MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timschmidt | 2025-06-21 23:50:49+00:00
I see what you're talking about, however, still find much to disagree with in that comment.

> US auto industry ownership unilaterally sent US auto manufacturing to China!

While the US auto industry did move manufacturing out of the US, this statement is factually incorrect in multiple ways. First, the auto manufacturers largely moved their operations to Mexico and Canada, not China. And second, this happened after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agre... an international trade agreement negotiated at the federal government level which made doing so possible and profitable. Doubtless industry lobbyists were involved, however the action was not unilateral in any sense.

Similarly, federal and international policy is capable of making it economically sensible to bring that manufacturing back onto US shores.

> China's already making most of what we consume here, and they're making world leading innovation in the EV market. So why aren't we just importing the EVs from there like we import everything else?

You rail against regulatory protectionism for US heavy industry but seem unaware that all nations with heavy industry engage in same. China imposes tariffs on importing US autos, as does most of Europe, Japan, S. Korea, and anywhere else seeking to maintain some form of local heavy manufacturing, which is seen as a national asset, particularly during war time and other emergencies like pandemics.

> The answer of course, is nowhere. There is no such thing in modern US big industry capitalism. It's a big f_cking lie!

Last I checked, 75% of Teslas components are US made.

> The only thing modern US capitalism is focused on innovating is how to f_ck the consumer, the worker, and the vendor, a little more completely, in favor of shareholders. I'm sure we all needed more financialization of everything.

This can be fairly directly traced to the Harvard Business School in the '80s. I think there's a legitimate axe to grind with them and vulture capitalists they trained. But it seems you're ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater over it. The US needs manufacturing to continue to prosper. Some amount of protectionism toward manufacturing is practiced worldwide, even by China, and can be acceptable here too. And while it seems you're very worried about addressing climate change, and I am too, I think we can work toward that as a nation without abdicating our agency.
by const_cast | 2025-06-21 23:51:46+00:00
DRM can still stick around and be popular. For example, consider an Apple TV. They make the hardware and software, so it can be locked down under the provided rules. Or a console. We might consider devices which are used for streaming or movies to not be general purpose computation devices. Which, historically, they haven't been.

Watching copyrighted stuff on general purpose computers is a very new phenomena, and it's still quite atypical IMO.
by helpfulclippy | 2025-06-21 23:52:56+00:00
This is the first I’ve heard of this so I’m just rolling it around… but I suppose this would make it cost-prohibitive for companies to insist on non-competes unnecessarily.

As the employee, it’s still clearly a bad position for me unless I can find a non-competing job that pays me at least 70% plus whatever pay bump I’d expect for career advancement.
by bob1029 | 2025-06-21 23:53:56+00:00
In the kitchen environment, there are no plastics that can outperform glass in terms of leaching and wear.

Even polycarbonate can't be run through a dishwasher or microwave like glass can. The only use I have for plastic in the kitchen is for blender jars. The shatter resistance is hard to argue with and PC doesn't emit particles when used with things like hard grains and ice.
by jmward01 | 2025-06-21 23:54:30+00:00
This may date me, but it feels like 1999 again where a small startup can disrupt an industry. Not just because of what LLMs can do in terms of delivered product, but because a small team can often turn on a problem so much faster than a big one can. I really hope that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of three to five person companies forming in basements right now ready to challenge the big players again.
by SllX | 2025-06-21 23:54:45+00:00
Small-dollar donors had an outsized impact outside of just Sanders and others on the left, and helped, just as two examples on the right: Donald J. Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The massive infusion of cash from small-dollar donors and politicians playing to their base on TV to boost their fundraising is doing far more to undermine both the Democratic and Republican parties than large donors ever have.
by kolektiv | 2025-06-21 23:55:09+00:00
I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing that much, but I will say: even if you show me something I love, in a way that I appreciate, but you do it in a time or place where I don't want that thing? That's still an imposition. So in a way we agree because time + place + content + style is something that is not possible to get right. There will never be an advert brilliant or relevant enough to make me happy that you showed it to me while skiing in the Norwegian mountains, or while watching my child enjoy their birthday party. Most cases are less extreme, but then most adverts are much worse - the scale will never be tipped the right way.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-06-21 23:55:12+00:00
The "I feel like they didn't deserve that" was about the YPG in Syria, not Israel.

