MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skeeter2020 | 2025-05-08 13:50:27+00:00
Agree; though it's not just a change in the type of people involved in YC, the actual people - Paul Graham included - have changed dramatically. When I look at PG's essays over time I see an obvious shift from someone trying to explain th HOW (often naively or inaccurately, but usually genuine) to someone trying to rationalize the WHY of positions, ideas and actions that seem inconsistent and at odds with the hacker sensibility.
by wormlord | 2025-05-08 13:51:41+00:00
Yeah this completely ignores the fact that many people would rather work on making things with their hands that they can physically see, rather than pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet.

This article ignores alienation, cost of living, social atomization, enshittification, the police state, and many other factors that contribute to everyone feeling like shit. The liberal intelligentsia need to learn that voters don't care about their numbers and charts, education has been hollowed out and the populace is going to respond to material promises and aggression. Not "hmm well did you consult my graph??"
by blamestross | 2025-05-08 13:52:28+00:00
I can only speculate based on publicly available information.

When a was in grad-school, "state level actors" were the boogeyman. You were told to just assume that everything would be compromised to them.

I ended up specializing in p2p systems (distributed hash tables, overlay networks, communication systems) and "State Level Actors" become "in scope" for me. Modern cryptography is focused on the capabilities of hypothetical computers and making radically more computational power required than is reasonable to expect of current human economies. Backdoors in the codebases for encryption is a fun hypothetical, but the level of scrutiny they are under would require a conspiracy beyond any i could imagine to hide.

Eclipse and Sybil attacks were the real threats. Those are Operational attacks, not Signals.

Now that I have spend a decade in the security industry in larger corporations. "State Level Actors" are entirely in the threat model. We don't talk about it explicitly, but these companies stand to loose globally if any one government compromised them. Government funded actors are assumed to be the primary threat. Supply chain attacks like XZ are the ones that scare us, the ones we might have missed. That came from superiority in operations not technical superiority. They actively pay me and a bunch of other people a LOT of money to actively detect and prevent issues like this.

The other side of the argument is a human organizational one. The story of this decade of military spending is outsourcing. Biden's Supply Chain Security EO and the new DoD software procurement requirements are bandaids on gaping wounds.

Even with it's massive defence spending budget, the TLAs couldn't keep up with the industry while also securing all its software. They have 3rd party dependencies too. Assuming that they don't just allways directly outsource.

And why bother? These companies have the entirety of human communications MITMed. Why bother with a complex secret system when a FISA warrant is cheaper and more efficient. PRISM(For attack) and TOR(For defense) stand out as successes of operational attacks. They don't need technological superiority.

I fully expect TLAs maintain an android fork and linux forks, but that is opsec for dependency management, not adding special sauce. The industry simply has more resources and more eyes on the problem than the government could ever afford.

The last part is simple "Brain Drain". The people who are really good at this generally don't want to work for the government and have done too many drugs to ever get clearance. Unless they have a lot of security engineer salaries in classified budgets they also can't afford us. Governments have direct agents that are underpaid and underskilled and they have working relationships with criminal organizations who work deniable offense for them.

Opsec is clearly their leverage-able resource, why not lean into it almost exclusively?
by hansvm | 2025-05-08 13:52:51+00:00
Busses are huge though. You can get fares cheaper than the cost of gasoline for an equivalent single-passenger trip just by using the available seats and ignoring standing room completely. The seats are pretty wide, so that satisfies the anti-sardine requirement easily.

The point about needing good service all day, not just during rush hours, is more interesting. If your hypothesis is that people just want the experience to not be terrible while they're in the bus, more trips during rush hours definitely suffices. You do need a minimum level of service in the middle of the day for the idea to be practical for some people. Surely 15-30min routes are fine though?
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-08 13:53:00+00:00
Ah yes the famous "If only unions didn't prevent administration from firing bad workers everything would be peachy" excuse.

