MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bruce511 | 2025-06-04 04:20:10+00:00
... whereas for one-time customers you hope they'll switch to a competitor.

I mean, you've been paid, what do you care if they stay or go? In fact "going" is cheaper for you.

The best meta argument for SaaS is that it keeps supplier and customer incentives aligned. I want you to hang around another month so I'm incentivised to keep standards high - to keep improving the offering and support.

By contrast a truly one-time offering means the customer has 0 value after the sale. That money is quickly spent. So there's less money for development or support. I am only interested in new sales so I optimize for that. My incentives are not aligned with existing customers.

Now, context matters. The model has to be correct for the product, the supplier, the consumer. I don't pay SaaS for my text editor, or my OS etc. I also don't need support from those providers. YMMV.
by Mossy9 | 2025-06-04 04:20:11+00:00
I've been birdwatching (birding?) actively for a few years now, but only this year did I start using these sound identifiers. What a boon it's been! I've already spotted over a dozen new species by sound alone, and also learned to identify some of them by myself.

It really has opened up a whole new venue of enjoying this hobby. At least here, machine learning/AI has a clear, positive impact.
by photonthug | 2025-06-04 04:20:42+00:00
My perspective as someone who’s done some of both.. regardless of working conditions, doing “janitorial” work is rewarding in that it is, um, real work.

What I mean is that it’s really easy to have a multi decade career in tech and look back, realizing that not only is none of the code you worked on still running anywhere, but none of the companies even exist. Frustrating on some level, even if you managed to avoid directly contributing to society’s problems.

Emt can be horrible on many days but saving a life lasts, well a lifetime roughly, more if the person has kids. But shit, even painting a fence is more of a “legacy” than most of the code that most people will write professionally. even more if you’re a land scaper. If someone removes the fence or the tree, there is a decent chance it was done for a better reason than resume-driven development, sketchy m+a to manipulate stock prices, etc.

Janitorial work is not necessarily intellectually stimulating though, knowledge work is not necessarily meaningful. Ideally every life would have some time and space for both, and if that were possible I think society as whole would also benefit.
by theamk | 2025-06-04 04:21:06+00:00
There is always a need for very good engineers, and you never know when one will come up.

As other posters said, if you get a bad hire (or even mediocre hire), it might be total negative - both because of negative contributions, but also because maybe the management only gave you one spot, and now you've given it to mediocre person, you no longer have a chance to giving to someone better.

Back when I was at a startup, we've were looking for the new people basically constantly. Very few people applied however (we were C++, not web, and in the constrained system...) and even fewer people passed, so we ended up with 1-2 people per year total.
by okayishdefaults | 2025-06-04 04:22:08+00:00
This is hacker news, and so I mean this earnestly

Why though? Because they have little to no ability to understand the consequences of their actions?

ot: have you ever looked into what the proper nomenclature is for dog breeds? None! They have subspecies based on vibes. Species is a human construct, one that doesn't even serve us in our second most familiar of categories. It seems difficult to double down based on a "science" of naming things.
by turtletontine | 2025-06-04 04:22:55+00:00
Google gets no competitive advantage from removing third party cookies from chrome. The anticompetitive monopolistic tactic was the plan to replace third party cookies with FLoC/Privacy Sandbox/Topics AI, and THAT is what they were not prevented from doing.

No one is trying to stop google from removing third party cookies. Google is just unwilling to remove them without introducing a new anticompetitive tracking tool to replace them.
by casenmgreen | 2025-06-04 04:24:44+00:00
I'm not sure I understand the method.

Is it correct that the study looked at the effect of a single (large) dose of ketones, rather than ongoing consumption?

As I understand it, dosage was 0.395g per kilo of body weight (so about 27g for 70kg subject), and that was it - with measurements of brain activity before and after.

No indication of duration of effect?

