MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ido | 2025-05-26 05:15:07+00:00
I agree my reply was flippant because I was annoyed by the original comment, and I apologise for that.

The US provides and provided a ton of assistance to Israel but there’s a tendency online for people (probably mostly Americans?) to assign credit to literally everything that happens in Israel to US aid.

Israel exists outside of US-Israel politics and not everything (like birthrates) that happens there is because of the US. The US also supported/aided a lot of other countries that didn’t experience the same economic/industrial/technological development that Israel has in the last 30-40 years - some of it really is because of Israelis’ efforts and not just because of Americans’.
by mindslight | 2025-05-26 05:15:29+00:00
> they'll correct their strategic stances for the newer unstable order: Onshored supply chains, better inventories than just-in-time, less reliance on inflation assets and more on production assets

How exactly do you think instability encourages long-term investment in manufacturing? Not the dynamic of being in a better position if factories simply popped into existence, but actually plunking down money hoping for a return in the face of economic slowdown and political instability.

The actual response I expect is even more goods shipped directly from China, with tariff taxes built right into the sale price (Aliexpress didn't miss a beat on that one), and with the general uncertainty raising Chinese sellers' profit margins.
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-26 05:16:06+00:00
I used to be a guy that genuinely didn't care about what others thought. I did my own thing. As they say: those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter. That worked surprisingly well for quite a while. And then I slowly realized the benefits of society. It's nice to be a part of this big human experiment of ours. It's nice to have respect. And the thing is, it doesn't have to cost you that much. You don't have to go full-conformist. If you do a few basic things that are fairly low-effort you get a good bit of leeway in the eyes of the world. I'm still a pretty weird guy; just one that wears a squid on his head less often. Soul still intact.

Coming back to the article topic, often times society's judgment saves people from making stupid decisions. For example, in non-HN circles, "I am going to go move far away from anyone I know to live in a dilapidated building in one of the most depressed towns in the Northeast and work at a gas station" would garner enough judgment to stop that person in their tracks. If you've ever been to a town like this, you realize that is a good thing! Statistically, they've just been saved from ODing on fentanyl! Same thing for all kinds of socially undesirable behaviors. If you think people do crazy shit now, imagine what they'd do without a society around them.
by rendaw | 2025-05-26 05:16:31+00:00
The argument in this thread is that he's responsible for the actions of his subordinates and therefore deserves some of the punishment, not that he's directly culpable in the crime and therefore should receive punishment.

There have been many situations where corporate incentives or structures, plus the innate power imbalance, pressure low level employees to commit crimes that benefit the corporation and the fact that employers are not responsible for the actions of their employees when not directly ordered means that those structures aren't fixed.
by throwaway290 | 2025-05-26 05:16:39+00:00
> But we don't want to work less, we want more stuff.

Hold on. That's what tech is for right?

certain people on this forum keep saying we don't want to work. They say it's OK that they steal our art to train AI that takes our jobs, because then we can finally chillax and not work. But now apparently we also must keep working the remaining shitty jobs to not starve until we die? who is supposed to win here??
by klaaz0r | 2025-05-26 05:17:08+00:00
AI SEO/GEO (or whatever it will be called eventually) monitoring for companies.

We monitor how companies/brands rank in LLMs/AI Search, we don't use the API but the user interfaces (since these are totally different). We run thousands of prompts to analyse responses and combine that with website traffic to get an understanding of what is being said and how well you rank.

I didn't anticipate Google moving to AI mode so fast, to be totally honest, which makes it really interesting because we likely see rank tracking and keyword tracking disappear in the near future.

website: https://promptwatch.com

As a fun side project, I run https://homestra.com a kind of Zillow for Europe but for second/vacation homes
by therealdrag0 | 2025-05-26 05:17:09+00:00
That’s not a plausible theory to me. IME older people are just less likely to work hard. They bring a “rest n vest” mindset. If an older person rounds a 40hr week down to 35 hrs, and a younger person rounds up to 45 hours because they are passionate and ambitious, all else equal the younger get person is better ROI for the team. Obviously this is stereotyping and may not be accurate but that sentiment can explain many decisions.
by rayiner | 2025-05-26 05:17:21+00:00
It would be hard to distill the fallacy of human fungibility into a purer form than this. If you’re say Danish, the kids you raise will be Danish. The immigrants won’t be Danish, they’ll be like the people from their country of origin: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran....

