MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MisterTea | 2025-05-28 14:14:08+00:00
This is happening all over and I think a lot of it has to do with society moving from communities to larger societies where they increasingly feel less significant. They work for a large bureaucratic systems that don't give two shits about them. The small mom and pop businesses are all consolidated into cold soulless corporations who's only goal is numbers go up. So you do just enough to fulfill that goal and use the rest of your mental and physical energy on things that make you feel better about being a insignificant cog.

My work was a kind-of dysfunctional mom and pop shop. Then the owner decided to get in bed with VC to boost his business. It became a numbers go up game headed by a CEO who lives 800 miles away. We lost benefits, worse insurance, less flexibility in work hours and loss of work from home for certain roles. That totally incentivizes people, right? Then the moron president VC installed uses AI like a crutch and talks about a future with more robots and less people. Again, totally incentivizes people to work more, right? Yet these detached morons wonder why people are apathetic. Then add on the state of the world being delivered via 24/7 fast news and meme cycles. People are literally being mentally beaten into submission. So it becomes "fuck em, I'm doing the minimum."
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-05-28 14:14:18+00:00
Honestly, maybe social media has accelerated the trend, but this has been happening for all of my life now (almost 44 years).

One Nation under God

has turned into

One Nation under the influence

of one drug

Television, the drug of the Nation

Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation

- TV, the drug of the nation

edit: stoopid HN parser
by devilbunny | 2025-05-28 14:14:30+00:00
Considering that they're talking about extracting it from what are almost certainly old oil and gas wells (the depth, as well as the Smackover formation referenced in the article, as well as the fact that ExxonMobil is the one proposing this), I'd assume that a big part of this is "well, it's not producing oil and gas anymore; is there anything else valuable down there we can get to?" The sort of operation that you wouldn't be able to make profitable if starting from scratch, but since you already have a lot of the infrastructure and experience in place, it might make sense.
by bsaul | 2025-05-28 14:14:39+00:00
As always with definitive assertions regarding LLMs incapacities, i would be more convinced if one could demonstrate those assertions with an illustrative example, on a real LLM.

So far, the abilities of LLM to manipulate concepts, in practice, has been indistinguishable in practice from "true" human-level concept manipulation. And not just for scientific, "narrow" fields.
by Agraillo | 2025-05-28 14:15:23+00:00
I think you invented (or reinvented) a simplified password manager, or a plain-text password manager. A usual PM solves the task of managing by human memory unmanageable: plenty of passwords with variable complexities routing them all to a single one intended for the human. In your system you have your own version of the master password (prefix + suffix) that locks out your actual password (a single substring). There are obvious drawbacks compared to a general PM like a much lower space of possible variants or needing to manage this manually (like generating the file or choosing randomly your prefix and suffix). But there is at least one benefit, if you keep the system simple enough (while not making it simple in generating the sequences), no hidden vulnerability should waiting to happen
by pixl97 | 2025-05-28 14:15:26+00:00
It's probably better to look at a group from outside. Every company of any size seems to accumulate at least some people that could be replaced with a small shell script. Where I work there are a few people that seem so questionable at their job (even though most are good) I wonder how they keep their positions. I'd rather work with AI for the rest of my life then have to deal with them again.
by safety1st | 2025-05-28 14:16:04+00:00
I think it's inflation. And I don't just mean Covid era inflation. Inflation has been an on-again, off-again problem since the collapse of Bretton Woods.

It's because of inflation that slowly and subtly, everything gets shittier all the time. It encourages businesses to cut corners, shave costs, and find cheap labor overseas. It encourages you to not give a fuck about your job because you haven't had a raise in 5 years and the price of gas just keeps on climbing.

Inflation destroys everyone's belief in the future. Why work hard when everything is always getting a little bit worse anyway?

We've staved off a lot of the worst material effects with tech and productivity increases, but half the time the benefits from those just go to shareholders (indeed, even if all you did was hold the S&P 500 in recent decades, your portfolio is one of the bright spots in all this).

