MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crazygringo | 2025-06-24 00:18:52+00:00
> I honestly don't get why people like Face ID more (what I currently use)

Because it works for authentication too. My password manager just... automatically authenticates me without me having to tap a thing. It recognizes the login form on the validated domain, it scans my face, it fills in my info. Same as paying with Wallet, I just slide up the credit card I want to use and it scans my face as I hold it against the reader.

And I'm not always pulling the phone out of my pocket, I'm picking it up off the table. I grab it by the edges, I'm not putting my finger on its back.
by quitit | 2025-06-24 00:19:16+00:00
I do understand your position and reasoning, but I'm hoping to explain that you're asking too much of the system. Nothing is going to overcome your personal willpower, if you want to see that site or load that app, there isn't any local technical solution that is going to stop you.

These systems are trivial to defeat, after all you turned them on, you can just as easily turn them off, but that's not the point at all. It's not meant to be an unsurmountable technical wall. The point is to provide you with a moment to actively think about your actions instead of an autopiloting behaviour that lands you on a website or app that you are trying to avoid using. People who use employ these types of "circuit breakers" do so because they find that they frequently find themselves autopiloting to these services. For these people the circuit breaker is their moment to realise "oh hang on I said I don't want to be doing this while I'm working on my project", rather than "oh this is inconvenient, I'll just disable it for the time being".

The stopping power comes from you, not from the crutch.
by maqp | 2025-06-24 00:20:06+00:00
That stalking thing also happens in personal peer networks. For the messaging app to have any relevance, you're going to want most of your peers in and once there's a few hundred people in, there's power to be abused.

University students don't get to run infrastructure of the facility, and at least in my uni, the old beard IT staff members and faculty don't really hang out with the students aside course environments or support groups, so there's a bigger gap. There's also salaries and careers in the line.

But bickering about who's trustworthy is pointless when there's trustless architectures for those situations already.
by jbeninger | 2025-06-24 00:20:14+00:00
What I mean is it would involve cryptographic signing to keep your data in "your network". Your friends can always download and share an image you've posted, of course, but it wouldn't be just stored out in the open somewhere. Content you post could only be unlocked by a key from your network. Threaded discussion could be limited to just a set of friends you choose, and their friends, by limiting the keys you distribute as part of the first post.

So blockchain has some similarities in that it allows a decentralized way of managing communication through cryptographic signing, but the core of blockchain is that it provides a full "chain" of transactions going back to the beginning of time, whereas this idea is less "chainy" and more of a graph, or maybe a bunch of little chains, each originating from your profile
by conradev | 2025-06-24 00:21:32+00:00
Another framing of the same phenomenon:

If the company makes cellphones, the cellphones need to sell. In order for people to buy the cellphone, they first have to want it, and so the cellphone needs to be universally desirable. The company hires a design team on a permanent salaried basis to do exactly this. Accounting really needs the number of phones sold to keep going up every year, so they really need the designers to think of new things that people might desire to include in the phones each year.

This was first done with cars, and that is why car companies also hire design teams on a permanent salaried basis.
by sien | 2025-06-24 00:22:36+00:00
It's global.

Here is something on Australia :

https://theconversation.com/australia-has-way-more-phd-gradu...

Key quotes :

The number of PhD completions has been steadily growing over the past two decades, from about 4,000 to about 10,000 per year.

According to our calculations* based on the information available, the cumulative number of people in Australia with a PhD has increased from about 135,000 in 2016 to about 185,000 in 2021.

The incentives are for Universities to get smart young people to do their work cheaply.

What happens to the graduates afterwards ceases to be the University's problem.

The only strange thing about it is that the smart young people are taking so long to figure it out.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-06-24 00:23:05+00:00
> PhD advisor with industry experience is not a bad idea. They will understand what you need to succeed in industry and have connections.

My industry experience taught me the following things:

- In industry, there exist quite some deep, interesting (e.g. math, programming) problems that (unluckily) many people in academia don't have on their radar. These kinds of problems often don't fit into the "boxes" of academic disciplines.

- People in industry are not interested that you attempt to work on a breakthrough on some of these problems (even in your free time) - even if this would give the company millions or even billions of money. They will instead actively be fighting you if you question anything non-shallow.

So to answer your implicitly stated question what you need to succeed in industry: keep your mouth shut, question nothing, and shut off your intelligence. Otherwise you are considered to be a troublemaker.
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-24 00:23:10+00:00
> Programming isn't like those jobs at all

I'm sure you understand the analogy was about automation and reduction in workforce, and that each of these professions have both commonalities and differences. You should assume good faith and interpret comments on Hacker News in the best reasonable light.