I Googled and have found a product on Amazon, which is asking about 30 USD for that dose, which would make daily 900 USD a month (!)
by Aurornis | 2025-06-04 04:25:33+00:00
> and the assertion that making your team feel good is not close to if not the top priority in the list of managerial duties.

I think the implication was that making the team feel good shouldn't come at the expense of communicating the truth.

This is a real problem I've had with some managers in the past: They try so hard to keep everyone happy that they're afraid to have difficult conversations. They soften negative feedback so much that the point is lost. They might even open themselves up to being manipulated by employees who learn how to leverage their desire to keep the team happy and use it against them.

Obviously it's not supposed to be like that, but it's a common pitfall for first-time managers especially.
by fsckboy | 2025-06-04 04:26:01+00:00
i went to read the page

then i went to read the comments here, current count 65

i don't get a sense that the people interested in this topic agree on anything, except "it's of some, but not too much, importance"

i do, however, get a sense that the people interested in this are in a distinct minority. i am always happy when a distinct minority gets their day in the sun and I get to learn about them.
by patcon | 2025-06-04 04:27:00+00:00
I think it is a shame that such a negative comment is at the top.

In fact, I am ashamed by association. Their burn rate is low (~$30,000/year now, though likely higher before) and the value they generate for everyone else has clearly been very high, even just in intangibles. They sound like a public good, and you hang them out to dry for not being... a profitable corporation? Is there an alternate universe where you toss libraries under the bus as well, when they fail to pay their way like bookstores? (I'm curious if anyone has feelings, why or why not this is a reasonable comparison for me to make.)

You (and those voting/speaking to your worldview) are likely materially collapsing something from existing through creating a narrative here. Which is meaningful because this community is likely one that could step up -- with a deep understanding of open source, and wealth through tech associations and profits.

Is your take worth that? Sink or swim, creators and gift-givers? Is PP universally bad enough that you wish for that to be your contribution here?
by sethaurus | 2025-06-04 04:27:39+00:00
Yes, preventing the app from running in the background (entirely) would prevent it from listening on a port and collaborating with websites via this exploit.

As for the second part: no, logging out of the apps would not necessarily be enough. The apps can still link all the different web sessions together for surveillance purposes, whether or not they are also linked to an account within the app. Meta famously maintains "shadow profiles" of data not (yet) associated with a user of the service. Plus, the apps can trivially remember who was last logged in.
by mediumsmart | 2025-06-04 04:27:51+00:00
Art is unique and made directly. You can record and photograph it. Creating the recording or the scan of the photograph with the computer is direct digital cloning. A source file and no originals.

That being said you can make a print on canvas and take a brush to add some unique strokes or play the recording and strum along on a guitar.

or you can automate the direct digital cloning and ask the computer for something original.
by theamk | 2025-06-04 04:28:17+00:00
> The customer logs in to the billing interface ( which remains active for allowing users to update their CC in case of problems), he adds in his CC again AND pays the last invoice again. Then the next day he does a second chargeback.

Sounds like in case of chargeback, you should lock out customer account until they contact support. If this was an honest mistake - then unlock is one email away. If it's not, you are not messing up your chargeback rate.
by neerajmenonc | 2025-06-04 04:28:26+00:00
Location: Kochi, Kerala, India

Remote: Remote Only

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Android, Java, Kotlin, JetPack Compose, React Native, ReactJS, NextJS

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vjfbZCGQuG1C3yO2ser8D35N-Xb...

Email: neerajmenonc@gmail.com
by andrewflnr | 2025-06-04 04:28:45+00:00
The closer analogy there is if someone used ChatGPT despite everyone telling them to use Claude, and declared that LLMs suck. This is closer to the mistake people actually make.

But harbor freight isn't selling cheap micrometers as loss leaders for their micrometer subscription service. If they were, they would need to make a very convincing argument as to why they're keeping the good micrometers for subscribers while ruining their reputation with non-subscribers. Wouldn't you say?
by gcr | 2025-06-04 04:29:07+00:00
This library has some pretty bad security bugs. For example, the author forgot to check that redirect_uri — matches one of the URLs listed during client registration.