But I think the spiritual effects can't be staved off once you internalize the idea that it'll continually cost you more to keep on getting the same results. The bar of soap you buy will be a little thinner, there'll be a little less meat in your burger. You're always fighting the current. There's never a rest. If you feel this way then why would you care about what you're doing?

Historically I don't think there are a lot of societies that find an easy solution to this, the solutions usually involve defaults and wars.

Maybe this is part of why the crypto cult is so rabid, Bitcoin has deflationary properties, it's the opposite of the inflation trend.
by KronisLV | 2025-05-28 14:16:05+00:00
> that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an “influencer.”

I might be too introverted for that sort of thing in the first place, but that sounds like hell, having to pretend in front of a bunch of strangers just to get clicks, all for clout.

Then again, I did delete Facebook too because I didn’t quite get posting bunches of vacation pics either: if there’s a cool picture or a few I can share those in the likes of WhatsApp or Discord with a more narrow and closer knit group instead of the world.

I’m guessing it’s quite different for most folks and I assume that the few of those who also do successfully become influencers are swimming in money, more than I’ll ever make.
by jeffreportmill1 | 2025-05-28 14:16:06+00:00
I use CheerpJ to do new development that is spectacularly cross-platform, runs native on all the major platforms and everywhere else in the browser with a single code base. I don't think there are too many alternatives for that and I suspect Java + CheerpJ is one of the best.

https://reportmill.com/SnapCode
by mhw | 2025-05-28 14:16:28+00:00
I think pax was more of a POSIX replacement for cpio and tar. While those three and ar all could be used to bundle files together into a single file, only ar had the special affinity with the linker as a way of bundling object files together into libraries. The others were more aimed at backing up directories to a tape drive, as the example on the pax man page shows.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-28 14:16:34+00:00
But you could argue it had benefits, because it was so obviously stupid it may have inoculated potential victims against cult think and saved some lives.

Moral orientations fall neatly on two spectra. One is empathy to narcissism. The other is practicality, which can be counterintuitive, vs emotion, which has no concept of consequences beyond the present moment.

Both are "subjective" in the sense that you can't usually argue people from one to the other.

The rest is execution and PR.

There's some social conditioning which teaches people that empathy is good, and rather more that suggests practicality is valued and emotional regulation should be a thing.

But in the real world - and especially in the US - narcissism is far more valued in practice, and emotionality is far more profitable.

Which is why it's a culture of opportunists, corporate criminals, scammers, and manipulators.

Meanwhile, in a very real, literal, sense Wall St is just Heaven's Gate with quarterly reports. The outcome - mass suicide - shows every sign of being identical in the medium term.

The machinery is far more abstracted and indirect, which makes it harder to see when you're inside it. But there's only a difference of scale between a lone nutjob scamming a handful of followers to death and a collection of systems and institutions that are objectively likely to leave most of the planet uninhabitable by the end of the century.
by friendzis | 2025-05-28 14:16:43+00:00
> In such 'super module' system it gets pretty annoying to push changes for testing in CI when every change to either libfoo or foobar needs to be followed by a commit to the super repo.

Again, tooling issue. CI can easily pull required changeset across multiple repos. We are in a subthread under "monorepo plus millions of dollars of custom tool engineering" vs "stock polyrepo"
by photochemsyn | 2025-05-28 14:16:45+00:00
The people who control institutions seem to care more about fiscal solvenceny of their institutions above all else. Thus, if AI chatbot generated content in media results in more visits to the site and more ad revenue, that's 'good' - the content doesn't need to be accurate or truthful, it just needs to bring in more eyeballs which translates to more ad views which translates to more revenue, which is the metric that the leaders of the institution care most about.

In a more authoritarian state bent on information control, the leaders of the institution might have a different metric, especially if they were a state-funded institution - namely, ensuring that their content didn't offend the heads of the authoritarian state, resulting in either a removal of state funding or a visit from the thought police.