And as a result, they won’t be nearly as economically productive as Danes, ironically undermining the whole point of immigration: https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-t...

The tremendous contribution that Danes can make to the world is to have and raise more Danish children!
by ozim | 2025-05-26 05:17:30+00:00
As a software dev I always felt like working warehouse - sprints, strony points being held on productivity metrics.

people think all devs work FAANG like companies when there is loads of companies where devs are treated like dirt only now one FAANG company catches up with reality.

Where business people seem to never be measured in any way.

If requirements were shitty - well dev team did a bad job - not that business made up stupid decisions on stupider time lines.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-26 05:17:33+00:00
I don't understand why you seem to think JWTs can't be used for authorization, and the fact that you denigrate this as a "puppynoob" approach is telling, but not necessarily in the way you think it is.

Many large systems with millions of users (e.g. Google's Firebase) store user claims in the token, and that can (and is) used to validate permissions.
by ggm | 2025-05-26 05:17:44+00:00
You can still see the concrete dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park, moved from Hyde park where they featured in the Great Exhibition of 1854 (which in turn led to the museums complex in South Kensington)

Due to mistaken identification of a claw as a horn, one of the models features rhino like features, when it's actually part of the clawed front foot. One of the moulds was used for a dining philosophers gathering before the exhibition. Cast Cement was a novel(ish) material. "coade stone" was used by prince albert decorating his design for osborne house he and victoria shared on the isle of wight. -Using it to cast these models was probably a shrewd move given the prince's interest in the great exhibition.

Acceptance of the realities of deep time from geology underpins the emergence of the modern british scientific movement. It was discussed at great length as a 'religion vs science' debate in the british scientific societies. Prior discoveries by antiquarians of bog bones, fossils begged questions which came to a head. Once you accept that geology reflects time beyond the trivial, and that folding and continuity of layers can be tracked and understood, and that mammon: the coal and metals mining industry is obviously funding and accepting this scientific truth, demanding that the same coal and metal barons fund a church which is diametrically opposed to a belief in time before 4004BC, is unwise.

The church caved.

Thomas Huxley, who led the fight in the press, was the grandfather of Aldous Huxley, of "brave new world" fame.
by wodenokoto | 2025-05-26 05:18:38+00:00
Where I live, the current daily temperature is between 33 in the morning and hits forty something mid day, so I have very recent experience with those 5 degrees, and I completely disagree with your assessment.

Difference between 10 and 30 degrees C feels, way, way bigger than 37 to 42.

One goes from straight up cold to quite hot, while the other just goes from very hot to even more very hot.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-26 05:19:54+00:00
> It can happen in a generation, if all of that generation decides to have zero offspring.

All of humanity has never decided to do the same thing ever. Society follows a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution , and there will always be folks who decide to do other than everyone else. Oppositional defiant disorder is a thing. You're living in imaginary land.

> We are also related to bugs.

Yes. And many very intelligent people besides myself think that we should be taking better care of the environment and all the other creatures in it besides ourselves as well.
by nurettin | 2025-05-26 05:22:47+00:00
IIRC The reason it was originally called a hallucination was due to experiments like "clone github.com/bleh/blah" and it would give you a non-existent repository. You could list and edit the files and so on. Or you would ask it to list files in your home dir and go three directories deep and it would keep on generating.
by PeterStuer | 2025-05-26 05:23:07+00:00
The idea since the early 80's was to prepare for the big boomer retirement wave by saving up in special retirement funds, aa demographic prohections were clear. In Belgium e.g. this was called the 'Zilverfonds'.