> There's a reason people who are overly attached to code and see their job as "writing code" are pejoratively called "code monkeys."

Strange. My experience is that "code monkeys" don't give a crap about the quality of their code or its impact with regards to the product, which is why they remain programmers and don't move on to roles which incorporate management or product responsibilities. Actually, the people who are "overly attached to code" tend to be computer scientists who are deeply interested in computation and its expression.

> Did CAD kill the engineer? No. It didn't. The idea is ridiculous.

Of course not. It led to a reduction in draftsmen, as now draftsmen can work more quickly and engineers can take on work that used to be done by draftsmen. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics states[0]:

Expected employment decreases will be driven by the use of computer-aided design (CAD) and building information modeling (BIM) technologies. These technologies increase drafter productivity and allow engineers and architects to perform many tasks that used to be done by drafters.

Similarly, the other professions I mentioned were absorbed into higher-level professions. It has been stated many times that the future focus of software engineers will be less about programming and more about product design and management.

I saw this a decade ago at the start of my professional career and from the start have been product and design focused, using code as a tool to get things done. That is not to say that I don't care deeply about computer science, I find coding and product development to each be incredibly creatively rewarding, and I find that a comprehensive understanding of each unlocks an entirely new way to see and act on the world.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/drafter...
by tptacek | 2025-06-24 00:24:18+00:00
Oh, no, not at all. I don't come to HN to reconcile myself to what's happening in politics and foreign relations (possible exception: zoning; I'm a housing activist). I generally feel like in these kinds of discussions, I'm doing things right if neither pole of the argument happening on HN thinks I'm on their side; the only thing I'm sure about is that this stuff is complicated.

Thanks for the detailed response! I could pick at it, but that's not the spirit of where we're at at this point in the thread.

Oh, by the way: Charlie Wilson's War --- the book is much better than the movie.
by protocolture | 2025-06-24 00:24:46+00:00
>I find it really strange how many people are outraged

>This is not to make a judgement about whether or not this should be considered acceptable

A person is outraged because they find it unacceptable. This is beyond terms and conditions, OpenAI is being forced to keep data they want to discard for the user.

I am shocked that you are shocked, that people are taking a position on this when you suggest you dont take a position on this.
by mianos | 2025-06-24 00:25:27+00:00
I was a senior leader for over 3 years and a year past a take-over. I had to give 3 months notice so I worked as hard as I could until way past the end of my last day. There was no exit interview at all. I think most of the new HR no longer even spoke much English.

What it said; I respected my team and wanted to give them the best possible chance so I worked for them. The people above me didn't give a shit. It's all quite funny in hindsight how clear that is. To any of my teams reading this, I love you people, I'll try and get you here when I can. :)
by trevorhinesley | 2025-06-24 00:25:44+00:00
It does have a GIL. You’re not wrong, but by that same logic, there’s pitfalls when using multi-threading as well, even in languages where it’s native (e.g., Elixir).

Regardless, in my experience, when you run into scenarios that need queueing, multi-threading, etc., you need to know what you’re doing.
by rocketvole | 2025-06-24 00:26:03+00:00
If it wasn't obvious, using Box-Office numbers as a catch-all measure of film success hasn't been reasonable since we came out of Covid. Streaming counts are beginning to play a larger role. It's why so many large studios are willing to make Direct-To-Streaming Movies instead of releasing them in theaters- Sony's (well-rated) "Kpop Demon Hunters" is the most recent example to come to mind.
by Apreche | 2025-06-24 00:26:17+00:00
This is a problem in many industries, for example animation.

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/annecy-exposes-...

I’m beginning to think we need to change academia to be driven more by employer demand than by student demand. Stop lying to people, like I was lied to. You probably can’t live your dream. You probably can’t grow up to be what you want. The vast majority of people have to do what society needs.

Let various industries tell the universities what kind of labor force is needed. Then universities should set the numbers of students they accept for those majors accordingly. The time to tell people no is before they spend several years of their lives and a fortune of tuition money in training to do something that will be a dead end.
by gridspy | 2025-06-24 00:28:50+00:00
Underlying this issue is that the judicial system (or the patent system, or the political system) is not populated with enough individuals possessing software engineering "common sense."

It is highly likely that this is not confined to just software, I'm sure other engineering or complex disciplines feel the same way about their discipline.

How do we have experts inform these decisions without falling into the trap of lobbying where the rich control the political and legal sphere?