1) Any union employee can still be terminated with minimal documentation demonstrating incompetency or any other issue. All you have to do to fire someone in a union is take notes that they failed in their job duties, email them about it, take notes that they didn't improve. Unions cannot prevent you from firing workers for cause. The vast majority of "benefits" teachers unions in the US provide is a phone number for a lawyer. If you can't convince a judge someone should have been fired, why are you paid anything at all?

2) The fact that the administration does not do the above is because there are zero teachers to replace them with, because nobody wants to be a teacher. They also don't do the above because they are woefully incompetent and utterly incapable of telling you which teachers are good teachers. Note that, no, students aren't good at telling you who are good teachers either. Administration and students alike often love teachers who are wildly incompetent and don't do their job, and just as often hate very competent teachers who aren't willing to jump when they say so.

3) The administration is incompetent and unable to fire teachers based on merit because they are politicians, not educators. They weren't hired for their competency as an educator, or skills as a manager, or experience dealing with children, but because they have enough clout in the small community to parlay that into a $250k a year job where he wastes taxpayer dollars on absurd projects. Property taxes are less than half one school district over, and their system isn't any more competent.

If an administrator is unwilling to do the paperwork necessary to do their job, like fire someone who has union backing, means they should not be in administration, a job defined by paperwork. They get paid that insane sum of money to administrate a school district that has 500 kids in 3 schools which already all have their own administration staff. Meanwhile, they utterly refuse to support teachers trying to keep problem students (you know, that thing everyone always hates for holding their kids back and wasting everyone's classroom time) out of the way, and consistently bow to parental pressure to not punish misbehaving students because their job is political. Teachers want to get rid of misbehaving assholes, but the administration does not put in any effort to do so.

This is all because every rural small town in America is dying. Anyone with any financial literacy, capability, or valuable skill ran away. All that's left are the people who had no life plan, who flunked out, who wasted their youth, and have not grown up emotionally from their highschool days. They coalesce and form your local "good ol boy" network, and tend to take over local politics.

This superintendent had the job for decades despite continuing decline in outcomes. Hows that for not firing underperformers?
by mg | 2025-05-08 13:53:23+00:00
I am developing this project, which replaces product lists with what I call "product charts":

https://www.productchart.com

The idea is to sort products not by one parameter (like price or release date) but by two - which creates an x/y chart. The product info is displayed dynamically - by default only the image is show. On hover, more info is displayed in a tooltip. And when you click "details", all data is shown.

This way, 300 products easily fit on the screen.

You need to watch it on a monitor to see the chart interface. On mobile, I just display a normal list.
by cookie_monsta | 2025-05-08 13:53:25+00:00
I found this game from a recommendation here and I have played it every day since. I think it's great. The rules take a bit of getting used to, but the dynamic of never having to guess (and getting penalised for guessing) makes it really interesting. It's just hard enough without being infuriating.

The page says that there are other Sam puzzles which can be played in html5, but the link only goes to the app store. Congrats on this one. Where can I find the browser versions of the others?
by jack_h | 2025-05-08 13:53:33+00:00
> I guess I find this so amusing because leftists love to fetishize European healthcare without understanding in European countries the government is much more aggressive about denying care than any US insurer. They actually have to keep costs sane for their system to continue existing.

All economic systems must contend with resource scarcity. Part of dealing with that is rationing resources which can take the form of higher prices, longer waiting lines, by need, countless other metrics, or some combination of metrics. While the current healthcare system in the US is a byzantine disaster that only a bureaucrat could love, I think far too many think there is a "solution" that somehow leads to a system without resource constraints. This imagined system isn't an economic system though, it's just a utopia.

