MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by worthless-trash | 2025-05-08 14:30:52+00:00
A man called "Ram Chandra" used to come to my school in the 80-90's and educate us on the danger of snakes (he has since passed away).

There is a little talk of it here https://www.mackayandwhitsundaylife.com/article/remembering-...

I had seen him get bitten by a bunch of different snakes during his time demonstrating dangerous animals to my school on different occasions, he was always very kind and educational.

I believe he had was also involved in milking snakes and making antivenom, but the specifics evade me.

I believe he went to many different schools educating the small townships of the Australian outback (Imagine more than 20 less than 30) and always had time to answer my stupid questions as a child.

This part of my local culture will be missed.
by zozbot234 | 2025-05-08 14:30:52+00:00
Isn't this essentially the generic typestate pattern in Rust? In my view there is a pretty obvious connection between that particular pattern and how other languages implement OO inheritance, though in all fairness I don't think that connection is generally acknowledged.

(For one thing, it's quite obvious to see that the pattern itself is rather anti-modular, and the ways generic typestate is used are also quite divergent from the usual style of inheritance-heavy OO design.)
by Yizahi | 2025-05-08 14:30:57+00:00
So you don't need ANY hositals, schools, banks, police, firefighters, military, science, environment protection, construction, roads, railways and so on? Or you just want that someone else paid for all that, and instead of paying both for example 20% tax, you will pay 0% and some unlucky honest worker will pay 40% for both of you?

I personally don't to live in either possibility, neither in "nothing exist" libertarian dystopia, nor in the current normal society where i would need to pay for a bunch of selfish freeloaders who avoid taxes.
by mg | 2025-05-08 14:31:17+00:00
Hmm... the way I use it is that when I put the mouse on an item, that is the one I am looking at. So it is fine that some others are hidden. And when I want to see all items again, I move the mouse into an empty area (usually right next to the item I just looked at) so the popup goes away.

Also, I usually use the filters first. Say for laptops, I set the screen size to >=12inch and the weight to <=3pounds. So there ain't that many items left on the screen.

Do you use it differently?
by MadsRC | 2025-05-08 14:31:30+00:00
Shameless plug, I pushed a small CLI for detecting unpinned dependencies and automatically fix them the other day: https://codeberg.org/madsrc/gh-action-pin

Works great with commit hooks :P

Also working on a feature to recursively scan remote dependencies for lack of pins, although that doesn’t allow for fixing, only detection.

Very much alpha, but it works.
by nobody9999 | 2025-05-08 14:31:35+00:00
>Social engineering hacks are the primary hack. If you're not familiar with them, you aren't security conscious.

You didn't say that financial aid administrators were being "socially engineered. Nor did you say that they had their SIMs swapped. Rather, you said[0]:

"Often issues such as this are the result of people involved in the verification process, being bribed or taking cash for approvals."

That might well be the case here. But unless you actually have even a shred of evidence (do you? if so, please provide it), you're painting thousands of people with the same broad brush.

>Do you imagine that university admissions employees are perfect, uncorruptible? Is this some weird, US political minefield?

I do not. But I also don't make completely unsupported accusations/attacks against random strangers as you did. Not a "political minefield" at all. You were just talking out of your ass and I called you on it. Full stop.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43924650
by wnc3141 | 2025-05-08 14:31:46+00:00
A few more things 1) these digital (or AI) first substitutes for traditional firms almost always rely on dark patterns to hit their metrics.

2) Having many firms serve a market is always better for consumers as well instead of a single firm. (with a few notable exceptions)

3) In terms of large scale, its impossible to scale efficiently across countries as you navigate new political and economic structures.
by delusional | 2025-05-08 14:32:20+00:00
What would be outside the sandbox? If you create a sandbox that only allows git diff, the I suppose you fixed this one issue, but what about everything else? If you allow the sandbox to be configurable, then how do you configure it without that just being programming?

The problem with these "microprograms" have always been that once you delegate so much, once you are willing to put in that little effort. You can't guarantee anything.

If you are willing to pull in a third party dependency to run git diff, you will never research which permissions it needs. Doing that research would be more difficult than writing the program yourself.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-08 14:32:47+00:00
Use of Signal has been rife in Washington DC since COVID times.

During COVID they closed many of the secure facilities indefinitely. Building access was on a rotation, so many people couldn’t see or communicate with their counterparts for weeks or months unless their rotation intersected. The government had no plan for how to conduct classified business with their facilities closed for extended periods. It is in this milieu that Signal became established as an alternative way to communicate.