Anyway, I cede you the point that the US law does not match my "common sense" esp around this 3rd party rule mentioned in other comments. It kind of sucks that US "winning the internet" means that even non-US citizens are subject to US law in this regard.
by sgentle | 2025-06-24 00:29:00+00:00
Pretty much anything – I just bought a random cheap one from Amazon, though you might get better latency for more money. The dongles show up as USB cameras (ie UVC) which is supported since iPadOS 17.

I use the (free) Orion app, but it's basically just a fullscreen camera preview so there are plenty of other options.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-24 00:29:16+00:00
I believe he is remoting into a Unix system to do his actual work. The Unix system can have tmux installed and running on it perfectly fine. I've done this too, to the extreme of SSHing into my own Virtualbox VM just to get that perfect compatibility layer that WSL still can't quite match.

Indeed, this is one of the strongest arguments for tmux versus other approaches to this problem. It can run on the server you're remoted into and still do its job. https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/tmux-is-worse...
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-06-24 00:29:17+00:00
I appreciate your taking the time to reply!

And yeah, I was aware that H700 is the new kid on the block as it pertains to Rocknix. It's just a bit frustrating, especially because (imo) the Anbernic H700 devices are the ones most deeply in need of a solid custom firmware / OS option. The version of Retroarch included in the stock OS is lacking some pretty standard cores (no INTV, no Colecovision, no Speccy, no 3DO, and that's just the "tier 2"s that come to mind, not doing a deep dive into the even-more obscure stuff like the Sharp systems or CDi). And the default Ambernic OS itself is, charitably, "not-great" (why are there two entirely-separate menus to browse games from, why can't I re-scan without rebooting, the list goes on and on and on...)

> What you're describing does sound like a bug, it might be that some flag is set incorrectly.

Yeah, hopefully this isn't intended behavior. :) The ROMs are being samba'd right into the appropriate directories (I tried both "roms-internal" and the third option that isn't "roms-external" - forgot the name and already wiped the card). I can play them fine as long as I don't ever reboot, so it's not like they're just not copying. The themes are downloaded and installed solely through the frontend, I'm not doing anything too obscure or beardy.

It even does this on a fresh install, so the default theme is immediately replaced with the... even-more-default...? theme. That definitely threw me for a loop on the first go-round. The "more-default-than-default" theme actually doesn't look too bad (sort of has a Cosmic Smash [1] vibe), but a lot of text breaks outside the confines of its boxes and it lacks any cursor highlighting in menus, so without screenshots you have no idea which option (or game) you're selecting.

> I would recommend dropping in at the Discord.

I don't use Discord, but I'm happy to file Github issues as long as you think it'd be non-redundant / a productive use of my time. Otherwise, by all means feel free to link my comments in the Discord!

[1] https://imgur.com/a/xQdepbN
by lapcat | 2025-06-24 00:29:32+00:00
> The only strange thing about it is that the smart young people are taking so long to figure it out.

I don't think it's so strange. They're smart in their chosen fields, but intelligence is not wisdom or hard experience. Moreover, intelligence breeds confidence, often overconfidence, the idea that you'll be the one to beat the odds. I suppose the same thing happens to young, talented athletes, for example.
by dietr1ch | 2025-06-24 00:29:46+00:00
You can jump through bastion hosts transparently™ with ~/ssh:you_but_jumping@bastion|ssh:you@remote:path/to/file~ (https://stackoverflow.com/a/16408592)

The thing that I had to fiddle with, was getting ssh and tramp to use the same ControlPath to share sockets because it helped make things smooth if you had setup ssh to use ssh-agent and persist connections already.

But yeah, I get why just giving up on tramp has been easier over the years. Besides connecting there's also annoyances on spotty internet that make avoiding it usually a better experience. I think I haven't relied much on tramp after trying to use it and realising tmux+emacs was overall better at the time, mainly because I could just hop on my workstation to the exact same session I was using once RTO happened. Nowadays I use it mostly for sudo and one off things, but not remote projects with remote compile and lsp anymore.
by fluorinerocket | 2025-06-24 00:29:51+00:00
National Instruments made programming FPGAs accessible to engineers who are not EEs like me via LabVIEW. It was really cool to have loops running at tens of kHz up to 100MHz speeds

It's really too bad that it was locked to NI products and they've kind faded away.

I sometimes like to think of what could have been, if the ability to program FPGAs so easily would have become more popular.
by handfuloflight | 2025-06-24 00:30:15+00:00
Perfect. Can't defend what you actually believe, so now we get the raw bigotry. You just confessed that this whole charade was you 'mocking' rather than making any serious argument. All that pretense about doctrine and scholarship was just cover for your need to spread contempt and hatred. At least you're finally being honest about what kind of pathetic person you are: a coward who hides bigotry behind intellectual theater until cornered.

