MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SoftTalker | 2025-06-06 19:07:53+00:00
One rule has worked well for me in all my writing: don't be lazy.

Put some effort into each sentence. Read it back to yourself. If something is clumsy, try rewriting it a few different ways. As Strunk said, "Rewrite and revise. Do not be afraid to seize what you have and cut it to ribbons."

Yes it takes longer, but for most writing, it is worth it. All of the other rules are just advice to consider, and perhaps reject.
by boris | 2025-06-06 19:07:57+00:00
> In other words, hypothetical improvements by AWS (and other Clouds) are extremely overrated.

Interesting, in a recent thread (I think it was about Redis going back open source) an AWS employer was bragging about substantial concurrency optimizations they implemented in Valkey. At the time I thought it could have been a great differentiator to keep proprietary but perhaps they decide to sacrifice it to help make sure Valkey takes over the Redis midshare.
by LocalH | 2025-06-06 19:08:07+00:00
Why should "YouTube" as an entity enjoy freedom of speech? They're a platform for user-generated content. Outside of outright illegal content (which is even tenuous sometimes, I'd like to reserve this for the worst of things), they shouldn't be able to pick and choose which UGC they are willing to allow. They're the modern "town square". They're effectively a monopoly in this day and age (yes, there are other video hosting platforms, but YouTube has the largest share of all by far, and are de facto the place people expect to find video UGC).

Serving video with high availability to millions of people is hard. Few organizations, that aren't already flush with capital, are going to be able to replicate that at any sort of scale.

I'm tired of big corporations using their might to override individual freedom of speech. Once you reach a certain size, you should have to make moderation a more personal thing. Instead of taking videos that aren't illegal in and of themselves down, they should have to empower the user to moderate their own feed. Of course, this is incompatible with the modern drive to use these platforms to push content in front of people, instead of letting them curate their own experience.

I don't have all the answers, but the "corporations = people, and thus corporations have freedom of speech" angle has done a lot of damage to the rights of individuals.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-06-06 19:08:41+00:00
> A decently functioning anti-trust system...

Unfortunately, it's a tall order in the current political environment for the same reason open source funding isn't forthcoming, these are just parts of a bigger problem which is best discussed elsewhere.

With that said, you're absolutely right in your assessment, this is approximately what needs to happen in order to improve the current sorry state of media and public discourse. Sadly, as evidanced by the other replies to your comment, the public at large simply doesn't get it and the situation is even worse with the structural changes needed to make a real solution possible.

It's a vicious cycle that results in ever worse media, and not only media. The current public spat between the two smartest people in the world (by mass media metrics), garnished with public blackmail attempts and private-social media channels, is a jaw dropping proof of dysfunction but ofcourse the media presents it as casual entertainment.
by o11c | 2025-06-06 19:09:04+00:00
The only time I've ever had shell startup time be significant is when loading fancy shell rc stuff (oh-my-zsh is the most infamous but there are many others)

Unfortunately I've hit some obscure bug with exactly when `HISTFILESIZE` is applied, and had some shells truncate all my history undesirably. There are also problems with reading history if the timestamp format changes.
by Lerc | 2025-06-06 19:09:40+00:00
I guess the questions to be asked would be

Will the US economy completely collapse in the next 30 years?

Will the US government completely collapse in the next 30 years.

For the past century I think the answers to those questions would have been, "Almost certainly not" and "Not a chance in hell"

I honestly didn't know where they stand today, but there's definitely been movement.
by bombcar | 2025-06-06 19:09:48+00:00
Almost any group identified from the outside has internal divisions that they insist are incredibly important.

What did the Elves say? “To sheep other sheep no doubt appear different. Or to shepherds. But Mortals have not been our study.”

People can get really prickly about it, for example lumping all people south of the US border as "Hispanic" or calling everyone in the UK "English".
by AStonesThrow | 2025-06-06 19:10:28+00:00
Well thank you for calling this out.

I was originally going to scold the GP for a shallow dismissal and shitting all over a perfectly good application that runs on the best operating system in development today, Microsoft Windows.

But I also have a soft spot in my heart for Linux and I thought I would instead mollify the GP by pointing out that there really is Linux software for his Software-Defined Radio.

Little did I suspect that the GP wants all of the special features that SkyRoof offers, such as hyperencabulation of quasicosmic quantum wave collapse, a genuine pair of cathode ray boobs, and also don't forget the 1.7 jiggawatt zener diode that is included free with every subscription.