> it can be as simple that there was no more "national security ground" to delay it.

Maybe but what had changed exactly at that point? Without a contextual argument that explains it, I can't help but feel like its a tell that Donald Trump is more friendly to Israel than previous presidents.
by ssl-3 | 2025-06-21 23:55:21+00:00
I've only seen it once.

I was doing some work in a small-ish county jail/sheriff's office in the States. As part of that work, I needed some Internet access.

Because jail (thick, reinforced walls and lots of steel) the cell phone coverage was basically shit -- otherwise I'd have just used my phone like I would normally have done approximately anywhere else.

It was a fun dance: Requesting access via wifi, getting sent a code via SMS, and then going outside, turning off wifi to establish an actually-working network connection, retrieving the code (yay Google Voice), and then going back inside, turning on wifi, entering the code, and actually using it.

There was some other detail (perhaps relating to very short timeouts or re-registration issues or MAC randomization) at some stage of the operation that seemed extra-insulting, but my mind has forgotten whatever it was.

I have no idea what this song and dance was intended to provide, prevent, or enforce.
by manquer | 2025-06-21 23:55:40+00:00
OPs statement should be modified to “ you don’t have to watch free Youtube “,

You can always pay for it and not have any ads .

There shouldn’t be an expectation that a free service should confirm to any standards ? Why should a service be free and of high quality in its free variant ?

If Google refuses to offer a paid version or made it unaffordable then it would be different , but the paid version is pretty affordable with lower pricing in countries with less purchasing power
by bell-cot | 2025-06-21 23:55:47+00:00
Many did...though perhaps only after they'd gained some maturity, and their testosterone levels had fall from the "24/7 beer goggles" level of teenagers.

Not so much anymore.

OTOH: I know a fair number of older women. From their PoV, trying to "date" in the past couple decades or so has also gone a long, long way downhill.
by bevr1337 | 2025-06-21 23:57:31+00:00
Here's a skeptical write-up about the mailers I was referencing. I like this view because it acknowledges human fallacies. For example, that an untargeted ad could feel targeted or that we may exaggerate the amount of ads that feel targeted.

https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-t...
by metalman | 2025-06-21 23:58:09+00:00
ya, but no be riding the glitch train I have a atrong sense that the brain is very much involved in growing the rest of the nervous system......which the "parts" need to function these hypothetical procedures will be hugely complex surgeries that will take a long, realy long time, and there will be complications, so the risk to benifit ratio will only be good in a few scenarios....for which you need a wildly complex and expensive facility to prepare for many years in advance. gets worse, as the timing of procedures may require "parts" that are critical for the....."chasis" to self maintain, then requiring other back up "chasis" gets even worse, as the learning curve is going to be exceptionaly steep, and long, almost certainly meaning that who ever trys first, wont live long enough to benifit. all for what? a new chasis for a worn out brain?
by PollardsRho | 2025-06-21 23:58:40+00:00
If you have many metrics that could possibly be construed as "this was what we were trying to improve", that's many different possibilities for random variation to give you a false positive. If you're explicit at the start of an experiment that you're considering only a single metric a success, it turns any other results you get into "hmm, this is an interesting pattern that merits further exploration" and not "this is a significant result that confirms whatever I thought at the beginning."

