MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by heterodoxlib | 2025-06-19 23:52:27+00:00
> Broadly, I think "being transgender also just a social construct that can and maybe should be addressed by loosening up our tight expectations for gender roles" vastly underestimates the scope and scale of this cultural system, the degree to which it's tangled up in our lives, and the difficulty of untangling it.

This makes sense, but I guess my question is rooted in my sense that the front that we've chosen to engage to push for re-evaluating gender is the absolute most controversial front we could have chosen. A subtler approach at re-evaluating rigid gender stereotypes—taken decades ago when we instead began to push for reassignment surgery and pronouns—could have already paid off in spades by now.

As is, the rhetoric surrounding transgender issues essentially demands that we accept that there are boxes—male and female—which people ought to be sorting themselves into, and it terrifies social conservatives because it actively encourages people to sort themselves into the boxes rather than accepting the lot they were handed. A subtler approach that started with "why shouldn't boys wear pink?" and progressed from there would have already finished the job by now, instead of creating the polarized warzone we have today. As a bonus we'd have been making life more comfortable for everyone in the middle, people who don't feel the brokenness of rigid gender norms strongly enough to want to switch entirely but still suffer from feeling the need to live up to them.

If most transgender people experience a strong biological component that demands reassignment for biological reasons, I can understand why our chosen approach was necessary. But if sufficiently changing and making flexible our expectations for what it means to be male and female would have been sufficient to make most transgender people comfortable, why did we choose the much harder sell instead?
by danudey | 2025-06-19 23:52:48+00:00
The example in the blog post shows full-on logic structures (if this then that else this), which... no thank you.

I don't think I can take a JSON or YAML document and export it to an HCL that contains logic like that, but at the same time we shouldn't be doing that either IMHO. I very much do not want my configuration files to have side effects or behave differently based on the environment. "Where did this random string come from?" "It was created dynamically by the config file because this environment variable wasn't set" sounds like a nightmare to debug.

YAML is bad for a great many reasons and I agree with the author that we should get rid of it, but HCL is bad for this use case for the same reasons - it does too much. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if there's another configuration language that makes real honest sense in this use case that isn't full of nightmarish cruft also.
by Lerc | 2025-06-19 23:53:58+00:00
There should at least be a way to declare a form of technology that is specifically designed to be able to cause harm.

I think I might use the term "Aw nope" for that. Or maybe an anagram of that to hide my disfavour.

I think that development of such things should be tightly regulated, but also that you should be clear to distinguish between things like that from things that are capable of doing harm or even likely to cause harm and how much intent it takes to cause that outcome. Angle grinders are very dangerous things, they harm quite a few people, but there is also an understanding that the vast majority of that harm is unintentional, and preventable with safeguards.
by tomhow | 2025-06-19 23:54:42+00:00
Please don't comment like this on Hacker News. It breaks several guidelines, most notably these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by foxmoder | 2025-06-19 23:55:06+00:00
Will share my personal experience here--honestly, I thought about this a long time personally for my own case, for years before and after my own transition.

To be honest? I ultimately arrived at the fact that I just feel happier when I present femme-ish. Usually still jeans and a t-shirt though--I'm not particularly hyperfeminine, as that's just not who I am.

I've decided that it works better for me, and that's enough for me.

Is it silly to "swap gender"? Absolutely. All notion of gender is silly, in my experience. We're told to perform certain appearances and actions and ideas, to socialize and be around people in a certain way. People treat you wildly differently (trust me, sigh) when they look at you and bin you as a woman versus a man--you wouldn't believe how stark of a difference it was even with old friends the minute they started physically perceiving me as a woman.

All of us are just trying to get through a wildly gendered world in a way that makes us happy--the least we can do is allow people their choice of the role they play in this grand performance, as all of us everywhere are acting.

'Transition' for me was just finally deciding that I got to pick how I socialize, how I act around people, how I dress, and so on. Someone could call me a man, perhaps--I wouldn't particularly be fond of it, and it would probably come across as unusual to others given my appearance, but surely it's a thing that could be said to me.
by scoofy | 2025-06-19 23:55:46+00:00
I mean, I don't disagree with you there. Even within academic philosophy circles, you'll get groans when one sect is discussing things with another sect. Lord knows ancient philosophy academics and analytic philosophy academics are going to get headaches just trying to hold a conversation... and we're not even including continental school.