“The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.” -- Thomas Sowell
by hparadiz | 2025-05-08 13:53:44+00:00
I recently was looking at a 4 speaker switch on monoprice. It was $20 two months ago. Now it's $40. It occurred to me that the parts in this speaker switch amounted to be $2 of raw parts. The simplest of plastic pieces with basic copper wires and metal screws. Yet they were shipping it here and forcing American consumers to pay $20 in taxes instead of possibly claiming an almost $36 profit margin by paying $2 of taxes on raw parts and assembling it here. Now I know it hasn't been long enough but these are the types of opportunities that are now available in the economy. If an assembling plant is there then that creates opportunities downstream to in-source even the raw parts too. Anyway that's just been where my mind goes about these things recently. I generally support free markets.
by miketheman | 2025-05-08 13:53:55+00:00
Excellent idea, and something I tried a little while back. The `pytest-postgresql` plugin used has the ability to do this natively, but when we tried it out we found that we had other issues with developing on a Linux machine.

Attempt: https://github.com/pypi/warehouse/pull/15365

Revert: https://github.com/pypi/warehouse/pull/15444

If you've got experience with making this kind of thing work on Linux development machines, it'd be great to have some help getting that back.
by CoastalCoder | 2025-05-08 13:53:56+00:00
I'm not an economist, but it It sounds like you're maybe conflating (mathematical models of economics) with (economics statistics).

It's one thing for their models to suck at fitting historical data or making bad predictions.

But I think your real beef is that their empirical statistics are touted as characterizing the middle class' lived experience, but don't?
by brostoffed | 2025-05-08 13:54:21+00:00
Here's something that i made which helps me out on a daily basis for the IDEA platform.

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/26658-contextbuilder

> ContextBuilder is a plugin that lets you combine and manage code files for AI prompts or other tooling. Features include a tool window with the same UI as the old ContextHistoryDialog, filetype exclusions, and a history manager.

You're able to select a directory, multiple directories, a file, multiple files and or a combination of them. After determining your selection, Right Click in the Project Explorer and you'll see "Generate Context".
by gsibble | 2025-05-08 13:54:31+00:00
I have an 7.1.4 Atmos system with a Sony ES receiver.

I can definitively tell you that sound bars to not come anywhere close to the quality of what I have, and at a decent price too (the entire audio setup cost less than my OLED tv).

I think most people are never exposed to real home theater audio so they don't know what they are missing. Similar with high end stereo audio these days (which I also have).

Every time I show Top Gun Maverick in my theater room to a friend, they want to go out and buy a real setup. Several have. It sounds better than an actual theater plus I get to lounge on my couch with my dog.
by hkchad | 2025-05-08 13:54:43+00:00
I'm using JetBrains w/ GitHub CoPilot, the amount of context it has around what I'm working on is next level, it's not just 'code complete' but it's 'context aware' as well, say for example I need to open a csv and parse out a few columns by the time I have named the file it's giving me the entire block of code WITH the proper column names of the files, all you do is hit tab and refactor. You won't get that just w/ copy/paste.
by w4rh4wk5 | 2025-05-08 13:54:54+00:00
Tracy [1] is the first thing that comes to my mind, then RenderDoc [2].

After that Visual Studio while debugging. In general, I think graphical debuggers and profiling tools do a relatively good job of packing lots of information into many, small windows.

[1] https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy

[2] https://github.com/baldurk/renderdoc
by Y_Y | 2025-05-08 13:55:09+00:00
FWIW, all-caps makes this look much worse to me. I understand that people like things like Hungarian notation, arrows over vector names, and shouting Common Lisp symbols. I understand the argument that it can make reading easier. I just can't appreciate that benefit, and it seems to me an ugly hack which obscures the abstract and general symbolic manipulation going on.

This is all highly subjective of course, de gustibus non disputandem.
by bwfan123 | 2025-05-08 13:55:43+00:00
What i would like to know is my digital footprint in the form of cookies that google and meta have access to. That digital image is a form of mental projection, and I presume meta's AI can target ads to that image.