But no politician throughout the decades could keep their hands out of the coockie jar, so now al those accounts are empty.

Funny how when 'defence' creates fake emergencies there is no limit to how money can be found. But money for retirement? Oh no, we can't have that!
by voilavilla | 2025-05-26 05:25:30+00:00
How does this make huge sense?

It's a financial goal that is literally based on how long you plan to live, aka, your age.

Let's say I have €100.000 in the bank and that's two years of expenses based on my budget. Can I retire tomorrow? Well, what's my age? and what X do I plan to add to my age to determine if that amount of money is sufficient to retire?
by ggm | 2025-05-26 05:25:51+00:00
This story is an instance of Simons-Ehrlich wager writ large. If you search HN discussions back 5 years or more you find people saying we're on the brink of running out of lithium, it will never be enough to make the batteries to displace gas in engines worldwide.

There is no shortage of lithium. It's a shortage of active mines, and a price to buy the lithium which sustains extraction. Australia has a massive amount of spodumine, an igneous rock alternative to the water deposited lithium found in Chile. and elsewhere.

We really don't have a lithium shortage. Musk will profit from this as long as the chemistry of batteries favours lithium for energy density. If BYD's alternate battery chemistries take off at scale, the amount of lithium needed might change is all.

Also, Musks battery tech is (as far as I know) a joint-venture with other companies. He doesn't have an exclusive, the flow processes to manufacture canned batteries is his big investment but it's with somebody like Panasonic. He may be moving off this, diversified, but it's not like only Musk benefits from cheaper Lithium, or that it will alter his intent to pricing EV in the short term: BYD are eating his lunch with significantly cheaper EV, and they have the same lithium need Tesla does.
by slyall | 2025-05-26 05:26:13+00:00
I doubt this is true in most countries. It would introduce all sorts of problems if people stopped working because of illness or their employer went out of business when they were 60. Not to mention somebody who stopped working the day before their 65th birthday or other strangeness.

You also have people who have not worked much throughout their lives.

But there are a lot of countries and types of pensions out there and some (such as for government workers) may work the way you say. Checks first before you resign (don't be like some UK women).
by lifthrasiir | 2025-05-26 05:27:16+00:00
My reasoning for Exif was that it is not only auxiliary but also post-hoc. Exif was defined independently from image formats and only got adopted later because those formats provided extension points (JPEG APP# markers, PNG chunks).

You've got a good point that there are multiple types of metadata and some metadata might be crucial for interpreting data. I would say such "structural" metadata should be considered as a part of data. I'm not saying it is not a metadata; it is a metadata inside some data, so doesn't count for our purpose of defining a composite.

I also don't think tar hardlinks are metadata for our purpose, because it technically consists of the linked path instead of the file contents and the information that the file is a hardlink, where the former is clearly a data and the latter is a metadata used to reconstruct the original file system so should be considered as a part of larger data (in this case, a logical notion of "file").

I believe these examples should be enough to derive my own definition of "composite". Please let me know otherwise.
by andyferris | 2025-05-26 05:27:34+00:00
The correct analogy is that software engineers design and build the _factory_. The software performs the repeatable process as defined by code, and no person sits and watches if each machine instruction is executed correctly.

Do you really want your auto tool makers to not ensure the angle of the tools are correct _before_ you go and build 10,000 (misshaped) cars?

I’m not saying we don’t embrace tooling and automation as appropriate at the next level up, but sheesh that is a misguided analogy.
by pdonis | 2025-05-26 05:29:00+00:00
> if you're able to prove it

It's a logical tautology, at least if we make the implications definite (i.e., "sounds bad" necessarily implies "not right", and therefore "right" necessarily implies "does not sound bad"). In other words, "A implies B" is logically equivalent to "Not B implies Not A". There's no need to give any further proof.

> you should be well aware that exactly the same proof will quickly show that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.

No, it won't. You really need to learn some basic logic.

