MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyberax | 2025-06-19 20:12:45+00:00
Carnivorous plants certainly don't mind extra phosphorus, but it's usually not limiting.

> I don't think this is very correct, but why do these biological means fail in bogs/swamps?

They don't. Moreover, the anoxic environment of swamps actually promotes the nitrogenase activity. However, the constant presence of water also diffuses the nutrients, and denitrifying bacteria use ammonia as an energy source. In oxygenated environments, they are typically outcompeted by regular air-breathing bacteria.

This happens in regular soil, but it's normally not saturated with water, so nutrients are not constantly washed out.

> All other plants in the swamp need nitrogen to grow, too, how are they doing?

Not very well. Swamps are not very productive biologically. There is _some_ nitrogen available, it's just that its equilibrium concentration is much lower.
by JohnMakin | 2025-06-19 20:12:50+00:00
> Any asshole can build an org where the most experienced, brilliant engineers in the world can build product and make progress. That is not hard. And putting all the spotlight on individual ability has a way of letting your leaders off the hook for doing their jobs. It is a HUGE competitive advantage if you can build sociotechnical systems where less experienced engineers can convert their effort and energy into product and business momentum.

This hits close to home for me recently. I don't profess to be a 10x engineer, but I found myself on a team with a few people with much less experience and competence than I am normally accustomed to. I started getting every single ticket with any kind of complexity, because I could get it done, and some people on my team couldn't. I could have continued this way, contributing a massive percentage of the output and claimed to be superior to everyone - but the reality is, for me anyway, this is exhausting (and feels really unfair). Plus I am a little lazy (as I believe all good sysadmins/sre's/ops guys are). I want my team to help me. So what I did was work extra for a few weeks and wrote a ton of abstractions over the most complex stuff we do (I dont write software, I write IAC, I'm aware this is a common pattern in software engineering) so that the less knowledgeable engineers could do the work I'd been doing much of. It freed my time up to work on more interesting problems. This was the first time in my career I had to do this without anyone already ordering me to.

I've been on teams where there was someone like me and everyone else was running around behind them frantically trying to keep up or cleaning up the inevitable tech debt that accumulates. It's miserable and really inefficient.
by skydhash | 2025-06-19 20:13:47+00:00
ML is basically greedy determinism. If we can’t get the correct answer, we try to get one that is most likely wrong, but give us enough information that we can make a decision. So the answer is not useful, but its nature is.

If we take object detection in computer vision, the detection by itself is not accurate, but it helps with resources management. instead of expensive continuous monitoring, we now have something cheaper which moves the expensive part to be discrete.

But something deterministic would be always more preferable because you only needs to do verification once.
by leeter | 2025-06-19 20:15:01+00:00
I did see that and for people that need that specific functionality it seemed like a good solution.

My goal was more "What if DOS hadn't ended and but kept up support for modern hardware" along with emulation of common things in DOS gaming. So for example you would be able to set up a PIV that mapped certain resources directly or emulated them depending on the need.

Could I use DOSBox for this... yes, but this is a "why not" sort of thing. I figured it would be a good excuse to learn OS dev. But life has kept me busy for now.
by jl6 | 2025-06-19 20:15:08+00:00
Health insurance companies could sequence every random bit of DNA in a given area, and then raise premiums in zip codes with higher than average rates of congenital disease. Of course, that would be totally unethical and illegal, so they’d just buy a set of risk data from a reputable company that worked out their risk scores somehow (how? Who knows? Best not to ask).
by nine_k | 2025-06-19 20:15:14+00:00
TLS internally does not depend on a domain in the DNS sense, it basically certifies a chain of signatures bound to a name. That chain can be verified, starting from the root servers.

The problem is more in the fact that TLS assumes creation of a long-living connection with an ephemeral key pair, while DNS is usually a one-shot interaction.

Encrypting DNS would require caching of such key pairs for some time, and refreshing them regularly but not too often. Same for querying and verifying certificates.
by sfblah | 2025-06-19 20:15:50+00:00
The problem with effective altruism is the same as that with most liberal (in the American sense) causes. Namely, they ignore second-order effects and essentially don't believe in the invisible hand of the market.

So, they herald the benefits of something like giving mosquito nets to a group of people in Africa, without considering what happens a year later, whether the nets even get there (or the money is stolen), etc. etc. The reality is that essentially all improvements to human life over the past 500 years have been due to technological innovation, not direct charitable intervention. The reason is simple: technological impacts are exponential, while charity is, at best, linear.

The Covid absolutists had exactly the same problem with their thinking: almost no interventions sort of full isolation can fight back against an exponentially increasing threat.

And this is all neglecting economic substitution effects. What if the people to whom you gave mosquito nets would have bought them themselves, but instead they chose to spend their money some other way because of your charity? And, what if that other expenditure type was actually worse?

