is a state that functions like a mafia, that shakes down and extorts anyone with a whiff of money on them. Elbakyan lives in Russia—is subject to immense criminal pressure. It's a neutral observation that any windfall profits from a major coin-minting end up not funding servers, but funding the Russian army. Only a naïf could dispute that.
by casey2 | 2025-05-16 13:18:56+00:00
What are you talking about? Since the 1800s people have been shipping vaccines to "most of the world"

Everyone could afford to "eat healthy" and get exercise if governments and social planners put in a modicum of effort. Unfortunately they aren't directly incentives to do so.

Framing either of these things as a wealth issue ignores both how wealthy even the poorest in the world are and the systems responsible for the problem. For everything else there's health insurance, yet another horribly mismanaged system.
by anarticle | 2025-05-16 13:18:58+00:00
The reason for this is very pragmatic actually. We don’t have enough researchers of a particular specialty in one country alone. When you get that specialized the air is very rare.

By pooling our funding / effort we can create a larger body of collaborators to solve problems faster and better.

It could be that the organizations are funding wild stuff that isn’t salient. I’ll concede that.

However, in basic sciences there are so few specialists it is important to share resources. The funding is worse than ever (hello 2006!), and that trend is unlikely to reverse for a while.

Source: I worked in bioenergetics for 10y, my collaborators were from Hungary, Chile, Canada, Israel, Italy, and more! At a major conference on mito energetics they all fit in one big lecture hall (100ish?)
by bko | 2025-05-16 13:19:00+00:00
I don't see why teen suicide rate is the definitive measure of how well children are doing. It's still extremely rare. Why not focus on anti-depressants? Surely kids being on a lot of meds is a sign something is off.

Everyone knows phones are a net negative for most children. You really don't need a study. Just go check out a local bus stop and see kids staring at their phones.

> The median amount of time a teenager in the US spends on their phone each week is estimated to be around 31 to 32 hours.

Do we think this is good? How confident are you that this is not harmful? Would you be willing to bet your kids development on it?

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/smartphone-usage-stats
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-05-16 13:19:07+00:00
As a small business owner — I recently spent an hour canceling things that just added up over time and that I don’t now need. It’s just so easy to waste money, period.

Directly to your point though, I once encountered a salesperson who was running an entire sandbox environment of a very large platform to the tune of about $25k/mo. It sat idle for almost half a year before someone came knocking. The cloud team did an audit and they were a little spicy about it, understandably.