Of course there is some intersectionality here - if the ad revenue is controlled by a few monopolistic corporations, then they might respond to critical investigative reporting on their industry with the removal of their advertising revenue from the media institution. In a monopolistic situation, this might not hurt their own revenue that much as consumers have nowhere else to buy products, but in a competitive market situation, refusing to advertise is likely to result in lower revenue.

For the media institution, generating fluff from a chatbot instructed not to offend either the state or the corporate conglomerate is the safe route when it comes to fiscal solvency (and staying out of prison).

Fundamentally, if the economic system is so corrupt and soul-crushing that the vast majority of people dream of acquiring enough capital to escape the system ('f-u money'), then something is very wrong with that system.
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-28 14:17:02+00:00
> If you accept their garbage bytes, things might seem less broken in the short term, but then every implementation is stuck working around some fool's inability to follow directions forever, and the protocol now contains an artificial ambiguity because the bytes they put there now mean both what they're supposed to mean, and also what that implementation erroneously uses them to mean, and it might not always be detectable which case it is. Which breaks things later.

And, if your project is on GitHub, gets your Issues page absolutely clowned on because you're choosing to do the right thing technically and the leeching whiners shitting up the Issues don't want to contribute a goddamn thing other than complaints, and they definitely don't want to go to the authors of the thing that doesn't work with your stuff and try and get that fixed either.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-05-28 14:17:17+00:00
I actually do all this stuff in my head and use hierarchies of bullet points in a text file to externalize some stuff. Some of these may end in arrows that point to a different process.

I never use paper because I'm always moving these bullet points around and inserting stuff between them. Apps are too slow.

I never write down all the information because these notes are enough for me to reload everything. It's pretty easy to see that I didn't write something when there's a gap in my notes. I never wrote it down because I'm going to come up with the same or better solution quickly.

This isn't really helpful for anyone else and doesn't work well with pair programming.
by dahart | 2025-05-28 14:18:14+00:00
It sounds like you wasted your time. I didn’t waste mine, and @sarchertech didn’t waste theirs.

I have asked some 30 year olds, in addition to reading quite a bit of research on this topic. I’m not at all surprised some people find their time in college to be mostly useless. Some people are lazy and contrarian and see school as authoritarian and useless from the start, and so they don’t pay attention and getting nothing out of it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - something they did to themselves because of their attitude. Maybe you’re one of those people. That reflects on their attitude and choices and not on school in general, since it’s a fact that many other people find their time in college valuable, many people take advantage of the time and seek out classes that teach them things they want to learn. My school had lots of choices for classes that fill gen ed requirements, and I chose my gen eds wisely.

The research that has statistically sampled all 30 year olds found that on the whole they are learning things and taking skills away from their university experience. It would be totally weird if they weren’t. Your point makes very little sense that people would spend 4 years of their lives learning and end up not learning. I think @sarchertech is right that you’re projecting your own experience on everyone else, making the incorrect assumption that because you didn’t learn much then nobody did.

> This isn’t about the degree it self being something that is used to gatekeep and lead to higher salaries

Yes it absolutely is. A degree that gets you into a 2x better paying job has utility, and is not useless, even if you waste your time and learn nothing.

Nothing you’ve said yet addresses the point that even though people could learn on their own everything that college teaches, we have loads of evidence that it just doesn’t happen very often.

BTW, I think you meant “you’re”. I wouldn’t have said anything, but you did it 4 times in a row.
by bicx | 2025-05-28 14:18:44+00:00
I think there is some truth to that (although I'm speaking about people proposing new ideas rather than making legitimate complaints). For me, the intent is respect - a way of acknowledging their input without direct rejection. The "I'll look into it" statement is often a more polite way of saying "I'll take the next steps if I think it is necessary." Often you already know enough to immediately say "no," but reframing it as "I'll look into it," helps show respect to the person asking by not immediately putting them down (and often in a public setting).

