MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryandrake | 2025-05-26 19:36:28+00:00
Project Manager here. I wish software were an industry where my job was not needed! Where the software team could just directly tell the boss: "It will be done in 3 months. Trust us, bro!" and they go off to do work without a single status report or a single meeting, and come back exactly 3 months later with a finished, tested and working product, ready for distribution! God that would be so great. I could just chill out, tell my boss and boss's boss to chill out, that the software team's got this, with 100% confidence that it was true. Or, I could go find some more useful career!

But it's never true. Team A depends on Team B, who is busy with work for Team C, and none of these teams are talking to each other because they're too busy writing code. Team D just lost two people and can't make the date that they promised, which sets Teams E and F back a few months unless we can figure it out. Or they're behind because they up and decided to do a big refactoring in the middle of the project without telling anyone. Or people just estimated poorly, like orders-of-magnitude poorly, and while the marketing team is ready, and the trade shows are scheduled, and the factory is ramping the device that the software should be flashed on, but the software won't be ready for another three months.

I empathize with engineers since I was once one, and can understand why some of them see us as adversarial. We tend to interact with them in places that Software Engineers hate, like in meetings and standups and via "update" E-mail blasts. Or we're sending them JIRA tickets which they also hate. I do my best to shield my teams from these things that I know they don't like, but sometimes they have to happen.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-05-26 19:36:31+00:00
It's strange that all four examples in the article are people with commonly objectionable right-wing views when the UK has sent arresting officers to people on the basis of online comments across the political spectrum in the last couple years. It isn't merely a partisan issue where a group that are easily written off as racists receive heavy-handed justice, the police have intermittently targeted every view away from the center in their homes, even Quakers, disability advocates and anti-hunting activists.

Does the editorial team of the Economist want to imply that only right-leaning members of the British public are experiencing this?
by zoogeny | 2025-05-26 19:37:08+00:00
Nix falls into the camp in my mind that includes Rust: great idea that I just don't have time for right now.

Reproducibility is the holy grail, IMO. It is so valuable that any system that actually achieves it will find some longevity and eventually be hammered into a useable form. I believed in the promise when AWS was all about amis. Then I believed in the promise with docker. It seems something like Nix is a natural next step in this evolution.

I want it to succeed enough that it gets easy enough for me to use. But for now I'll stick with macOS for my laptop and docker with alpine for my deployments.
by drewcoo | 2025-05-26 19:37:10+00:00
Replacing intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards cheapens the activity and makes it less enjoyable. Awarding me badges for brushing my teeth and taking out the trash is a great way to help me do boring tasks. Awarding me badges for having deep, meaningful conversations with my partner . . . not so helpful. Alfie Kohn has collected decades of studies and written about that in his book Punished by Rewards. It's one of the books I try to give away to friends and coworkers who are interested in the subject. The pro-gamification folks seem to want to pretend that they're doing something totally different this time and they can ignore all the previous data.

https://www.alfiekohn.org/topics/motivation-inside/
by specproc | 2025-05-26 19:37:18+00:00
What seemed to be interesting from the email addresses disclosed is that there are a hell of a lot of people engaged in finance, investment or trading of one sort or another.

There are a few there with enough emails for it to be relatively widespread within the institution: Scotiabank, JPMorgan, KKR and Jeffries stand out -- Scotiabank has hundreds of emails, I imagine they're having a bad week. Also a lot of energy stuff, Aramco, Total.
by jaoane | 2025-05-26 19:37:20+00:00
I live in Spain and there is no rising anti-American anything. The average person doesn't care beyond the Trump hate that is spewed by the mass media, but the mass media spews hate about many things, so much that the average person can't really invest much energy into hating every little thing.

I know that people here would love to live in an alternate reality where everybody in the EU is fuming at the US having a right-wing government but that's not here at least yet. The US has done so many terrible things throughout history; they will survive this too.
by hakfoo | 2025-05-26 19:38:12+00:00
You don't have multiple choices.