> They are the same statement

No, they're not. Again, please learn some basic logic. "A implies B" is not logically equivalent to "B implies A". You are claiming that it is. Any basic textbook on logic will tell you that you are wrong.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-26 05:29:01+00:00
> Maintaining and improving existing software sure is boring and often thankless

There was a big public episode where he appealed to Elon Musk for a job at Twitter, was given an “internship”, tried soliciting public submissions for the code he was tasked with, left a lot of people shocked that he was struggled with basic FE work, and then resigned 4 weeks in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34074344
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-26 05:30:19+00:00
What do you want me to read in that link?

On its face, it directly contradicts you:

> Using invoices, each seller pays VAT on their sales and passes the buyer an invoice that indicates the amount of tax paid excluding deductions (input tax). Buyers who themselves add value and resell the product pay VAT on their own sales (output tax). The difference between output tax and input tax is the amount paid to the government (or refunded, in the case of a negative amount).

Though of course a distiller isn't reselling its still; it is the final consumer of the tank.

> [example of] 10% VAT:

> At each stage of production, the seller collects a tax and the buyer pays that tax. The buyer can then be reimbursed for paying the tax, but only by successfully selling the value-added product to the buyer at the next stage.

That reimbursement comes from the customer, not the taxing authority.
by antisthenes | 2025-05-26 05:30:21+00:00
Well, what is half their lives anyway?

Let's say you live to 80, half your life is 40 years. You only start working a decent job around ~22 years (4 year college degree).

22+40 = 62, pretty close to 70 already. Assuming some people die early, so others have to pick up the slack, some people work part time, etc. and you end up pretty damn close to 70.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-26 05:31:50+00:00
> What the ... ? Sorry, but you don't have to earn that. I suggest you familiarize yourself with human rights, particularly if you won the lottery and were born in a country like the US; it is very clearly written, in unambiguous terms, the rights their citizens enjoy.

This is obtuse. I obviously wasn’t talking about human rights or the 1st amendment.

I was saying it’s illogical to suggest that because someone did one impressive thing in another domain a long time ago, we should therefore continue to value their input on every topic forever.
by arghwhat | 2025-05-26 05:31:52+00:00
1. Denmark has a special retirement system for people who started work life earlier than normal, allowing them to indeed retire after some 45-48 years of work. All these rules are broken though.

2. These ages only affect a minimal government pension, and a massive tax saving on cashing out a specific, government approved retirement investment. If you wait to start receiving payments on that till retirement age, you avoid paying income tax of it. You can start earlier with worse taxation, or use regular investment types altogether. The overcomplicated tax system and its incentives are quite broken though.

3. Danish politicians still have a retirement age of 60 and a massive retirement package, so they can't deem retirement age and available funds to be that important...
by pdonis | 2025-05-26 05:32:09+00:00
> Less likely than what?

Think of it this way: some percentage of writing that sounds bad is wrong, and some percentage of writing that does not sound bad is wrong. I am simply pointing out that it is perfectly possible for both percentages to be the same, so that whether or not the writing sounds bad gives no useful information about whether it's right or wrong.

I think you are taking "less likely" too literally. PG makes it clear that he is not talking about exact mathematical functions. His intent is much better captured by treating the statements as logical implications, as I and others have been doing.
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2025-05-26 05:32:47+00:00
I noticed usually DI is not necessary at runtime, but rather at compile (or boot) time.

In practice I noticed I'm ok with direct dependency as long as I can change the implementation with a compile time variable. For the tests, I use an alternative implementation, for development another. I don't swap an implementation for another within the same code. It is an option, but it happens so rarely that it seems absurd optimizing for it.

So, I like dependency injection as a concept, but I avoid it to reduce complexity. The advantage is that you can get by with a lot more "global" code. In Go this is particularly nice since DI is really nasty (struct methods have various limitations)
by kloop | 2025-05-26 05:33:44+00:00
> The idea that because software goes through a standardised workflow and pipeline over and over and over again as it’s built it’s somehow like a factory is also bullshit.