And this is before you come to the issue that Subsaharan Africa is already overpopulated. I've argued this point several times with ChatGPT o3. Once you get through its woke programming, you come to the reality of the thing: The European migration crisis is the result of liberal interventions to keep people alive.

There is no free lunch.
by companymatches | 2025-06-19 20:15:57+00:00
Hey HN, owner of the companymatches.com here

We weren’t quite expecting this much love… We just exceeded our free egress limit today (and this post contributes to a big portion for sure)

If things start acting weird, that’s why. Thanks for the interest — and the brutally honest feedback.

Feel free to keep voting on the site. And let us know what you'd like to see next.
by 1propionyl | 2025-06-19 20:16:48+00:00
They can call themselves empiricists all they like, it only takes a few exposures to their number to come away with a firm conviction (or, let's say, updated prior?) that they are not.

First-principles reasoning and the selection of convenient priors are consistently preferenced over the slow, grinding work of iterative empiricism and the humility to commit to observation before making overly broad theoretical claims.

The former let you seem right about something right now. The latter more often than not lead you to discover you are wrong (in interesting ways) much later on.
by leakycap | 2025-06-19 20:17:09+00:00
I was referring to the extent of brightness variation in the flicker -- while many focus on a higher frequency (Hz) to reduce eyestrain, the key factor is how the screen behaves during the off cycle

Some PWM implementations ramp the brightness up and down slightly (easier on eyes), while other manufacturers flip the switch on and off harshly (like strobing)

The shorter time the screen is dark between being lit up results in a a shorter pulse duration, and the pulse duration and depth are more important than the Hz
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-06-19 20:17:17+00:00
>...way easier, scalable, way more accurate ways to invade your privacy that are already proven to work...

That aren't detectable? That you can't easily take precautions against?

If sequencing were cheap then it would be a hidden way to check who was at a venue - better than gait (or other biometric) analysis from video.

For some uses this seems like a revolutionary monitoring technique.
by jauco | 2025-06-19 20:17:25+00:00
Always had the conceptual model that terraform executes something that resembles a merge using a three way diff.

There’s the state file (base commit, what the system looked like the last time terraform succesfully executed). The current system (the main branch, which might have changed since you “branched off”) and the terraform files (your branch)

Running terraform then merges your branch into main.

Now that I’m writing this down, I realize I never really checked if this is accurate, tf apply works regardless of course.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-06-19 20:18:18+00:00
> But I have to wonder: if "any asshole" can build orgs like that, why don't they?

Other posters have said money, but it’s also a function of time—how long can a company afford to wait to find the perfect “unicorn” engineer who excels in every aspect of the product but may take a long time to hire, versus hiring someone whose expertise only covers some of the product’s needs but can be found immediately?

Certain companies benefit disproportionately from unicorns, especially those in interdisciplinary fields. For instance, in quantitative finance, a single individual who’s an excellent 1. systems programmer, 2. mathematician, and 3. financial market expert will contribute a lot more than a team of three specialists in each of those domains. But it’s a lot faster to hire that team of three versus finding the rare individual who can supplant a whole team. This is also true in less exotic fields—it’s rare to find someone who’s truly a “full stack” web developer, with a deep understanding of networking protocols and Linux system administration and (cloud based) distributed systems and databases and caching services and frontend development & cetera. But the company that can afford the money and time to find these people will make a much better product than the company that cannot.

(Whether the product actually needs the quality commensurate with all that engineering firepower is an entirely other question.)
by JohnFen | 2025-06-19 20:18:26+00:00
> You phrase this significantly based on what youve seen.

As do we all.

> countless new solar and wind setups.

I'm speaking about nationalizing existing things, not about new things.

> worth a trillion gdp a year

What they're worth monetarily isn't really relevant to the discussion.

> If you want the "best" medical help in the world, you go to the usa.

If you're wealthy, yes. If you're not, the US isn't a great place to get medical care.

> What you call "utterly disasterous"

What I call "utterly disastrous" is that people die because they can't afford to get adequate health care.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-06-19 20:19:19+00:00
I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu, though.

One of the biggest faults of Linux is we don't have an easy, user friendly, idiot proof distro for normies, but Ubuntu is just broken corporate slop.

When I was wearing the various "save users from themselves" hats in my previous life, Ubuntu users were 100% the bane of my existence... since they were all server customers, the ones that took my advice and let me help them switch over to Debian suddenly stopped being frequent footgun fliers, no matter what their original issue was.

Ubuntu, to me, is simply Debian that has been aggressively turned into enterprise slop.
by sofixa | 2025-06-19 20:19:28+00:00
> the Dems campaign funds were 3 times the Republicans at the last election so the corporate donors were very much on their side.

I'm not going to fact check that because it's probably wrong, but regardless, it doesn't matter.