The appeal of Peak Netflix was that it had everything in one place with reasonably working discovery mechanisms. You could pay $10 or so per month and be satisfied. The current streaming era is "if you want to see all your favourite shows, it will cost $60 per month and you'll have to bounce around among 12 apps to find what you want."

If we had a mandatory-licensing regime, I'd expect multiple choices would work great. Services couldn't survive on "Only we have The Office/Game of Thrones/Bluey" alone and would have to differentiate based on other factors like "best discovery tools" or "built to better suit your specific devices"
by rh3939 | 2025-05-26 19:38:36+00:00
Author here. Totally agree that H.264 can be lossless. Generally its lossy. My idea(which I am still working out) is to compress the difference of frames using a rational bloom filter. I previously posted here about using conditional bloom filter that rely on rational k. The idea was to use different values of k based on whether the url was more likely to be malicious than not. This results in a lower fp rate for the same filter size when compared to integer k. I then saw this paper[https://arxiv.org/html/2502.02193v2] was posted recently which describes an almost identical approach(theirs is much nicer). I will do much more rigorous testing as my current setup is a bit sloppy but I hope it illustrates the idea.
by mrweasel | 2025-05-26 19:38:51+00:00
This is awesome, well, useful. I have a package I'd like to have in Debian, and I am willing to maintain it, but getting startet is just ... complex.

The whole Debian package infrastructure is remarkable complete and capable, but it's dense and the documentation is not great. The git-buildpackage is barely documented, at least not in a manor which where a newbie can just build a package and be sure that an upgrade will work in the future.
by zzo38computer | 2025-05-26 19:39:14+00:00
I think that being able to make user stylesheets based not only on HTML but also on ARIA attributes and on existing CSS commands, might be helpful, to compensate for the problems. User settings could also be used to e.g. override (and/or disable) the meaning of specific CSS commands in the styles specified in the document, and to override the results of media queries. It could also perhaps help to make the rendering more efficient if inefficient commands are disabled by the user (I often find it slow due to inefficient use of CSS commands).
by FredPret | 2025-05-26 19:39:31+00:00
Some "plumbing" company websites are really just referral farms that are supposed to send your data to plumbers in your area.

The idea even makes sense - if this worked, plumbers could focus on plumbing and SEO hackers could focus on getting a landing page in front of people looking for plumbing.

Sadly there are a lot of slop-like companies out there.
by motorest | 2025-05-26 19:39:55+00:00
> The statuslist itself has a TTL (...)

If you read the draft, the TTL is clearly specified as optional.

> (...) and does not get re-loaded until that TTL expires.

That is false. The draft clearly states that the optional TTL is intended to "specify the maximum amount of time, in seconds, that the Status List Token can be cached by a consumer before a fresh copy SHOULD be retrieved."

> You can have a lower TTL for statuslist, but that comes at the cost of higher frequency of high-latency network calls due to cache misses.

The concept of a TTL specifies the staleness limit, and anyone can refresh the cache at a fraction of the TTL. In fact, some cache revalidation strategies trigger refreshes at random moments well within the TTL.

There is also a practical limit to how frequently you refresh a token revocation list. Some organizations have a 5-10min tolerance period for basic, genera-purpose access tokens, and fall back to shorter-lived and even one-time access tokens for privileged operations. So if you have privileged operations being allowed when using long-lived tokens, your problem is not the revocation list.
by jajko | 2025-05-26 19:40:14+00:00
Why education should be done for maximal profit? Oh the poor CEO, he just wants to bring more value to shareholders! Clearly folks are fed up with eventual inevitable result.

Things like education or healthcare shouldnt be privatized, since that always eventually ends up as profit-first game. The product suffers since milking is obvious, and quality of service is at best secondary concern.

Is is really that hard to see all this?
by zugi | 2025-05-26 19:41:11+00:00
> The public might well question why so much time is spent on this, while burglaries routinely go unsolved.

I'd offer yet another explanation: laziness.

For burglaries, you have to get out of your chair, go out into the community, interview witnesses, search for evidence, and maybe wander into dangerous areas to find and arrest potentially violent suspects.