They required almost everyone to work at home without a plan for how that is supposed to work when most people don’t have a SCIF[0] in their house. As bad as it is that the US DoD converged on using Signal, there is an identical issue in many European countries with the pervasive use of WhatsApp for sensitive communication. It is a classic case of shadow IT taking over.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform...
by threetonesun | 2025-05-08 14:32:50+00:00
My go to for UI inspiration especially packing in a lot of information in a small space are mobile apps in the audio editing/creating domain. Loopy Pro is one I always bring up, but there are a lot of audio apps that have to fit a lot of information on the screen at once while being highly intuitive because the app itself is not the primary interface, a midi controller or instrument is.
by nabilhat | 2025-05-08 14:33:04+00:00
The same reasons convenience stores sell single cigarettes, and people smoke them in their cars. Compelling cravings don't care about your externalities and don't want to wait. Lots of people don't want the people they live with to know how much they actually consume. Some people live with others who don't allow beer in the fridge for various reasons. Some have a housemate who can't be trusted around a surplus. Lots of people like to think of themselves as the kind of person who doesn't need to have a whole pack around, they just want this one and maybe another one. Depending on who you're hanging out with, sometimes it's nice to go to a BYO party and not contribute a surplus if that would get abused. And as always, who said they waited to get started until they were driving home anyway?
by mempko | 2025-05-08 14:33:06+00:00
Talk about missing the point that Gary Stevenson was making. The point he was making was not that the tax policy of the 50s,60s, and 70s meant the rich paid a bigger share of the income tax in aggregate, or that the income tax brought in was a higher percentage of the GDP. The point Gary was making was that inequality (wealth and income, but especially wealth) was much lower back then and has been growing ever since.

The data in the article proves Gary's point. Not only is income tax brought in less now, but more taxes are VAT (sales taxes) which are regressive. In other words, the poorer people in society are taking on a bigger share of taxes. They are transferring them from a progressive tax system (income and wealth taxes) to a regressive one (sales taxes and VAT).

Talk about missing the whole point of Gary Stevenson's argument. The point was that inequality was less back then and the tax system was one reason why. Now inequality is high and keeps getting higher. So yes, we want to go back to the tax system of the 50s, 60s, and 70s not because of getting extra taxes, but because it slows down and may reverse the rise in inequality.
by rollcat | 2025-05-08 14:33:57+00:00
Agree on DAWs. Even though I'm familiar with the general concepts, every time I try out a new one (Logic, Reaper, Ableton), it's quite overwhelming at first. You have a pretty good idea about what's supposed to be there, but the sheer amount of knobs and buttons... But once you get in the flow, you quickly find out it has all the information you need, nothing more nothing less, it becomes second nature.

(Notable omission: GarbageBand. It has the opposite effect, it instantly puts you into action, but becomes more frustrating the more you use it.)
by enraged_camel | 2025-05-08 14:34:01+00:00
The UK press and associated "think tanks" have been busy writing pieces like this trying desperately to refute Gary Stephenson because they, meaning their wealthy handlers, see him as a threat.

Gary specifically does NOT advocate for an income tax. He advocates for a wealth tax. This piece does nothing to refute that. It's knocking down a strawman, i.e. that we should go back to the exact same tax policies of 1950s-70s. Gary has never said that. He simply pointed out that achieving financial security was significantly easier for average folk back then, and clearly the answer lies at least partially in our attitudes towards taxing rich people back then, compared to today.
by florianvo | 2025-05-08 14:34:12+00:00
I built this after getting overwhelmed with newsletters I couldn't find time to read. Wanted something that would properly transform text to audio - not just read it aloud.

The system uses AI to create a proper podcast script from your content, narrates it with customizable voices (single narrator or two-host conversation), adds background music, and generates an RSS feed for immediate distribution to Spotify/Apple Podcasts.

If you sign up for an account you can try a free preview with your own content!
by dovab | 2025-05-08 14:34:13+00:00
Hi HN,

I built HirePrep to help job seekers feel more confident going into interviews. The idea came after seeing friends (and myself) constantly Googling "top interview questions" that often felt generic and unhelpful.

With HirePrep, you paste your resume and the job description, and it generates tailored interview questions you're likely to be asked - plus guidance on how to answer them.

It's free to try (you get 2 questions per job), and there's a one-time payment if you want unlimited for a specific role. No subscriptions, no upsells.

Built with Next.js on the frontend and Symfony/API Platform on the backend.

Would love feedback on:

- Where you think the UX could be improved

- Whether the free vs paid balance feels fair

- Any edge cases or failure modes you hit

Thanks!
by zerkten | 2025-05-08 14:34:24+00:00
I had 15k reputation score at one time on SO. It recently dropped down to due to people deleting their accounts. There are review queues which appear on the top nav incentivizing power users with enough rep to go in and take action like closing requests.

Having met many SO power users in group settings over the years, I feel that there is very little tolerance for questions that require effort to understand. If it's a simple question posed by a non-English speaker that needs some thought, then it doesn't belong (but that's why comments were introduced later.) The same goes for a deeper technical question where the author gets it all out but doesn't take the time to structure or format it. The volume of behavior like this differs based on the type of question and experts prepared to weigh in.