Trump literally appointed a billionaire to be a minister of his, after said billionaire spent hundreds of millions on his campaign. Same billionaire also has government contracts, was in charge of "optimising" government spending. Oh and he runs a social media with blatant censorship. Trump had a coronation event where billionaires had to donate big sums of money to be able to attend. He launched shitcoins and collectibles and a fucking mobile phone.

Nothing any recent politician in any western country has done comes even close to this level of brazen corruption. Hell, well known corrupt autocrats like Putin are more delicate in public about their corruption.

> And the corruption within USAID was off the charts..billions of dollars shovelled out the door to Democrat friends

Like preventing HIV from being transmitted to babies in Africa? Darn Democratic HIV infected babies!
by closeparen | 2025-06-19 20:19:39+00:00
We have a pretty strong culture of individual ownership, but each owner has at least one other person reviewing their PRs, usually several junior engineers contributing, design review at the team level, and oncall at the team level.

When the owner is away, the other people involved keep things moving. If they're away long-term or leave the company, we'll designate someone else to take ownership.
by johnfn | 2025-06-19 20:20:56+00:00
HN judges rationality quite severely. I mean, look at this thread about Mr. Beast[1], who it's safe to say is a controversial figure, and notice how all the top comments are all pretty charitable. It's pretty funny to take the conversation there and then compare the comments to this article.

Scott Aaronson - in theory someone HN should be a huge fan of, from all reports a super nice and extremely intelligent guy who knows a staggering amount about quantum mechanics - says he likes rationality, and gets less charity than Mr. Beast. Huh?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-06-19 20:21:30+00:00
> they're not a scam.

Nobody explicitly said it was a scam, just that the claims are questionable and unverified. There's certainly no shortage of people on the internet who claim to have a get-rich-quicker-than-average scheme with claims exactly along these lines. Obviously those claims should be verified.

> I recommend just looking at their website.

A random website can't be trusted as an unbiased source about itself. I did check their website, but couldn't find anything there regarding your claims that was independently verified.

> [Chris has] consistently outperformed buy & hold [for 10+ years].

This is literally one of the most common hook/marketing lines from investment advice "businesses"/scammers.

---> Where did you learn this? <---

---> How do you know it is true? <---

^--- These questions should be answered if one wishes to avoid scams, just as a general life rule.

> They've been in business for nearly 20y

If Chris has been in business for 20 years, and Chris' strategy has worked for 10 of those years, that means Chris' strategy works 50% the time.

Thus, even if the claims of beating the market for 10 out of 20 years were true, that could be easily explained by random chance.
by alexandre_m | 2025-06-19 20:21:36+00:00
> When your teams are used to operating with a mix of genders, racial backgrounds, identities, age ranges, family statuses, geographical locations, skill sets, etc — when this is just table stakes, standard operating procedure — you’re better equipped to roll with it when life happens.

Resilience doesn’t come from having a “diverse” team on its own. What a shallow take.

True resilience comes from mature teams with strong processes, clarity of roles, and the ability to adapt and recover effectively.
by frollogaston | 2025-06-19 20:21:47+00:00
Honestly I like Debian more than Ubuntu too, but the problem is that just as many people might say Debian sucks and you need to use LinuxMint or something. Even more confusing and frustrating is the "it depends on your use case" thing, as if 99.99% of PC users aren't all trying to do the same basic things (server is different, but even then, 90%?).

There has to be some acceptable default that doesn't change too much, even if it's not the best thing ever. Ubuntu changed DEs twice even though the original was fine. Windows UI is intentionally bad at this point, but at least it's stable.
by pathartl | 2025-06-19 20:22:08+00:00
Is a lack of programmable dolls really the things that's keeping women out of the tech sector? I don't see how this will "fix the gender gap". I have a friend with daughters that hosts a LEGO league team and it sounds like they get just as much enjoyment out of it as the boys do.

On the surface I guess this is neat. But maybe instead of forcing dolls on girls and cars on boys we could do a bit better by, well, not being presumptuous.
by notahacker | 2025-06-19 20:22:22+00:00
Yeah. It's not that they never express uncertainty so much as they like to express uncertainty as arbitrarily precise and convenient-looking expected value calculations which often look like far more of a rhetorical tool to justify their preferences (I've accounted for the uncertainty and even given a credence as low as 14.2% I'm still right!) than a decision making heuristic...
Show HN: Clarabase – Managed REST APIs from a Single JSON Schema in Seconds
by hyperaeolian | 2025-06-19 20:22:34+00:00
Hi HN!

I built a way to easily spin up a production ready, multi-protocol REST API given just a (json) schema.

Almost every backend project starts with the same tasks of creating migrations, validation, auth, tests, docs, etc., and I got tired of writing this over and over again so I built an abstraction layer to automate this!

Basically you build a JSON schema to define a resource and Clarabase gives you a working, flexible API in a few seconds.