For internet thought crimes, you can sit in the comfort of your own chair, getting paid to surf the internet, and declare enough posts "offensive" to look productive. When you do show up to arrest someone, they're highly unlikely to be violent. It's a lot easier and safer than investigating burglaries.
by lukan | 2025-05-26 19:41:32+00:00
Why do people prefer games over hard work while learning? Because this is how we used to naturally learn.

Kids having fun playing hide and seek? Wrestling and throwing stones? They are learning hunting/survival skills.

Today with more abstract knowledge needed it is harder, but the concept of making abstract learning a game again, is a very smart one in general. It of course fails, if engagement becomes the metric and not gaining knowledge.
by throwaway77385 | 2025-05-26 19:41:39+00:00
Whatsapp messages?

It's pretty crucial to find out how these ended up with the police.

Did these people send Whatsapp messages to someone who didn't like the messages and this person then went to the police? In that case, it's back to the article and lack of definition within these laws.

If, however, the police got the whatsapp messages via some kind of mass-surveillance programme, then we have a big problem...
by zzo38computer | 2025-05-26 19:42:01+00:00
> Colors should be good to go if the website is well-styled to begin with.

What if it is not well-styled? Or, maybe some people think it is and others disagree and want something else. The end user should need to customize fonts (not only larger, but also if you want smaller fonts; I more often find the fonts on a web page are too big and want smaller fonts; however, also you might prefer a specific font typeface and not only the font size), colours (also for many reasons, including using a monochrome display or printer that the web page author might not have been aware of), animations (e.g. to disable them), margins, etc.
by whyowhy3484939 | 2025-05-26 19:42:33+00:00
That's bad news for the millions that had to do just that and learned fine in fact better. I'm not saying you should read the Upanishads in the original, I'm saying a proper intro textbook is fine and some teacher-figure ("human") to actually use your body and read theirs.

Heck, Latin even has a Latin-only method: LLPSI. "Roma in Italia est", you'll figure it out quickly enough.
by neilv | 2025-05-26 19:43:13+00:00
> They're just not as simple as you make it sound.

I didn't say it was simple. I said I thought it was more achievable than "it can't be done."

I suspect one of the barriers to it being done is that it's not a top requirement like I assert it should be, for basic resources of society.

When led with that requirement, I have faith that some smart engineers and product management can figure it out.

With apologies to JFK, "We do these things, not because they are easy, but because--" they need doing. Even if they are hard.
by galaxytachyon | 2025-05-26 19:43:21+00:00
Those on HN are considered extremely tech-savvy and security aware and yet we are still concerned about our accounts getting compromised like this. What can a random user like our moms or siblings do? They won't even notice these kind of attack.

It is such a pathetic state of affair where massive leaks like these are expected. I contend this is a result of lax regulation and lack of consequences. In healthcare, patient data are locked down so hard even people who need to work with them have problems getting to them. It is because of regulations. Everything is traceable, recorded, and maintained to the strictest standards possible. It costs a huge amount of money but as a result, we don't see many serious breaches.

Compared it to fintech and regular tech services, these guys make fuckton of profits and yet suffer almost no regulations. What a joke.
by chairmansteve | 2025-05-26 19:43:49+00:00
Yes, there are definitely problems, but at least you can criticise the speech laws. And fight to change them. In fact if you feel strongly about it you can do something about it. The article mentions the Free Speech Union in the UK. There is also the EFF in the USA. Democracy requires that we fight for it. Otherwise it will disappear.

In dicatorships there is no opportunity to speak out.
by jrflowers | 2025-05-26 19:44:02+00:00
You make a good point. Chipotle sources locally, cooks things in-store and sells fresh things, none of which are things that any Taco Bell does, so it would really be funny for them to announce that they are switching to being a place that puts Chipotle wrappers on Taco Bell food rather than what they have an established reputation for doing.
by intellectronica | 2025-05-26 19:44:10+00:00
I usually really love Sassy's writing, but this time it's the usual AI-shy nonsense.

It's possible for good managers to do much better management work with the aid of AI (saying from first-hand experience).