Recommendations in the form of ads targeted to humans is a perfect usecase for LLMs. There is no right answer, and the interpreter is a human. Hallucinations dont matter, and if the targeting is a tad bit better, that justifies the investment.
by gardenhedge | 2025-05-08 13:55:45+00:00
I use Chat and Paste with LLMs. I have tried Cursor and Co-Pilot but they both kinda of suck in their own ways. I feel like understanding of the code completely goes away with Cursor since it's doing it's own thing. There's benefits to that but then it is challenging to debug since you don't know about the codebase. With Chat and Paste I think more about what I am putting in my codebase.
by actionfromafar | 2025-05-08 13:55:48+00:00
My gut feel is that people drove very badly in the before-times but often also very slowly and cautiously at the same time. Speed felt dangerous in old vehicles. Modern computers with wheels are like living rooms with great acceleration and decelaration. Maneuvers which would had taken great skill to perform with an old rear-wheel drive car with bad tires, are now executed routinely like it's nothing, thanks to antispin, traction control etc etc.

Cars are much safer now, especially on the inside, but when you get hit on the outside by a several tonne projectile, it's about the same as it ever were.
by throw4847285 | 2025-05-08 13:56:06+00:00
The reason people don't have original opinions is because it isn't worth it. The stakes are extremely low. How one chooses to write code is ultimately a matter of personal preference.

The lower the stakes, the more dogmatic people become about their choices, because they know on some level it's a matter of taste and nothing more. Counterintuitively, it becomes even more tied to one's ego than the choices that actually have major consequences.
by rsynnott | 2025-05-08 13:56:19+00:00
Yeah, there's a route (or set of closely related routes) near my office which, at peak times, has a 100 person double decker bus about once per _minute_. Really, it should be a tram route, but that would require building a tram line, and Dublin tends to see that as an immense undertaking to be done only once a decade or so (and this decade's one is already planned out).
by Tostino | 2025-05-08 13:56:40+00:00
You still need it. There are tools included with Postgres that you can cobble together for a backup solution that is lacking in features and edge case testing. But i'd much rather just use the right tool for the job.

For example, pgBackRest solves real problems with features like block level incremental backups that drastically reduce storage and transfer times for many workloads, automated backup retention policies, multiple repository support for offsite backup redundancy, encryption support, point in time recovery for granular restoration capabilities, and tooling to build standby servers very quickly and efficiently. These features handle edge cases and reduce operational overhead compared to managing scripts around pg_basebackup and WAL archiving yourself. In many environments, those features are required (e.g. encryption).
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-05-08 13:56:45+00:00
No.

"The peoples of Europe are fair-skinned and reddish, because they live in a cold climate and are not scorched by the sun."

Source: Hippocrates, On Airs, Waters, and Places, 5th century BC.

"The physical characteristics of the Germans are consistent: blue eyes, reddish hair, and large bodies."

(Tacitus, Germania, chapter 4)

Egyptian tomb paintings from the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC) visually represent foreign peoples with distinct skin tones - "Europeans", in the form of Sea Peoples or early Aegean peoples (e.g., Minoans or Mycenaeans), were sometimes shown with light red or pale skin tones.
by watwut | 2025-05-08 13:57:22+00:00
The people you talk about are consistently voting for more police state, for more social atomization and for higher cost of living. They see empathy, help to others and cooperation as negatives. Those are just facts.

As for working with hands rather then pushing numbers in spreadsheet, most people do not want to work as workers in factories - that is based on surveys. That includes tradesmen.
by fein | 2025-05-08 13:57:26+00:00
For my stereo setup, around $4000 for everything. It's also used for game emulators, kids to watch movies and cartoons, wife to watch whatever she feels like, etc.

Projector (Optoma laser) - $1200

110" powered retractable projector screen - $100

Mid tier PC - $600

DAC (Schiit modi 2) - $180

Amp (Behringer A500) - $100

SVS prime towers - $1000

SVS Sub - $750

All of my music is running off Jellyfin. I have a turntable that barely gets used but that's because I don't have enough space for it to keep it out of the reach/ damage radius of my kids.