It's basically a variation on the multiple comparisons, but sneakier: it's easy to spend an hour going through data and, over that time, test dozens of different hypotheses. At that point, whatever p-value you'd compute for a single comparison isn't relevant, because after that many comparisons you'd expect at least one to have uncorrected p = 0.05 by random chance.
by sircastor | 2025-06-21 23:58:58+00:00
This implies that any employee at Coca Cola knows and has access to the secret formula, which is of course, not true. And even if it were true, there's a substantial difference between a specific, limited piece of information (such as the recipe for Coca Cola) and broad concepts about operating in an industry.

I work in the Robotics industry. While the algorithm for our path planning would be a trade secret, how path planning is pursued is not. It's a fundamental concept in robotics. To extend the metaphor, it would be as if my company thought that any robotics work that involved path planning would violate their IP, because I did path planning work with them. It's nuanced to be sure, but some companies are very aggressive as to prevent you from having mobility in your career. Sometimes in a genuine effort to protect their IP, but also sometimes to reduce your negotiating power or punish you.
by const_cast | 2025-06-21 23:59:17+00:00
> My grandma should not have root on her phone and a lot of younger people as well.

I would agree.

> Making it easy to root phone makes it easy for scammers to ask people to unlock it.

I would also agree, so then: don't make it easy.

> Mobile banking apps refuse to run on rooted phones.

... but they do run on my web browser. On a computer using open-source software without even secure boot enabled. So, it seems to me this is a cop-out by said banks. They shouldn't require client-side absolute trust to run, and evidently they actually, practically, today, do not require that. It's simply a choice they made, presumably out of laziness or greed.
by kolektiv | 2025-06-22 00:01:42+00:00
Yeah, you're right, "adverts" as a catch-all term is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and it's not focused enough. And thank you for a clearly, deeply considered reply!

You raise some interesting points, and I'm probably pretty unusual in finding most of those things even low-grade annoying (I am genuinely slightly irked by producers having influence over store merchandising because I'd rather be free to try and choose products which genuinely suit my needs rather than having my attention nudged by certain products being shoved into my eye line).

Movies are about the only one of those areas where I'd be hesitant, but that's mainly because I'd say yes, Hello Kitty is basically an ad, and Marvel Movies... I'm not sure. I'd say the movies themselves would be worth making financially without the merchandising spinoffs, and so they can be considered a product in themselves (and perhaps also because I've never bought a single item of Marvel merch despite having seen many of the films). But you're right to point out that in many cases the line is blurry. That said, for things like YouTube - it isn't blurry in the slightest, in most cases!
by armada651 | 2025-06-22 00:02:53+00:00
> Most people (especially Americans) have been indoctrinated by society to be unable to interpret any radical or leftist concept in any but the most extreme bad faith way possible.

That is true, there is a concerted effort to control the narrative and define terms that are left vague with the most unfavorable or extreme interpretation. This is possible is because these terms are left so open to interpretation, however the vagueness is not an accident rather it is fully intentional.

The real reason that slogans like "defund the police" and "abolish prisons" are so vaguely defined is because America's two-party system demands "big tent" politics. Both parties need slogans that will unite both extremists and moderates on their side of the political spectrum. The fact that "prison abolishment" can be interpreted as both "fundamental reform" and "all prisoners go free" is a feature, not a bug.

Most politicians will actively avoid giving a solid definition to these slogans, because they know that when they do they will a lose voters. So be aware that adopting vague slogans is to your own detriment too, because the people you think support your position may not actually share your interpretation.
by smarks | 2025-06-22 00:03:25+00:00
This is a very old argument. Xah Lee wrote the linked article around 2008, but previously he had posted "Why we have cons?" on comp.lang.lisp (and comp.lang.scheme) all the way back in early 1998:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/T_Tozq2P53I/m/N...

Lee's post seems more of a question, but to my eye it's a "why X" question that thinly disguises an "X is bad (or ugly, redundant, useless, confusing, counterproductive, unnecessary, etc.)" argument. Essentially though it's the same topic.