AI does not make mediocre managers good or bad managers mediocre.

Today's best managers are putting a lot of thought and experimentation into making AI a powerful tool for being even better managers. Others ... cope.
by someperson | 2025-05-26 19:44:24+00:00
Keep in mind Hacker News (formerly Startup News) is effectively a loss-leading advertising arm of Y Combinator, which at this point is one of the most successful investment firms in the world.

And HN founder and original author Paul Graham is (at least on paper) billionaire, not merely the decamillionare he used to be.

Though it's still good for it to be a self-funding project even if that means accepting donations.
by next_xibalba | 2025-05-26 19:44:26+00:00
Duolingo is techno fascism?

I looked up the definition as:

> authoritarian rule, often involving the fusion of state and corporate tech power, where technology is seen as the driving force of the regime and used to consolidate control, suppress dissent, and erode public trust.

I’m trying to connect the dots between the above and Duolingo.
by zahllos | 2025-05-26 19:44:52+00:00
I don't think it is an odd take. I live in Switzerland, which has 4 national languages (Swiss German is spoken in dialect form that varies between towns, while Romansh has well-defined idioms with distinct spelling, although the 5 or so idioms are mutually intelligible). I speak French, passable German and one of the Romanshes, and I'm a native of none of them. Between French and Romansh I can more or less read Italian, although I can't understand it when spoken.

The same thing that has worked for me as a method for learning languages has always been the same. Get books, particularly short stories or children's stories aimed at A2/B1 level, and read them. Practice grammar. Get a pen and paper and learn vocab by repeatedly writing it down. Boring but effective. And of course practice listening and talking, which means either having native friends, doing a course, using audio materials from somewhere, etc. Courses with actual humans make learning go faster (in the case of Romansh, it would have been impossible without the course).

I don't find duolingo to be effective at all, as others mention beyond the A1/A2 level. I'd be a bit more skeptical and say even A2 you need to expand your horizons.
by pcrh | 2025-05-26 19:44:56+00:00
The comparison is made with America's First Amendment, which is a valuable piece of legislation.

How does the law in the US treat incitement to violence, as shown by some of the cases described, e.g. Among them were people who said things like “blow the mosque up” and “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards”. That probably would have been legal in America, says Gavin Phillipson of Bristol University, since it falls short of presenting a clear and imminent danger.

What would constitute "clear and imminent danger" in a online posting?
by kccqzy | 2025-05-26 19:45:26+00:00
The user ID is a piece of email. It is PII. To define how it's broken is to describe a list of specific actions the user did to the private information in their account causing the UI to be broken.

If training is such a problem, I don't understand why we solve the problem by obviating such training and make the issue tracking system an acceptable storage medium for PII?
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-26 19:45:29+00:00
Though I don't expect Windows targeting tools to leverage it much, using 32 bit pointers can be quite an efficient method to save memory when keeping track of lots of small objects. You're limited by 4GiB of memory per process, of course, but by switching to 32 bit you're practically halving the space spent on pointers.

Using smaller pointers also allows for better data locality and better cache efficiency depending on your data layout. If you're not close to hitting 4GiB of RAM, a few free percentage points in performance aren't a bad deal.

Microsoft isn't going to deprecate 32 bit application support any time soon, so you may as well take advantage. That said, so few people have need for it that the deprecation into tier 2 support is probably the right choice. Whatever the 32 bit ABI can do, a custom allocator can probably do just as well on x64.

Oh, and Office stll comes in 32 bit mode for some reason. If you're building an Office plugin, you may need 32 bit code.
by reify | 2025-05-26 19:45:39+00:00
The ones I visit daily

https://pluralistic.net/

https://www.wheresyoured.at/author/edward/

https://www.understandingai.org/

https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html

https://european-alternatives.eu/

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/

https://hope.net/

for some human spiritual depth:

https://www.themarginalian.org/
by willmeyers | 2025-05-26 19:45:42+00:00
I made a random number generator API that used a shared caps lock key as entropy (https://eieio.games/blog/the-global-capslock-key/). It didn't really work because bots made everything kind of deterministic. But it's kind of weird.