The CVE is uncharacteristically scornful: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2025-4143

I’m glad this was patched, but it is a bit worrying for something “not vibe coded” tbh
by petesergeant | 2025-06-04 04:29:16+00:00
I don't think you can use one of the world's most historically successful entrepreneurs to make this point.

> But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
by dahart | 2025-06-04 04:29:16+00:00
Why do you call it computer created, when you wrote the software? You’re giving away credit that is entirely yours, to a tool that doesn’t make any art without you. Your computer didn’t decide to make pictures of procedural gas giants, right? It doesn’t even pick the good ones from the boring ones. That’s all you.

You picked the subject matter and setup the camera and shading. You designed the software UI. You decided what level of control you wanted, and you can add more control if you want. I understand you’re using procedural rules and randomness, but that was your intention, and so the story that you don’t have control and don’t know what it’ll look like when run seems to me contrived at some level.

One of my main digital art projects centers on artificial evolution, which is notoriously difficult to control; I am deeply, intimately familiar with what you’re talking about, and I still say emphatically the computer is not the artist, I am, especially when I write the software. In a digital art project, the software is part of the art. You’re framing your control in terms of what happens only between starting up the software you wrote and getting one output image, but for some reason leaving out all the control and intention you exercised writing the software and deciding what kind of procedural pictures you wanted.

There’s a whole category of art called “generative art” that isn’t about computers specifically, but started long before computers existed, and is about setting up and releasing a system of rules, whether physical or logical. Generative art relies on some level of randomness, and the resulting artifact is rarely predictable. And yet, it is still deterministic. The rules might be complex, but the only intention comes from the humans involved who establish the rules, and then let them execute, and hold up the output as art.

Noticing the machine does the labor isn’t very relevant, IMO. Cars do a ton of complex work while driving with only vague directions, but we don’t anthropomorphize them, not seriously anyway. Knitting machines do all the complex work making clothes, but clothing designers don’t talk about collaboration with the machine, nor give design credit to the machine. Printers and copiers are very complex, but nobody waxes philosophical about them being collaborators. Just because an image might come out different every time a program runs that was designed to produce a different image every time it runs doesn’t make the machine an artist, it only shows that the computer is a useful, powerful, and reliable machine.
by peeters | 2025-06-04 04:29:24+00:00
> I think we could solve that problem by removing Jupiter. If we drop it into the Sun, we can gain all of its orbital energy in the process.

How did you come up with dropping Jupiter into the sun being a net energy producing operation? You have to cancel out around 10^35 J of kinetic energy to drop it from its orbit, and that is real work. How do you get that 10^35 J back? (Ignoring that from your own math, that E35J is around 100,000 years of the sun's total energy output).
by mousethatroared | 2025-06-04 04:29:24+00:00
Not really, the computer's criterion to reverse the singularity was already dropping. If anything they saved the thousands of trillions more who would have been born had they not hastened the process.

And the book specifically highlights the futile fight against entropy. Eventually human population growth, already in the trillions, would become too large to manage causing the crash.

Finally, their arguments were sound. All humans would enter into despair - either consuming boundless soma or forever playing the death game.

The only two people who survive are the only ones who in five hundred years refused to surrender anything to the machine. Lawrence by his tireless job and the woman by refusing anything that wasn't real.
by quantadev | 2025-06-04 04:30:13+00:00
Having a happy team is a sub-goal of the higher goal of 'accomplishing the task' (getting the work done), because sure it's nice for people to get along, and they're generally better performers when they're happy; but conversely if they get the job done while not getting along, then the higher objective is still attained, which is often the case.