The post elicited around 60 responses, among them this one from the late Erik Naggum:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/T_Tozq2P53I/m/g...

which includes the following gem (or turd, depending upon your point of view):

> All in all, the pairs notion is redundant. I hope you understand and appreciate what I have written above so the following does not apply to you anymore. you see, I wrote it all because I _really_ wanted to say that that sentence is the single most ignorant and shallow-minded line that I have ever seen in any programming language newsgroup or forum and I hope _never_ to see anybody display such utter disregard for the brilliance and genius of people who came before them just because they grew up in an age when "simple interface" is sneered and laughed at in favor of "simple implementation" so any dumb fsck can implement it right out of a "for Dummies" book.

From where I sit in 2025, I have nothing to add.
by const_cast | 2025-06-22 00:06:39+00:00
> Trump says many things that nobody actually believes.

I've made this point so many times before but I'll say it again: Trump being either an idiot or a liar is not a valid defense of Trump. Nor is it a "good political strategy".

Also, it's not tough times. I know it doesn't feel that way because Trump is acting as though he requires powers only endowed in times of war, but no, it is not tough times.
by gwern | 2025-06-22 00:08:28+00:00
> I characterized coding agents as camels in RotJD, and that metaphor still has legs. Four of them. But I find it difficult, as a writer, to convey the siren-song allure of coding agents when I'm describing them as a bunch of camels gurgling at me. So they're… baby camels? Regardless, they’re like toddlers, but with proper supervision and food preparation, they're absolute brutes at writing code. I can't bring myself to leave when my brutes are hungry. I've tried, it's a no-go. I have to run a practiced escape plan every night to get my computer closed by 2am. First I get them all spinning at once. Then I leap up, run out of the room, slam the door, jam my fingers in my ears, and sprint away shouting lalalala. It is perhaps not the most refined of plans, and doesn't have a great success rate. My babies need me.

Amdahl's law in action: the economic gain from coding agents is ultimately bottlenecked by the slowest serial component in the system. In this case... Steve Yegge himself.

Which is why the goal is to replace Yegge entirely. Even the perfect coding assistant which makes Yegge 100x more productive is still 100x worse than full replacement and running 10,000 virtual Yegges in parallel. Why settle for 1%?
by conartist6 | 2025-06-22 00:09:00+00:00
He is sure AIs are the solution. That is the theme of all his writing. I'm sure he gets his paycheck for saying so.

The problem then, as he makes clear, is the collapse of everything else. His own self-worth, for example, he finds gone at the moment it's most important to him. In the post he just sounds a little too honest, which is how engineers usually sound when they're burning out -- no mystery considering the draining relationship he describes having to his work.

This is the same contradiction he cannot address elsewhere: is his talent 1000% leveraged because he is an uber-god programmer? Is he addicted to a powerful and expensive drug? Is his involvement in his work so inconsequential that he could just be playing video games? Is AI sheparding the most valuable work in society because it has unlimited potential? Or are these people just leaderboarding to slurp up a limited pool of value while dunking on the people working to expand the boundaries of what is possible in the human world?
by sublinear | 2025-06-22 00:09:26+00:00
I don't know much either, and this is all way before my time, but I'm going to guess that getting sound off the film (if it has it) has got to be one of the reasons.

The other being that just operating a suitable projector as intended is the simplest and most accurate way regarding timing compared to finding or writing software to handle scans. I'd think they'd want to do both.
by throwanem | 2025-06-22 00:09:51+00:00
"Intimidating." I remind you this is a website, where I have publicly disclosed my real identity for years while you remain anonymous.

That is your choice, of course. But this is what I mean about not taking you seriously. No remotely reasonable person could possibly believe anyone competent to participate in Hacker News and be able also to honestly claim to be intimidated by someone taking an impatient tone in mere discourse on the relative merits of programming languages, in a context where I am the one whose identity is known.