Code’s here: https://github.com/willmeyers/global-caps-lock-rng
by Fokamul | 2025-05-26 19:45:58+00:00
This goes to Spain government (Nazi-like behavior has long tradition there) and Spain citizens letting laws, which allows this, to pass. Because same law was or will be used to block opposition, etc.

Of course, that similar organizations (paid by huge copyright companies) tried the same in my country. And luckily our government listens to local experts (NIC.cz and others) and not to mention, pirating has big tradition here. So they failed to pass this ridiculous law. (blocking IP addresses)
by leoc | 2025-05-26 19:46:23+00:00
Even at those levels there doesn't seem to be any reason why you wouldn't be better off putting your time into Dreaming Spanish https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ or Muzzy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzy_in_Gondoland , just to name some famously approachable beginner material.

To be a bit cynical about it: the typical DuoLingo player has probably been misled to some extent about its effectiveness, yes, but also many of them don't particularly want to learn a new language. I suspect that they're happy to be able to play a popular mobile game that everyone else is also playing without the stigma of being a "Candy Crush addict" and "timewaster". "I'm learning a language!" is the welcome figleaf. https://youtu.be/F3SzNuEGmwQ?t=243
by zzzeek | 2025-05-26 19:46:31+00:00
oh, so you only mean like the gamified nature of duolingo? Lots of language apps have lessons that are interactive versions of language books and they also include conversational practice with language models. Conversational practice with humans is not necessarily easily available nor is it that appropriate if you are just learning a language and can't have simple conversations yet. Babbel for example is pretty comparable to a traditional language class in how it's structured. It's pretty convenient that I can use it any time of day and as often as I want, from my car or whatever.
by redserk | 2025-05-26 19:46:35+00:00
Your initial take is bizarrely politically charged for something that transcends the left-right divide.

Many non-“left” barriers have been raised too and ignoring that only contributes to the mess we’re in. For example: zoning and planning. Plenty of folks would like to claim they want more homeless housing, just not near them.

I find the divide between what people want nationally versus locally very amusing: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/44611-opinions-na...
Show HN: A New Platform to Share Stories of Unsung Everyday Heroes
by izanamador | 2025-05-26 19:46:35+00:00
Hi HN, I built AnonymousHeroes, a simple site where people can share stories of everyday heroes they admire—people who never seek recognition but deserve it. You can read, vote, and nominate heroes anonymously or with your name. Here are two stories that recently inspired me:

A nurse who stayed 12 hours past her shift in a storm to care for vulnerable patients

A bus driver who always ensures the elderly get a seat, no matter what I’d love feedback on the site or any ideas on how to grow a community around celebrating real-world kindness. Thanks!
by motorest | 2025-05-26 19:46:40+00:00
> What is so frustrating about tech like JWTs is that it fits the fairly rare, high profile, websites like Reddit, netflix, etc. but doesn't fit ANYTHING else.

This is only conceivably true if your ability to design services only goes as far as reusing reddit-like usecases for everything and anything.

But everyone else is not incumbered by that limitation.

> Everyone else wants immediate revocation of rights, not waiting for a token to expire.

Where exactly does a JWT prevent you from rejecting revoked tokens? I mean, JWTs support short-lived tokens, jti denylists, single-user tokens with nonces, etc. Why are you blaming JWTs for problems you're creating to yourself.
by zer00eyz | 2025-05-26 19:47:04+00:00
This is a theme for Duolingo... and they have been overt about it for a long time (first vid is a ted talk from a year ago!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6FORpg0KVo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0UE2ZY3QB0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUsDbgGQmIM

(As an aside I hate that videos are now "source material" for a discussion... it feels somewhat lame).

> wife began to complain about Duolingo feeling more and more manipulative and less and less useful.

I think this is a great bit of insight into what a lot of what the web has become! If they had been more manipulative and stepped up the quality and utility of the product would that have been acceptable to remain competitive vs something like tiktok?