My point is that, yes, while it may be a bit annoying in general (lord knows how many times I rolled my eyes at my old roommate talking about trans-humanism), the idea that this Rationalist™ movement "thinking about things philosophically" is controversial is just weird. That they seem to care about a philosophical approach to thinking about things, and maybe didn't get degrees and maybe don't understand much background while forming their own little school, seems as unremarkable is it is uncontroversial.
by kllrnohj | 2025-06-19 23:55:49+00:00
> Every year or so, I try to use my Windows PC to convert a RAW photo taken with a high-end Nikon mirrorless camera to a proper HDR photo (in any format) and send it to my friends and family that use iDevices.

> This has been literally impossible for the last decade, and will remain impossible until the heat death of the universe.

It's possible right now with gainmap jpegs. Adobe can create them, Android captures in them now, and Apple devices can view them even. Or if they can't yet they can very soon, Apple announced support at the recent WWDC (Apple brands it "adaptive HDR")

There's something kinda hilariously ironic that out of all these new fancy image codecs be it HEIC, AVIF, or JPEG-XL, it's humble ol' JPEG that's the first to deliver not just portable HDR, but the best quality HDR of any format of any kind
by Kon-Peki | 2025-06-19 23:57:12+00:00
> As a result of the ruling, notice will be issued to the allegedly affected job applicants, in what could be one of the largest collectives ever certified. In filings, Workday represented that “1.1 billion applications were rejected” using its software tools during the relevant period, and so the collective could potentially include “hundreds of millions” of members.

I hope we find out how many it is. If it truly is hundreds of millions, then we’re talking about less than 5 or 6 applications per person, on average, right? But we’ve been told that tools allow people to apply to hundreds of jobs quickly.
Do you need to be academically smart to be a successful tech founder?
by moneyhungry | 2025-06-19 23:57:46+00:00
Hey everyone,

So many well-known tech founders come from top schools Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. It makes me wonder, is being academically brilliant actually a key to startup success? Or is it more about buisness acumen like in other industries ? You always hear the big names, Zuckerberg, Gates, the Google guys, and they all have elite academic backgrounds. But are there counter examples of founders who were more “street smart” than school geniuses.
by ImaCake | 2025-06-19 23:58:15+00:00
>if you read Popper

Thanks, I might actually go do this :) I recently got exposed to a very persuasive form of "rationalism is a social construct" by reading "Alchemy" by Rory Sutherland. But a theme in these comments is that a lot of these ideas are just recycled from philosophers and that the philosophers were less likely to try and induct you into a cult.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-06-19 23:59:07+00:00
Honestly running your own control plane is not that much harder than using something like EKS or GKE. The real complexity that the grandparent was talking about is all the tweaking and configuration you have to do outside of the control plane. Eg the infrastructure and deployments you’re building on top of Kubernetes and all of the associated configuration around that. In other words, whether you use EKS or hand roll your own kube you still have to solve node auto scaling. Load balancing. Metrics/observability. DNS and networking. Ingress. Etc etc etc.
by sanderjd | 2025-06-19 23:59:52+00:00
For what it's worth, your comments in this thread have been very good descriptions of things I became frustrated with after once being quite interested / enthralled with this community / movement!

(I feel like you're probably getting upvotes from people who feel similarly, but sometimes I feel like nobody ever writes "I agree with you" comments, so the impression is that there's only disagreement with some point being made.)
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-06-20 00:00:33+00:00
For my needs as an engineer working on your standard simple monolithic-ish app I want a system that can’t do everything. Start with the ability to host a few services as simple as possible. I want a Heroku/Render level of complexity here. Spin up a db, web workers with simple scaling rules, background workers etc. Once you’ve perfected the design see if you can add anything else in to expand the capabilities. If you can’t do that without making it high maintenance and incomprehensible then don’t. It will forever be loved as the best way to host simple apps.
by tux1968 | 2025-06-20 00:00:40+00:00
> possible for DNSSEC if people who want to solve the problem

But for several decades, DNSSEC proponents have been complaining about the vocal detractors, rather than actually addressing the problems that have been identified. That's a pretty significant track record on which to make a fair judgment about who is making the strongest case.