Such a transparent lie would ill befit a child of five, and whatever axe you have here to grind, the way you go about it is just embarrassing. Your critique, such as it was, has been submitted, received, and evaluated as ill founded. You have no further business with me.
by sircastor | 2025-06-22 00:10:04+00:00
> Sure, some things (like taking customer lists when you leave a company) are messed up and should be barred

Is it messed up? If you're a salesperson, and you've built the relationships with these customers is their loyalty to you, or to the company that you worked for? I had a personal trainer for a little while and he took all his clients to a new gym when he decided to contract with a different gym.

I don't know the answer to this. But it doesn't seem as clear cut to me.
by explosion-s | 2025-06-22 00:10:45+00:00
You do have a lot of fair points I've been working on the README recently and will work on it a bit more soon, most of my work has gone into the actual code. Currently it's intended for extensions that:

1. Apply to only a few specific sites 2. Their functionality isn't entirely browser API based (this wouldn't make sense even if they're polyfilled) 3. "Could be" userscripts: It's an abstraction layer to make things work, not something to build on top of.

That aside it's pretty powerful and does a really good job on most extensions that meet this criteria. I'll let you know once I'm finished with the README, I'd love to have some feedback on it. It's worth noting there's a draft (totally human written) blog article in docs/article.md
by noodletheworld | 2025-06-22 00:13:01+00:00
There are many resources that will explain this rigorously if you search for the term “p-hacking”.

The TLDR as I understand it is:

All data has patterns. If you look hard enough, you will find something.

How do you tell the difference between random variance and an actual pattern?

It’s simple and rigorously correct to only search the data for a single metric; other methods, eg. Bonferroni correction (divide p by k) exist, but are controversial (1).

Basically, are you a statistician? If not, sticking to the best practices in experimentation means your results are going to be meaningful.

If you see a pattern in another metric, run another experiment.

[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1112991/
by homebrewer | 2025-06-22 00:13:10+00:00
Weblate has been doing that for any number of languages (up to 200 or however many it supports) for many years, using many different sources, including public translation memory reviewed by humans.

It can be plugged into your code forge and fully automated — you push the raw strings and get a PR with every new/modified string translated into every other language supported by your application.

I use its auto-translation feature to prepare quick and dirty translations into five languages, which lets you test right away and saves time for professional translators later — as they have told me.

If anyone is reading this, save yourself the time on AI bullshit and use Weblate — it's a FOSS project.
by darkerside | 2025-06-22 00:13:31+00:00
I get that you are judging me for my perspective or past perspective, and that's your right (please don't deny it, just own it, it's fine).

I don't think it's a cultural barrier. It's how many humans are generally wired. There are so many problems in the world that if you concern yourself with all of them, you'll be mired in inaction anyway. When you don't have time to help homeless people, you ignore them because to do otherwise would make you feel like a bad person. Pretty simple?

Besides, I don't think it's so simple. Yes, there is an element of luck and society, but there's is also an element of personal responsibility. And only one of those is in the control of the "victim", so I still believe it's harmful to encourage that victim mentality, even when there is truth to it.

What is your personal view on the homeless? What do you do when you see homeless people in the streets?
by Spivak | 2025-06-22 00:13:53+00:00
Since it's Apple talking to Apple (and other iOS apps) it doesn't actually have to be MCP and they already have SiriKit. So I mean they already did build it in a weekend. SiriKit has broadly the same features as MCP exposing content (resources) and actions (tools) so their interest in Perplexity has got to be something else.

It's weird that Apple never opened it up to arbitrary tools. I guess until "Apple Intelligence" they couldn't support arbitrary tools.
by ggm | 2025-06-22 00:14:45+00:00
I wonder if the bunker buster was used. It has a somewhat indirect lineage to the ww2 grand slam designed by Barnes Wallis.

Iran has massive earthquake risks. For reasons unassociated with nuclear bunkers they do a lot of research into (fibre, and other) strengthened cement construction. With obvious applications to their nuclear industry of course.

Another unrelated point, a significant number of Iranian civil engineering graduates are women. A somewhat dichotomous economy, when you consider the theocratic restrictions on costume and behaviour.