You can use it for things like getting a jumpstart on building a new feature, or to have an actual API for integration testing environments, or something like having the same api but dual writing data (think EU data tenancy compliance) and a lot more

We're in early access and would love some feedback. Here's the link: https://www.clarabase.com

Happy to answer questions, share more tech details, or discuss architectural and integration patterns etc.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-19 20:22:40+00:00
I grew up with some friends who were deep into the early roots of online rationalism, even slightly before LessWrong came online. I've been around long enough to recognize the rhetorical devices used in rationalist writings:

> Aren't these the people who started the trend of writing things like "epistemic status: mostly speculation" on their blog posts? And writing essays about the dangers of overconfidence? And measuring how often their predictions turn out wrong? And maintaining webpages titled "list of things I was wrong about"?

There's a lot of in-group signaling in rationalist circles like the "epistemic status" taglines, posting predictions, and putting your humility on show.

This has come full-circle, though, and now rationalist writings are generally pre-baked with hedging, both-sides takes, escape hatches, and other writing tricks that make it easier to claim they weren't entirely wrong in the future.

A perfect exaple is the recent "AI 2027" doomsday scenario that predicts a rapid escalation of AI superpowers followed by disaster in only a couple years: https://ai-2027.com/

If you read the backstory and supporting blog posts from the authors they are filled to the brim with hedges and escape hatches. Scott Alexander wrote that it was something like "the 80th percentile of their fast scenario", which means when it fails to come true he can simple say it wasn't actually his median prediction anyway and that they were writing about the fast scenario. I can already predict that the "We were wrong" article will be more about what they got right with a heavy emphasis on the fact that it wasn't their real median prediction anyway.

I think this group relies heavily on the faux-humility and hedging because they've recognized how powerful it is to get people to trust them. Even the comment above is implying that because they say and do these things, they must be immune from the criticism delivered above. That's exactly why they wrap their posts in these signals, before going on to do whatever they were going to do anyway.
by EvgeniyZh | 2025-06-19 20:22:41+00:00
> He didn't say that.

Sure, you replace "Jews" by "Zionists" and then every trope is ok. It's Zionists who have the power to influence or direct US government behavior (i.e., control it).

> Two members of congress? Out of hundreds?

Well yeah, to show something possible it's enough to show one example.

> Yes!

How is being elected to Congress political suicide?

> It's not even debatable that the US is absurdly pro-Israel.

I'm not debating that. I'm debating the idea that this is somehow doing of evil Zionist lobby or that repeating antisemitic tropes is not antisemitic because you euphemize Jews by Zionists
by _august | 2025-06-19 20:22:44+00:00
Incredible, thank you for making this!

Can this be installed with uv? https://github.com/astral-sh/uv

Edit:

# Install uv curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh # Install the required CLI tool (Node.js) npm install -g ccusage # Clone and setup git clone https://github.com/Maciek-roboblog/Claude-Code-Usage-Monitor.git cd Claude-Code-Usage-Monitor # Install Python deps with uv uv add pytz chmod +x ccusage_monitor.py # Run it uv run python ccusage_monitor.py --plan max20 --timezone America/New_York
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-19 20:23:00+00:00
"DNS resolvers are the ones in charge of tracking down this information for you."

If one uses them.

One can alternatively use iterative queries where no "DNS resolver", i.e., recursive resolver, is used.

Many years ago I wrote a system for interative resolution for own use, as an experiment. I learnt that it can be faster than recursive resolution.

People have since written software for iterative resolution, e.g., https://lizizhikevich.github.io/assets/papers/ZDNS.pdf

Unfortunately authoritative servers generally do not encrypt their responses. IMO this would be more useful than "DNSSEC".

"And that data is often provided by authoritative servers."

What are examples of data not provided by authoritative servers.
by otterley | 2025-06-19 20:23:18+00:00
First, K8S doesn't force anyone to use YAML. It might be idiomatic, but it's certainly not required. `kubectl apply` has supported JSON since the beginning, IIRC. The endpoints themselves speak JSON and grpc. And you can produce JSON or YAML from whatever language you prefer. Jsonnet is quite nice, for example.

Second, I'm curious as to why dependencies are a thing in Helm charts and why dependency ordering is being advocated, as though we're still living in a world of dependency ordering and service-start blocking on Linux or Windows. One of the primary idioms in Kubernetes is looping: if the dependency's not available, your app is supposed to treat that is a recoverable error and try again until the dependency becomes available. Or, crash, in which case, the ReplicaSet controller will restart the app for you.

You can't have dependency conflicts in charts if you don't have dependencies (cue "think about it" meme here), and you install each chart separately. Helm does let you install multiple versions of a chart if you must, but woe be unto those who do that in a single namespace.

If an app truly depends on another app, one option is to include the dependency in the same Helm chart! Helm charts have always allowed you to have multiple application and service resources.