In other words, if a manager's choice comes down to 1) happy people v.s. 2) replacing whoever it takes to get the job done, with or without happiness, then #2 must be done. So 'getting the work done' is the top objective, and everything else is secondary and subordinate to that. An employer's job isn't to run a social club, it's to produce results.
by 0manrho | 2025-06-04 04:31:02+00:00
If the point you're trying to make is "No, because some recycling is done as advertised, and therefore recycling in general isn't a scam" then agreed, but that's not what was asked. The question you responded "No" to was "Did 'Big Oil' Sell Us on a Recycling Scam".

The objectively correct answer is yes. Some entities running a recycling scam does not mean that all recycling is a scam. Doesn't even mean all plastic recycling is a scam. But all the same, a scam is being run to charge people for a service that isn't being performed as advertised, knowingly and intentionally and in a significant way.

> Just as a company promising to use solar energy and not doing so doesn't discredit solar energy.

Just because someone successfully dupes people with a scam doesn't suddenly make it not a scam, just as people acquiescing to the hypernormalization of enshittification in the real for lack of a sense of agency in the face of megacorps with megabucks and congress in their back pocket does not mean that what people are apathetic towards isn't a problem or that there aren't people justifiably upset about it.

There are second order discussion points on this topic that you're trying to dig at that are worth discussing, but it's hard to engage in those in good faith when your answer to the fundamental question "Do you think this scam that is objectively a scam, is a scam?" is "No."
by procinct | 2025-06-04 04:31:38+00:00
Can it really be called an expression of yourself when you don’t write the lyrics or have any musical input on the song? This sounds more like having an idea for a song rather than an actual expression of yourself.

Would you still call it an expression of yourself if you paid an artist to write a song for you around an idea you had? I don’t think most people would generally refer to it as “expressing themselves” when they commission another artist.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-04 04:32:06+00:00
Indeed, unfortunately when it comes to children/babies everyone is busybodies and seems to think they can act on behalf of the child in their interest and trump the actual parents. The biggest actor in the US in this capacity is CPS themselves, who investigate and take black children at far higher rates than the others races, believing they can stomp on black parents to implement their idea of bettering the outcome of babies to closer match that of white ones.

I hope someday society can see your plan of less interventionism is the more correct one.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-06-04 04:33:03+00:00
Please look at a chart of per-MWhr generation costs. Wind and solar are a fraction of the cost of nuclear (with solar plunging by the day, almost) and nuclear is only getting more expensive as time goes on despite being a decade or two away from being a 100 year old technology.

In the US nuclear plants are being phased out and wind/solar projects are replacing them at a ratio of roughly 6:1...with huge savings for grid operators and customers. It's so cheap, even with storage system costs it's still cheaper.

That's where utilities are focused: expanding energy storage and better transmission grid infrastructure. Those, and renewable energy, increase grid reliability.
by neilv | 2025-06-04 04:35:12+00:00
If you're someone who tends to be candid, and maybe empathetic, it helps to think through this in advance, and to set expectations in advance.

My current thinking about established companies (flat early startup might be different):

In a superior position on the org chart, your people should know that you'll be capable, honest, trustworthy, and fair, and also that you'll look out for them in some ways, but also that it's often your job to be diplomatic, as part of helping the company work together well.

So, even if you secretly agree with a subordinate that you don't understand what the CEO is doing, or that an adjacent team keeps dropping the ball, you have to be diplomatic.

And hopefully the person already knows that, since literally saying "I have to be diplomatic on this" in the moment probably wouldn't come across right.

You can be informed by, and work with, that concern, and you can convey that you're taking their concerns seriously, but probably don't commiserate.

Maybe one way to think of it (just thought of this one): It's duty of the manager to be more diplomatic, so that subordinates can be more candid within the team. This is another way that a manager can be a bit like helpful insulation.

Having diplomacy as SOP can also help when it's not yet clear that the person is correct in an interpretation. It's still a concern to be looked into, but there's no expectation for you to commiserate.

Of course, if a subordinate is going through a difficult personal/family event, you can express genuine sympathy (while you're also being practically supportive) -- that's not commiserating.
by speakfreely | 2025-06-04 04:38:34+00:00
> I give odds of seeing the end of humanity in my lifetime at around 50%.