Sorry to confuse you!
by carabiner | 2025-06-06 19:10:39+00:00
Related: A New DNA Test Can ID a Suspect's Race, But Police Won't Touch It

> Tony Clayton, a black man and a prosecutor who tried one of the Baton Rouge murder cases, concedes the benefits of the test: "Had it not been for Frudakis, we would still be looking for the white guy in the white pickup." Nevertheless, Clayton says he dislikes anything that implies we don't all "bleed the same blood." He adds, "If I could push a button and make this technology disappear, I would."

https://www.wired.com/2007/12/ps-dna/
by zkmon | 2025-06-06 19:12:15+00:00
Math is not independent of observation. Math sits on logic which itself sprouts from human experience with the world around them. Math and logic are not alien pure forms isolated from this world. There is not even single concept of logic that is not fully tied to the human experience and perception (of the world).

The concepts such as true, false, equal, greater than - all refer to human experience with counting things or perception of existence etc.
by knallfrosch | 2025-06-06 19:12:27+00:00
Nice writeup! You definitely chose a pretty hard way, but the project setup is always the most complex part. Bonus points for immediately running into security/header issues, but my bet would have been CORS.

At $WORK, we're also building with emscripten/C++. We'll add WebGPU/shaders and WebAudio for bonus pain.
by SLHamlet | 2025-06-06 19:12:27+00:00
I've been skeptical about XR headsets for years, but this post makes some really interesting points that I haven't seen discussed much, like:

"While XR devices like VisionPro do re-create home and office setups and allow for vast screen real estate, they lack a true sense of location. Evolution shaped our brains to operate differently depending on whether we’re traveling or at home. Researchers call this the encoding specificity principle—our memories link closely with the environment where they were first formed."

IE, even if the VisionPro wasn't as heavy as a sushi plate, it would still have fundamental problems!
by filmgirlcw | 2025-06-06 19:12:42+00:00
You’d have to check with Microsoft. OpenAI says that this doesn’t apply to customers with a Zero Data Retention endpoint policy, but my recollection is that Azure OpenAI doesn’t fall into that category unless it’s something that is explicitly paid for. That said, OpenAI also says that ChatGPT Enterprise customers aren’t impacted (aside from their standard policies around how long it takes to delete data, which they say is within 30 days), but only Microsoft would know if their API usage counts as “enterprise” or not.
by codedokode | 2025-06-06 19:13:14+00:00
The problem with lsof is that it outputs lot of duplicates, for example:

- it outputs memory-mapped files whose descriptor was closed (with "mem" type)

- for multi-thread processes it repeats every file for every thread

For example my system has 400 000 lines in lsof output and it is really difficult to figure out which of them count against the system-wide limit.
by RobRivera | 2025-06-06 19:13:31+00:00
Yellow bus syndrom in action for me today.

Last week I never heard of Emscripten.

Integrating SDL for a project, there were CMake callouta for APPLE, MSVC, and EMSCRIPTEN.

And here we are seeing it again on hn in a few days.

I should put an afternoon aside for some deep diving on it for context.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-06 19:14:13+00:00
> Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities.

Here's some text from Section 230 of the CDA:

> (c) (2) Civil liability

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

> (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

> (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1)

...

> (e) (1) No effect on criminal law

> Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair the enforcement of section 223 or 231 of this title, chapter 71 (relating to obscenity) or 110 (relating to sexual exploitation of children) of title 18, or any other Federal criminal statute.

Now in this case, you have YouTube, a service with obvious market power, taking down content promoting a competitor to YouTube. There are Federal criminal antitrust statutes.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-06 19:14:48+00:00
> (Other than CIWS, because nothing like that can be used on land.)

Someone should tell the US, UK, Israel, and Australia (all of whom operate the Centurion C-RAM/Land Phalanx Weapon System) [0] that that land-based CIWS system, and any potential similar system, cannot be used on land.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_C-RAM
by LocalH | 2025-06-06 19:15:10+00:00
> Sadly, as evidanced by the other replies to your comment, the public at large simply doesn't get it and the situation is even worse with the structural changes needed to make a real solution possible.

The ones with money and power (which are effectively the same thing) want it to be this way, as it makes them richer and more powerful. The masses are just pawns literally being moved around on the chessboard of society.
by mdaniel | 2025-06-06 19:15:13+00:00
It for sure has an excruciatingly slow UI, but I haven't yet been able to stomach the Ruby magick enough to dig in and find out if it's all of GitLab that's slow, and thus their culture of who-cares just propagates to the UI, or it's literally just the web frontend that's molasses yet because so many folks interact with it over the web that's where the conclusion ends up

I know their backend git proxy is written in golang, their runner agent is written in golang, it spawns CI jobs using containerd, written in golang, and they use postgresql and a redis-esque KV -- although for that part I do believe they're still using Sidekick (ruby) for doing job dispatch, so that one could very easily lolol back into not actioning tasks efficiently

GitHub Actions sure does enjoy just sitting there twiddling its thumbs when I push "run job," and is also both Ruby and their own crazypants ajax-y web framework, so I don't think it's exactly the shining star of performance itself
by sokoloff | 2025-06-06 19:16:22+00:00
Now imagine that a restaurant buys 100 tables, 500 chairs, kitchen equipment, cutlery for 800 people, signage, a security system, and does a remodeling before opening. (Or an airline buys an airplane. Or a hotel chain builds a hotel.)