I don't think it's bs. The pipeline system is almost exactly like a factory. In fact, the entire system we've created is probably what you get when cost of creating a factory approaches instantaneous and free.

The compilation step really does correspond to the "build" phase in the project lifecycle. We've just completely automated by this point.

What's hard for people to understand is that the bit right before the build phase that takes all the man-hours isn't part of the build phase. This is an understandable mistake, as the build phase in physical projects takes most of the man-hours, but it doesn't make it any more correct.
by baalimago | 2025-05-26 05:33:57+00:00
Seems to me like FANG is primarily sacrificing QA to increase productivity, with AI as the reason. Will be interesting to see if they too are 'peeing their pants' (warm and nice -> cold and not so nice), or if it actually will be sustainable.

LLM's were trailed as customer service bots, which backfired (for the most part). Now they're exploring different areas.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-26 05:34:50+00:00
Then one wonders what the agenda of the NYT is here. Does this also misrepresent Willison's writing?

And just as the proliferation of factories abroad has made it cheap and easy for entrepreneurs to manufacture physical products, the rise of A.I. is likely to democratize software-making, lowering the cost of building new apps. “If you’re a prototyper, this is a gift from heaven,” Mr. Willison said. “You can knock something out that illustrates the idea.”

Why do they cite bloggers who relentlessly push this technology rather than interviewing a representative selection of programmers?
by const_cast | 2025-05-26 05:36:23+00:00
Right but Biden's performance was perfectly adequate, and even quite good in many areas. It's mostly just propaganda against him and the left in general.

The left is bad with money, ooo. Conservative fiscal policy works, ooo! But if you compare the US on the global stage during Biden's presidency, we did quite good. There was a pandemic, people. Expecting nothing at all to happen economically is a delusion.
by unscaled | 2025-05-26 05:36:44+00:00
Everything can include "claims". Claims are just fields in a JSON object. If you're using your own token format which is based on Libsodium's secret box, you can just do `secretbox_seal(secret_key, json_encode(claims))`. It's a no-brainer one liner. You can even use MessagePack or protocol buffers instead of JSON and save a little bit on the token size.

JWT might do other things for you, like standardizing how to deal with key rotation (using the "kid" claim and JWKs discovery urls), or tying a bearer token to a PoP structure (DPoP), but that's all about standardization. And as a standard JWT is too flexible and ambiguous. There are better proposed standards out there, and for most of the thing JWT is used for (non-interoperable access tokens) it's an overkill.
by anttiharju | 2025-05-26 05:37:25+00:00
With `brew install go`

and

module github.com/anttiharju/vmatch

go 1.21.0

toolchain go1.21.1

I still get a binary that claims to be built with the latest version of Go instead of 1.21.1 or .0

vmatch has version 0.1.6+dirty built with go1.24.3 from 83c9aa83 on 2025-05-25T18:43:30Z

I think this is a problem for me. Go 1.22 did a breaking change with the for loops for example https://go.dev/blog/loopvar-preview.

I see that I can change it with a command like `go env -w GOTOOLCHAIN=go1.21.1+auto` but then again I'm doing something I don't want, managing the version.

Perhaps I'm missing some config.
by sdeframond | 2025-05-26 05:37:30+00:00
Obviously it depends a lot but, as white-collars tech people, we can already work less.

What's preventing us from going on sabbatical ? We would earn less, sure, but do we really need that money? I mean it is buying us things that our parents didnt have so it should be possible to do without, no?

Again, that's a different story for poor people.
by atlasunshrugged | 2025-05-26 05:37:34+00:00
I'm just finishing up a book called Rebooting a Nation on how the country of Estonia modernized so quickly after independence from the Soviet Union and became a leader in tech and e-government. It should start shipping on Amazon in the U.S. later this week! Happy to chat with folks who have questions about the publishing industry from an authors perspective (I ended up signing with Hurst in the UK which distributes through Oxford University Press).

https://shorturl.at/LKMxS (Amazon link)