This is not well-reasoned.

Climate change, even in its most hysterical worst case scenarios, could make large areas of the planet uninhabitable, and cause massive migrations, wars, and famines. But it won't kill everyone.

Forever chemicals, even if you believe they're responsible for reduced fertility, haven't sterilized humans. We're not in the Handmaid's Tale yet, and if we were, it's pretty clear there would be resulting cultural shifts to address fertility.

Nuclear annihilation is not possible with current arsenal levels. You would need millions of high yield detonations to accumulate lethal levels of radiation planet wide. Nobody has that many nukes. There's enough to make large areas uninhabitable, but it won't kill everyone. Nuclear winter could cause famines, but isolated groups can use existing technology for indoor farming.

There are some things that could kill us off entirely (asteroid), but none of the things you mentioned are going to do it.
by natpalmer1776 | 2025-06-04 04:42:37+00:00
A follow up question(s) that occurs to me are: “Do neurons die?”

What is the lifecycle of a neuron? Does it get replaced? Will a neuron, whose connections to the broader brain decayed or otherwise went away, continue to “live”?

I’ll go ask ChatGPT, but spare this rigorous community the unreliable answers to my passive interest.
by lilerjee | 2025-06-04 04:44:37+00:00
- Change work environment

Close unused apps Focus on the current work, and open the useful apps for it only

- Change the environment completely

Go outside for a walk Ride a bike Go to a quiet place, e.g. Library

- Improve your workflow

Thinking (at least the rough outline and flow) is the first before any work. If you have a clear overview of your work, you know how to do it and what work to do, and your mind will focus on them. Thinking while walking, riding, etc. Write the results of your thinking
by nine_k | 2025-06-04 04:44:52+00:00
If only there'd be an automatic handler that was invoked every time `?` hits a None, and transformed the error to a richer one, using the context of the entire function. Something like... and exception handler :)

Java and Python use stacks of exception handlers that catch and re-throw exceptions, chaining them and adorning with contextual information. It works very well: you get a stack trace, and a number of human-oriented messages with relevant context.

Unfortunately, the whole idea of walking up the stack and looking for an exception handler crumbles down once you touch async calls, as evidenced by JS/TS and C#'s LINQ. It's almost as if you want to pass a context object to any fallible function, to be logged if an error happens. It's very similar to passing other context, like the `this` pointer in OOP, or implicits in Scala (uhg!). Lifetime of such an object is also going to be an interesting problem, because you likely don't want to copy it all the time, so it must be mutable.
by tptacek | 2025-06-04 04:45:34+00:00
First, when we're talking about imaging overuse we're generally talking about injuries and back/joint paint.

But it's also probably not true that we screen less aggressively than Europe. For instance, I think we start breast cancer screening earlier than Europe. There are European countries with better rates of colorectal screening, but that's a patient compliance issue as much as anything else (and 10 years from now standard of care is unlikely to be imaging-based for that screening for most pts).
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-06-04 04:45:40+00:00
I won Merlin once. I didn't know you could win the game, but I was relaxing in my backyard and suddenly it notified me that I had found the merlin. I was so excited. I hadn't known that a merlin was a kind of bird.

I do wonder how accurate Merlin is. I certainly can't tell the bird calls apart, and I don't usually spot the bird in question, so it could just be lying to me half the time, and I'd probably never notice. But I sure do love the app as an amateur bird-liker.
by masklinn | 2025-06-04 04:45:53+00:00
> That "special cases reassignment" where ':=' is sometimes a shadowing declaration and sometimes a reassignment sounds like the opposite of that.

FWIW it is never a shadowing declaration. It is at least one non-shadowing declaration plus any number of reassignments.

The fun part is the tendency to keep reassigning to `err` makes the unused variable largely useless, so it’s just there to be a pain in the ass, and your need a separate lint anyway.