Should they be able to expense all of those items that provide value for multiple years in a single year?

Does software development provide value exclusively in the year it's done? Or over multiple years?
by deepsun | 2025-06-06 19:16:36+00:00
Interesting, didn't know about farmers. Skydivers are the same, most accidents happen to experienced ones. But it's understandable, as adrenaline wears out with experience.

Pilots typically are trained against that complacency, plus, as they say, everyone can be stupid for 15 minutes a day, plan for that. I found piloting pretty boring, if done right. Talk about soul-crushing.
by btown | 2025-06-06 19:18:08+00:00
That situation was a bug, with a detailed post-mortem: https://openai.com/index/march-20-chatgpt-outage/

It is worth noting of course that per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185913 ChatGPT will now be required by law to retain a record of all chat history for courts and lawyers to review, but at least that data won't be made fully public.

Both of those are different from a willing and intentional dark pattern of making things publicly discoverable!
by ampdepolymerase | 2025-06-06 19:19:09+00:00
The phospholipid micelles are non-trivial (trade secret) to make and it's the major reason why African nations and other countries have not been able to successfully create mRNA vaccines at scale.

A cell is a bundle of proteins wrapped in a membrane that's sort of an oil drop (or as another comment said, a fat bubble). In biology it's called a phospholipid bilayer. Fun fact you can actually "merge" cells together with the help of certain viruses. Drug delivery usually involves moving molecules though this phospholipid bilayer which involves all sorts of tricks. There are pores and receptors on the membrane that can selectively bind to different biochemical molecules and proteins. A good chunk of research in bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, quantum computing is focusing on simulating protein binding dynamics and protein-protein interactions on various levels so we can design drugs that can bind to the receptors we want. (Alphafold made this a lot easier to figure out how to go from a sequence of genetic material to a specific protein shape) A RNA vaccine is kinda like a virus in that it has to be taken into a so the cellular machinery (ribosomes) can build the protein that it codes for. So having a micelle (or nanoparticle, whatever you want to call it) that can get absorbed and merged into the cell that you are targeting specifically is a Big Deal.
by ramoz | 2025-06-06 19:20:16+00:00
I’ve been saying Claude Code feels more like an OS. There is a lot of power with an agent living in the OS and filesystem - vs bound by abstraction in the IDE.

I think this represents the next evolution of general office tooling (prev dominated by MSFT); which is why OAI bought Windsurf.

The future really isn’t about interacting with “agents” so much as it is “intelligent infrastructure.” Skillsets will be emphasized through planning and orchestrating these systems—Wands vs keyboards.
by Retric | 2025-06-06 19:20:56+00:00
I disagree because the information has already been recorded and users don’t have a say in who at the company or some random 3rd party the company sells that data to is “authorized” to view data.

It’s the collection itself that’s the problem not how soon it’s deleted as economically worthless.

> with no guarantees of security, no audits, and few safeguards.

The courts pay far more attention to that stuff than profit maximizing entities like OpenAI.
by ruszki | 2025-06-06 19:21:03+00:00
Hungarians mass migrated about a thousand years ago from the Ural Mountains, several thousands of kms from present Hungary. Germans mass migrated to Hungary hundreds of years ago, especially after Mongols and Turks killed most of the population there. Italians lost their appetite to coriander because the mass migration of Germanic people around and after the fall of Rome.

It was more difficult, but it happened many-many times.
by rayiner | 2025-06-06 19:21:04+00:00
> science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences.

That’s not true. AI can determine race from even from x-rays: https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-a...

> In a recent study, published in Lancet Digital Health, NIH-funded researchers found that AI models could accurately predict self-reported race in several different types of radiographic images—a task not possible for human experts.
by EdwardCoffin | 2025-06-06 19:21:26+00:00
Bruce Dawson says: I like to call this Dawson’s first law of computing: O(n^2) is the sweet spot of badly scaling algorithms: fast enough to make it into production, but slow enough to make things fall down once it gets there.

https://bsky.app/profile/randomascii.bsky.social/post/3lk4c6...
by throwaway29303 | 2025-06-06 19:21:41+00:00
Nothing but we should most definitely progressively tax these systems based on a percentage of the difference between the least efficient model[0] and the most efficient human. (Assuming, of course, that the least efficient model is more efficient than the most efficient human.) Use those funds to retrain people who lost their jobs for the mythical jobs every manager/CEO keeps talking about.