Bravo! How do the mirrors you look into withstand such a face?
by svachalek | 2025-06-24 00:30:48+00:00
I think you're either imagining the circle too small or overestimating how often humans step outside it. The typical programming job involves lots and lots of work, and yet none of it creating wholly original computer science. Current LLMs can customize well known UI/IO/CRUD/REST patterns with little difficulty, and these make up the vast majority of commercial software development.
by dekhn | 2025-06-24 00:31:10+00:00
I've worked on quite a few large-scale scientific collaborations like this (and also worked on/talked to the lead scientists of LSST) and typically, the end groups that do science aren't the ones handling the massive infrastructure. That typically goes to well-funded sites with great infrastructure who then provide straightforward ways for the smaller science groups to operate on the bits of data they care about.

Here's the canonical example: https://home.cern/science/computing/grid and a lab that didn't have enough horsepower using a different grid: https://osg-htc.org/spotlights/new-frontiers-at-thyme-lab.ht...

Personally, I have pointed the grid folks (I used to work on grid) towards cloud, and many projects like this have a tier 1 in the cloud. The data lives in S3, metadata in some database, and use cloud provider's notification system. The scientists work in adjacent AWS accounts that have access to those systems and can move data pretty quickly.
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-24 00:31:28+00:00
Here is the reality: In large parts of the world, very high quality drinking water is available in large, reusable jars and bottles, for a cheap price which poor people can afford. While the tap water ranges from undrinkable to bad tasting.

Now you might think that it is outrageous that they buy and drink this water, that they don't deserve it and should wait for plumbing or better government water treatment. That they should be denied one of the basics of life in the holy name of hacker efficiency. Do you think they give a fuck about what you think? You are literally arguing to take away people's good drinking water because they live somewhere with lacking infrastructure.

> If someone can figure out to 'very accessibly' deliver bottled water from hundreds of miles away to your home, why wouldn't they be able to 'very accessibly' deliver locally sourced water to your home?

Because locally sourced water is not of the same quality or even drinkable many times. A river or a spring is in a fixed place geographically and not everybody can live on top of it. If you lived an hour or two from a large spring with high quality water, you wouldn't want to drink foul-tasting water from the tap or try to dig a well for some brackish water.

> And if you have to go from your home to a distribution center for those bottles, how is that better than the proverbial village well?

They deliver it to your door and with your permission they will cary the jars into your home and put them wherever you tell them to.
by Analemma_ | 2025-06-24 00:31:55+00:00
Academia will never go for this of its own volition, because "higher education is about learning for its own sake and becoming a more complete individual and citizen" is key to academics' self-conception. They never want to admit to being "mere" vocational training, now matter how clear it is that's what they are and have been for a while. If your proposed change does happen, it will have to be forced on them from without.
by mystified5016 | 2025-06-24 00:31:55+00:00
The entire world's supply of lithium batteries in 2024 was (rounding up) 4TWh.

In 2024, the USA used 30,000TWh.

In December of 2024, we used about 2,500TWh.

The entire planet's production capacity of batteries in 2024 would store enough energy to power the USA for 70 minutes. Being generous, this would occupy 3.5 million cubic meters, or (conveniently) 3.5 empire state buildings. For an hour of electricity.
by ranger_danger | 2025-06-24 00:32:26+00:00
I have not been able to use Discord for years, even when I try hard against my better judgement. It always ends with one of these:

Create new account: all servers stuck in preview mode permanently

Create new account: instantly auto-banned

Create new account: phone-walled immediately

Create new account: banned immediately after providing phone number

Ban appeal: "our automated system is working properly, appeal denied"

Doesn't matter what computer/ISP/OS/browser/etc. I use, the experience is always one of these.
by janalsncm | 2025-06-24 00:32:32+00:00
Jeffrey Wasserstrom made the interesting point on Lex Fridman’s podcast that for political reasons China settled into an equilibrium of building too much while the US settled into one of building too little. In China it’s kickbacks and building with credit and selling homes that don’t exist. In the US it’s NIMBYs and environmentalism and austerity politics and everything bagel liberalism.

My hope is that people who believe government should work make it work better for more of us. In tech we are pretty clearly the beneficiaries of government investment and R&D.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-06-24 00:32:50+00:00
> Doing all the work. Microbes get no respect.

Maybe not in the mainstream?! But for many years people have had jobs specifically trying to get microbes to do useful work for us. [0]

Look up key terms like "directed evolution" in microbial research - which to me sounds like a fancy phrase for "breeding". But when breeding cycles can be measured in minutes across millions of units for something so small we can't see it... it kind of is a different thing so I guess it's fair to differentiate it.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2403585121