I realize that the value of this approach is highly dependent on a culture of public respect. Common in Japan, and common in some cultures in the U.S. Making the wrong person look stupid is a recipe for career problems in those cultures.
by monkeyelite | 2025-05-28 14:19:49+00:00
I’m telling you that even if those are the numbers on paper, the software and hardware are using tricks to achieve it which lower the overall quality.

So yes you get 4k pixels lit up on your display, but is it actually a better image?

And yes there may be high end hardware which can handle it, but the sw still made design choices for everyone else.

There are also image algorithms which are not as amenable to GPUs which are now impossible to compute effectively.
by Barbing | 2025-05-28 14:20:56+00:00
>There’s not a day goes by on HN that I don’t see stuff that fits this mold.

Surprised this didn’t smack me in the face when I first read the post. This very site does indeed serve as a bit of a counterpoint.

How could we compare and contrast effort and apathy across time, apples to apples? Maybe comparing farmhands or authors… e.g. the average reception of authors’ works vs. length of writing time

(bad example, maybe someone has a better one)
by delichon | 2025-05-28 14:21:07+00:00
Knowledge was definitely a problem for me even after extensive education on diabetes. It wasn't until I started looking at the results of my glucose monitor multiple times per day and associating the spikes with specific meals that I found the motivation to make the necessary changes. It was usually (but not always) the foods that I expected to be a problem, but I didn't really emotionally understand it, or the magnitudes, until I started collecting the data. Since then I've removed so many of the problem foods from my diet that my CGM is mostly a boring flat line and not worth the expense of wearing it all the time.
by fsflover | 2025-05-28 14:21:30+00:00
> Many people fall prey to the marketing

It seems you did fall prey to the anti-GDPR marketing. It's being actually enforced [0] and doesn't allow "all or nothing" pseudo-consent [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39813801

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39272861; (upd:) an even better link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974361
by some_furry | 2025-05-28 14:21:41+00:00
I have a high work ethic but I mostly keep it to myself.

That is: I don't hold strangers to my standards or expect them to feel the same way about their work that I do about mine.

I've never been sacked for poor performance, but I have been included in mass layoffs and restructurings throughout my career, which always makes one wonder if they were secretly not meeting some metric.
by 0_____0 | 2025-05-28 14:22:03+00:00
I was in New Zealand a couple of months ago and today something crystallized about my experience there - I consistently encountered people who were good at their jobs there.

They've got a shortage of people in the trades, but their tradies seemed highly professional and efficient, the folks at the bike shops were on point, the airport staff were quick to help and super informative (gate attendant explained visibility 'minimums'!)
by newpavlov | 2025-05-28 14:22:18+00:00
>Keccak for all of symmetric crypto: it is suited both for encryption, hashing, duplex transcripts for ZK protocols etc.

Unfortunately, Keccak and sponge constructions in general are inherently sequential. Even with hardware acceleration it heavily restricts possible performance. For example, AES-CBC encryption is 4-8 times slower than AES-CTR on high-end CPUs with AES-NI available. VAES makes the difference even bigger. Algorithms like AES-GCM, ChaCha20, and BLAKE3 are designed specifically to allow parallelization.
by uludag | 2025-05-28 14:22:38+00:00
I must say, without hesitation and doubt, that Claud 4 is my most important tool. I literally feel like I have the intelligence of the entire human race at my fingertips, giddily awaiting a caress from the tips of my fingertips. I honestly could not imagine my developer life without the twain of Opus and Sonnet.

Not my opinion of course, I just thought I'd include it as I found it surprisingly missing from the comments.
by versiqcontent | 2025-05-28 14:23:00+00:00
In a culture obsessed with uptime, sleep is one of the last unmonetized protocols that actually protects the system running everything else: your brain.