This gets compounded by the up and comers on the reputation scale. They get their special powers and see this BOFH close behavior and replicate it. Over time it starts to become the norm. I had the ability to vote for reopens and these same people would argue about why this was a bad idea. They weren't prepared to admit they were wrong and felt they were doing God's work by ridding the site of poor questions when some of us even had the ability to make edits to clarify them.

I just opened the site after some time away. At the top, pushing the question list below the fold, are: Reputation, Badge Progress, and Watched Tags blocks. The Interesting Posts for You question feed is below that and I have to go see how that is constructed. I only ever wanted the firehose of new questions with my tags highlighted.

EDIT: The behavior I noted above is yet example of why I always want to know how a job candidate deals with ambiguity. In my experience, this has a massive impact on the ability to work independently, not piss off colleagues/clients/customers, and make good decisions.
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-08 14:34:35+00:00
Fascinating.

Interestingly enough, my first non-class-related experience with "intrusive lists" was in C, and we implemented it via macros; you'd add a LINKED_LIST macro in the body of a struct definition, and it would unspool into the pointer declarations. Then the list-manipulation functions were also macros so they would unspool at compile time into C code that was type-aware enough to know where the pointers lived in that individual struct.

Of course, this meant incurring the cost of a new definition of function families for each intrusive-list structure, but this was in the context of bashing together a demo kernel for a class, so we assumed modern PCs that have more memory than sense. The bigger problem was that C macros are little bastards to debug and maintain (especially a macro'd function... so much escaping).

C++, of course, ameliorates almost all those problems. And replaces them with other problems. ;)
by mousethatroared | 2025-05-08 14:35:52+00:00
Is it surprising though?

Without looking up the data, off the top of my head.

The bus driver needs a commercial license with air brakes, is a public employee and has benefits.

He has to be making 75k/year + overhead. Let's say overhead is 50%

$56.25 / hr.

Then there's the diesel cost. A large bus must get ~ 10 mpg highway, but a city bus is all stop and go - disastrous for a vehicle as massive as a bus. Let's say it gets 4 mpg.

$4/gal diesel * 30 mph average speed / 4 mpg = $30 / hr on diesel.

We're at $86.26/hr.

You could argue my driver makes too much, and my mpg is too low, but I havent included:

- routine maintenance

- fixing broken vehicles

- cleaning

- amortization

So, play with the numbers if you will; but $100/hr has to be a good, round estimate, for running costs.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-05-08 14:35:56+00:00
> Any union employee can still be terminated with minimal documentation demonstrating incompetency or any other issue.

The leader of my cities police union had a relationship with a 17 year old at the high school he was stationed at. He was at jan 6. Hes been suspended 9 times and has 50 civilian complaints against him. 10 complaints were sustained. The city still could not fire him, though they certainly tried. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Catanzara
by phatskat | 2025-05-08 14:36:01+00:00
> which absolutely should out the whole swat team in jail

Which doesn’t really happen, I mean cops murder innocent people and it’s a struggle to get meaningful consequences for _that_.

This is part of what ACAB means - the justice system is woefully against the interest of the public. If we hadn’t seen time and again cops get away with literal murder, if there were actually consequences, and if police unions didn’t have the ability to hold a community hostage, maybe fewer people would be ACAB. The fact that we even had to have a Supreme Court case about whether cops have a duty to protect civilians (surprise, it was ruled that they don’t) should be evidence that the system is rotten.
by chrisweekly | 2025-05-08 14:36:47+00:00
Yeah, in general financial software designed for expert users (hedge fund managers / traders) is extremely info-dense.

I'm also reminded of World of Warcraft; in my role as a "healer", keeping track of changes to the health levels of maybe 20 other players in a raid (in addition to all the health / spells / weapons / maps / etc for my own avatar's immediate needs) required an impressively info-dense UI.
by WillAdams | 2025-05-08 14:37:00+00:00
There is (was?) an absolutely fabulous answer on quora.com which detailed how this site came to be --- from memory:

- initial ecommerce site was a mess (basically a page-by-page recreation of the catalog?) which saw minimal usage

- the redesign, which focused on usability --- notably reduced cognitive load --- resulted in an immediate uptick in orders which grew markedly for a long while until it represented the vast majority of their business EDIT: and also optimized for repeat orders on a schedule

If someone could find that, or a better writeup, I'd be grateful (it's _not_ the Medium.com article) and this page: https://iacollaborative.com/work/mcmaster-carr/ is just a mentioning by the company which did the underpinnings, not the overall architect. This link is decent: https://www.bedelstein.com/post/mcmaster-carr

There was of course previous discussion of this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502

Video on why the site loads so fast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ln-8QM8KhQ

(which is from the Medium.com article)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-05-08 14:37:12+00:00
Basically all of the Andrew Gelman books are also good.