You can of course do this for much less if you don't spend 2 grand on the audio part.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-08 13:57:38+00:00
I found out my house was "overengineered" when a professional architect pointed out a load carrying beam that was much larger than it needed to be.

A few years later I found structural issues in a different part of the house.

But, because I spent more money on overengineering one part of the house, there's less money to fix real problems.
by gsibble | 2025-05-08 13:57:46+00:00
I mean, I am an audio/videophile with a proper 7.1.4 Atmos setup at home.

I cannot even watch streaming tv or movies on it as it sounds so bad.

But I put in a 4K UHD disc and wow. It sounds better than a real movie theater.

I just think most people are never exposed to what high end movie audio sounds like anymore. I can tell you that channel separation is as good as ever. It's just most people never realize what's possible at home or don't have a room conducive to the setup. Or frankly don't care. My wife loves good movies and she could care less about the sound quality.
by planck_tonne | 2025-05-08 13:58:11+00:00
The relationship between industry and academia is borderline parasitic. Academia trains the talent, and nowadays industry tries to make them stay there as long as possible (wait until they finish their PhD), developing their skills and potentially interesting projects while on the taxpayer's dime. Industry is always busy on safe incremental improvements, while the stuff with the potential to be truly revolutionary only happens in academia -- the article cites many great examples. And as soon as a project starts to show promise, they take over. Public research, private profits. Finally, even for their shy incremental improvements, they rely to an extent on academic research for inspiration.

Whether or not this dynamic is good or fair for society, to me it's obvious that academia is necessary for industry to thrive (unless we do a complete restructuring of the whole system or something). Shutting it down seems incompatible with having cutting edge technology.

P.S.: Don't get the impression I'm a sucker for academia either. It's rotten as well.
by graealex | 2025-05-08 13:58:21+00:00
> And yes, javascript supports many kinds of inheritance

Funny you mention it, since JavaScript has absolutely no concept of contracts, which is one of the most important side-effects of inheritance. Especially not at compile time, but even at runtime you can compose objects willy-nilly, pass them anywhere, and the only way to test if they adhere to some kind of trait is calling a method and hoping for the best.

At least that had been the case till ES6 came around, but good luck finding anyone actually using classes in JavaScript. Mainly because it adds near-zero benefits, basically just the ability to overwrite method behavior without too much trickery.
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-08 13:58:43+00:00
They shared information with large customers with NDA. They were old school telecom — very tight.

Everything traversed their network. It was a bonkers architecture that would not fly today. The other thing about that obscurity is it enabled all sorts of weird use cases. Because the devices were identified to the BlackBerry network, you could message without user assignment.

It was common for corporate and political people to use them for unaccountable, compartmentalized communications. You could build ad hoc networks of people without there a record of who was who, and periodically reshuffle the devices to add and remove people. It was basically Nextel DirectConnect for texting / “the wire” for corporate people.
by gsibble | 2025-05-08 13:59:45+00:00
Be careful about Atmos. Most Atmos discs (I refuse to stream it) are a 5.1 TrueHD main setup with atoms layered in. So it's still 5.1 or 7.1 with some atmos effects.

That being said, I have a 7.1.4 Atmost setup and it is on the level of "HOLY SHIT" good.
by karmakaze | 2025-05-08 14:00:26+00:00
I had stopped interacting with SO as well, though the fact didn't really cross my mind. I had a few popular answers that got be enough points to be a moderator. The experience there is similar--possibly worse because the idiocy is unveiled. In the past I've often argued to reopen questions, sometimes even making edits to make it more agreeable to other mods.

It's common for those to get shouted down based on some policy or other bureaucratic nonsense by those who have no idea what the question is actually about. The problem could be that many of those who don't do, moderate. It attracts different sorts of people than those that are actually working with the things being discussed.