This piece breaks down sleep as cognitive infrastructure. Not wellness fluff, but essential maintenance for a knowledge worker’s neurological stack. From glymphatic drainage to the impact of micro-decisions, it treats rest as a technical necessity, not a luxury.

A thought-provoking look at how chronic digital exposure becomes a security flaw we rarely debug.
by HelloNurse | 2025-05-28 14:23:23+00:00
How is this function definition (or maybe just its parameter x) "untyped"? There is enough information to deduce that the type of parameter x is empty and the type of the function doesn't matter because there is an error.

If the body of the function contained only the first or the second call, the verdict would have been that x is respectively an Integer or an Atom and the type of the function is the type of the contained expression.
by throw4847285 | 2025-05-28 14:23:29+00:00
You can alter a work environment to allow some of those people to thrive (though I'm not naive enough to think that all of them will). But once somebody suited to their environment becomes convinced that their success is totally due to their own overwhelming greatness, they become impossible to work with.

I would rather work in an office entirely staffed by well-meaning people struggling at their jobs than a single person like you.
by seec | 2025-05-28 14:24:19+00:00
You can't say they did nothing about it. They actually did: make sure to restrain access to well-paying jobs with long and costly studies; make sure to regulate any way the young could get ahead by creating rules for things they never had to suffer through and make sure to increase the age of retirement as well as increase the ratio of contributions from salary.

It's all very cynical, and it's based on fundamental egoistic human behavior. Most boomers I know are proud to be egoist and very often stingy. They all think that they can make the difference by helping their own children, but this is flawed "thinking" in a system that is profoundly collectivist.

And all this comes from the massive flaw of democracy: only numbers matter, if you are the dominant demographic, you can get whatever you want, regardless of the nefarious impacts down the line.

When people keep repeating the trope of democracy is the worst form of government expect of all the others, I laugh my ass off. It can only be so if you have a way to weigh the votes otherwise you are just ruled by the tyranny of the mob and that generally doesn't turn out nicely.

The problem has been artificially created, the ideology said that restricting personal freedom was better for everyone as a whole and we can very much observe that this was a lie of epic proportions...
by pm215 | 2025-05-28 14:24:27+00:00
Similarly, I like it when I occasionally see little bits of on the job training when I'm a customer -- the barista this morning teaching another about pouring latte art, the senior dentist nudging the trainee into what the right diagnosis was based on the symptoms I was reporting, that kind of thing. It's encouraging to see people caring about what they do and passing their skills on to other people who care about getting better.
by bitwize | 2025-05-28 14:24:38+00:00
> I might be too introverted for that sort of thing in the first place, but that sounds like hell, having to pretend in front of a bunch of strangers just to get clicks, all for clout.

There's an excellent movie called Eighth Grade. The main girl in it, as a pastime, records videos for YouTube or similar in which she delivers nostrums to her audience about confidence and being authentically who you are and that sort of thing. Meanwhile, in her real school life, she's plagued by self-doubt and pressured by peers into being something different, something "better" than who she is.

That movie hit so hard, looking back on my xennial eighth grade experience, and it still injected ancillary commentary on modern social media trends.
by globnomulous | 2025-05-28 14:25:44+00:00
> I don't think anyone believes that a computer program is literally their companion

Quoth the makers of Claude:

> AI systems are no longer just specialized research tools: they’re everyday academic companions.

> https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-ho...

To call Anthropic's opener brazen, obnoxious, or euphemistic would be an understatement. I hope it ages like milk, as it deserves, and so embarrasses the company that it eventually requires a corrective foreword or retraction.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-05-28 14:25:44+00:00
Well, Webb has observed SMBHs earlier than current theory would suggest.

But I don't think that's the problem here, it's the opportunity:

ΛCDM was the best model for the cosmic web when we thought that SMBHs could not exist so early. But now that we have observed that they do, it opens the possibility of other theories for the cosmic web, including this one (blow torch) in which the early SMBHs take a role in its creation.