Suppose the most efficient human produces $250k/y worth of labour and the least efficient model produces $1M/y worth of labour. So $1M - $250k = $750k. %1 of $750k = $7.5k. Now multiply that by the number of companies/people who bought these services.

Models are assumed to a) become more efficient and b) be competent on several and different types of jobs.

This would also include robots but those systems aren't yet ripe, IMO. I'd let them marinate a little further before taxing them.

Apply this tax to very large companies that produce/sell these systems.

[0] - This incentivizes companies to keep investing in more efficient and capable models/systems.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-06-06 19:21:41+00:00
So the author is saying, don't buy SaaS, that's vendor lock-in. Instead just go all-in on one platform... like Cloudflare, the one (& only) platform that the SDK he writes works on. Which isn't vendor lock-in? No, wait, everything is vendor lock-in:

No matter what choice you make, it's always going to be vendor-locked in. Switching out something, even if it's open source and self-hosted, means that you're rewriting a lot of code.

That's not what lock-in means. Just having a vendor-specific component or integration, is not the same thing as being locked-in to a vendor or integration.

Locked-in means that switching it out for something else is either A) impossible, or B) would require an investment greater than just sticking with the existing thing.

When you write software in a loosely-coupled, highly-cohesive way, the intersection between different components is designed to not take much work to replace one component or another. The same is true of systems. If the interfaces of those components are simple, and their use is cohesive, it should not be difficult to replace a part. However, if your components are not cohesive, then it will be a huge pain in the ass to replace anything.

So, no, it's not a good idea to choose a platform because "everything is lock-in, so fuck it, i'll lock myself in even more!" As a developer, I can see the appeal, as it means less work for you. But as a business owner, this is a stupid reason to choose a solution. Choose solutions that will support the business and give it flexibility to change over time.
by reissbaker | 2025-06-06 19:21:45+00:00
No, your split argument doesn't make the case you think it does. If groups A, B, and C were once groups A and B (and B split into B and C later), it's true that B and C are likely closely related, but it doesn't mean A and B are more different than A and C.

To put it another way, if we start with groups A and B, and then branch off B' from B, while B and B' are likely similar, that doesn't tell us anything about the relationship between A and B', and it doesn't imply that A and B' are closer than A and B.
by teknominds | 2025-06-06 19:22:03+00:00
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by fpereiro | 2025-06-06 19:22:33+00:00
Hi HN! OP here. Thank you everyone for reading and commenting. Thanks to your feedback I have done the following edits to the post:

- Added a comment on GLP-1 agonists. I wrote the article like it was 2023, not 2025. These drugs now exist and their benefits massively outweigh their drawbacks, particularly for people that really need help. Anything that helps out of the trap, particularly with this effectiveness, should be front and center. Thank you for pointing it out.

- Added a comment on my take on the usefulness of exercise for this process. I don't believe in exercise as a calory burner, but as something you need in order to be strong, fit, flexible and feel better mentally. It supports you in your journey. Exercise in order to burn calories to get lean is counterproductive. It is a thick wall of the mental fat trap.

- I realize that my struggles (and I don't say this lightly) have been a small fraction of what many of you had to go through, or are still going through. I also mentioned this in the article now. For some, it can be ten, a hundred, a thousand times harder than for others to break free from being overweight and be able to regulate their food in a way that is mentally healthy.

- I also added this: "Incidentally, I don't think this is about willpower (this is another parallel with Carr's insight). The decision to change comes from a deeper source. When I was most obsessed about asserting willpower over my eating, I was having the worst time and making bad choices. Getting out involves awareness, work, and a willingness to fail and keep on trying. The authors above say it much better than I can."

Hope again this was helpful for those with like struggles.
by jhanschoo | 2025-06-06 19:23:00+00:00
Africa is the continent on which humanity originated from, and peoples in other continents migrated in waves. So the most insular communities in Africa have had more time to diverge than the most insular communities in other continents.

They are talking with respect to internal diversity I believe.

As an Anglophone you may notice a similar thing in language, and in English you can notice the large diversity in accent in native UK speakers.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-06 19:23:26+00:00
Isn't this literally the content of the article? What you just wrote down is basically this paragraph from TFA:

> And so, on schedule in 2022, the change to Section 174 went into effect. Companies filed their 2022 tax returns under the new rules in early 2023. And suddenly, R&D wasn’t a full, immediate write-off anymore. The tax benefits of salaries for engineers, product and project managers, data scientists, and even some user experience and marketing staff — all of which had previously reduced taxable income in year one — now had to be spread out over five- or 15-year periods.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34627712