Data Analysis... https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/arm/ Regression and Other Stories: https://avehtari.github.io/ROS-Examples/

Wasserman's All of Statistics is a really good introduction to mathematical statistics (the Gelman stuff above are more practically and analytically focused).

But yeah, it would probably be easier to find a good statistics course at a local university and try to audit it or do it at night.
by wormlord | 2025-05-08 14:37:36+00:00
From what I have seen, personally, the younger guys that would follow in their dad's footsteps and enter trades do not because of a few reasons:

1. Their dads tell them to go to college because trades are hard on your body. 2. For whatever reason, their kids end up really lazy. Doing drugs and trying to live life the easy way, ending up in their late 20s still living at home with their parents and not having any skills. 3. They join the trades but their coworkers are extremely toxic. Either always starting fights, being racist, shitting on apprentices. One guy told me a story of how a disgruntled coworker got kicked off a job site only to come back with his AR. Needless to say that guy has been trying to pivot into civil engineering instead of concrete work.

It's a bit of a rabbit hole to go into, but I think that the reason is that the idea of "every generation having a better life than the last" is easier said than done. Parents in the trades who want their kid to be white collar workers end up sorely disappointed when they don't give their kid any of the advantages that white collar worker parents did-- early childhood education, summer camps, SAT prep, etc. Or when their geographical location doesn't have decent white collar jobs. The kid ends up not prepared for either type of work.

If a lot of these jobs were better unionized (I know many already are), there would be no need to view them as "stepping stones" to a better life. You could have several generations all working the same trade, making good livings.
by rft | 2025-05-08 14:37:38+00:00
I find Geizhals' filtering options reasonably compact and information dense. https://geizhals.de/?cat=gra16_512&xf=132_16384&pg=1&view=li...

I like the simple table view of RPiLocator. Only a few columns, but lots of rows, no unneeded clutter. https://rpilocator.com/

Not as compact as possible, but at least shows quite some information: GSMArena. It could fit more phones into the comparison table with less whitespace/greyspace though. https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=10386&idPhone...

All sites as viewed on desktop, on mobile this would likely not work out.

I also want to echo the command line tools mention in another comment. GDB's TUI is reasonable for my use, but after some experience this recently posted terminal debugger might be better: https://github.com/al13n321/nnd via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43905185

Also the hex editor I am currently using, despite some problems: https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex

An example of an information dense GUI that might be a bit overwhelming is Ghidra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghidra (page includes a basic screenshot, you can fill your screen(s) with as many sub windows and information panes as you want)

As a side note, while trying to find examples I realized just how few websites there are (any more?) that show a lot of information at the same time. Worst recent offender is YouTube's redesign with only 3 video tiles in a row on a 1440p screen, luckily easily fixed via a ublock rule.
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-08 14:38:12+00:00
Objects are a pretty good abstraction for when you have data that represents, well, objects. In 3D graphics it's a very useful abstraction. Significantly less good when you're trying to model process, pipeline, or flow IMHO (I know there are some people who swear by them for anything they would bash together with UML first, and I just... Don't see it. I've used more than enough object-oriented flowchart-description languages to fundamentally disagree; charts are two-dimensional, text-represented code is one-dimensional, making the code "objects" doesn't fix that problem).

(Probably also worth noting that high performance 3D graphics torture the object abstraction past recognizability, because maintaining those runtime abstractions costs resources that could be better spent slamming pixels into a screen).
by stickfigure | 2025-05-08 14:39:33+00:00
> The reason is that inheritance is almost always a bad idea in practice.

It's just slightly too strong of a statement.

I'm working in a very large Spring codebase right now, with a lot of horrible inheritance abuse (seriously, every component extended common hierarchy of classes that pulled in a ton of behavior). I suspect part of the reason is the Spring context got out of control, and the easiest way to reliably "inject" behavior is by subclassing. Terrible.

On the other hand, inheritance is sometimes the most elegant solution to a problem. I've done this at multiple companies:

Payment + PayPalPayment + StripePayment

Sometimes you have data (not just behavior!) that genuinely follows an IS-A relationship, and you want more than just interface polymorphism. Yes you can model this with composition, but the end result ends up being more complex and uglier.

It doesn't have to be all one or the other. But I agree, it should be mostly composition.
by alec_irl | 2025-05-08 14:40:31+00:00
I would highly recommend that anyone interested in reading manga on an e-reader check out the boox page: https://shop.boox.com/products/page

I have had this for a year and change and use it interchangeably for books and manga. The 7 inch display is sharp and I use CDisplayex to read manga in horizontal mode with both pages displayed to preserve spreads and other multi page layouts. It works like a dream and I've ready literally hundreds of volumes of manga this way. It also natively support FTP and runs Android, so you don't need to do anything special beyond dropping the files on your device.