Someone above offered a link [1] that gives some pretty good reasons why nobody is stepping up to fix the problems.

[1] https://blog.apnic.net/2024/05/28/calling-time-on-dnssec/
by Aloisius | 2025-06-20 00:01:46+00:00
The preface to the list of examples is rather important:

> Contemporary examples of antisemitism ... could, taking into account the overall context, include...:

Context is important. The examples are not true in all cases, but rather context dependent.

Accusing Jewish citizens of your country of being more loyal to Israel than their country simply because they're Jewish? Antisemitic.

Accusing a specific Jewish citizen that has said they are more loyal to Israel? Not antisemitic.
by ImaCake | 2025-06-20 00:01:50+00:00
Brilliant way to phrase this idea! I think its incredible that we can even manage an imperfect way to escape our "social" brain. It's clearly very powerful - math, and thus all of science, only exist because of how weird predaliction to thinking abstractly enough to (sorta) break our social bounds. At least when thinking in these terms, I am sure you can poke holes in it.
by tptacek | 2025-06-20 00:03:27+00:00
Stapling is dead: nobody could agree on a threat model, and they ultimately ended up at an HPKP-style cached "this endpoint must staple DANE" model that TLS people rejected (reasonably).

But if you have DoH chaining all the way from the recurser to the authority, it's tricky to say what stapled DANE signatures are even buying you. The first consumers of that system would be the CAs themselves.
by foobar_______ | 2025-06-20 00:03:47+00:00
I really appreciate this comment. Now in my 30s, I was not even aware of EA or Rationalist groups in my 20s but your description of a person high on the smell of their own farts and putting logic as king was me. The world is so chaotic that it felt good and right that I could lean on something "true" like logic. It took me to the "correct" answers according to logic but very misguided answers as I see them now. Humans are driven by emotions and the world is probabilistic so relying so heavily on logic just seems so misguided now that I'm older.
by Terr_ | 2025-06-20 00:03:53+00:00
> Humans are generally better at perceiving threats than they are at putting those threats into words.

Not only that, but this is exactly the kind of scenario where we should be giving those signals the most weight: The individual estimating whether to join up with a tribe. (As opposed to, say, bad feelings about doing calculus.)

Not only does it involve humans-predicting-humans (where we have a rather privileged set of tools) but there have been millions of years of selective pressure to be decent at it.
by viccis | 2025-06-20 00:03:55+00:00
I agree 100%, and that's my main issue with them. To build a group with its identity centered around "we form our opinions with logical inquiry from first principles" implies that you think that everyone else is doing something else. In reality, we just end up with a lot of worldviews and arguments that seem suspiciously like they are nothing more than people advocating for their own interests using some sophistry that is compelling enough (to them) to trick themselves into thinking they have other motivations.

When ones find themself mentioning Aella as one of the members taking their movement "in new directions," then they should stop and ask whether they are the insightful well rounded person with much to say about all sorts of things, or whether they are just a very gifted computer scientist who is still not well rounded enough to recognize a legitimate dimwit like Aella when they see one.

And in general, I do feel like they suffer from "I am a genius at X, so my take on Y should be given special consideration." If you're in a group where everyone's talking about physics and almost none of them are physicists, then run. I'm still surprised at how little consideration these people give philosophy and the centuries of its written thought. Some engineers spend a decade or more building up math and science skills to the point that they can be effective practitioners, but then they think they can hop right into philosophical discussions with no background. Then when they try to analyze a problem philosophically, their brief (or no) experience means that they reason themselves into dead-end positions like philosophical skepticism that were tackled in a variety of ways over the past centuries.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-20 00:04:51+00:00
I have enjoyed learning the context and original meaning behind many of these aphorisms and words of wisdom, and that is the true utility of learning them, so that you can subvert them and invert them. Cultural touchstones have value because of shared context. The specific utility and applicability of wisdom varies because conversation is context specific and outcome dependent based on the adversarial vs collaborative nature of the dialogue.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-20 00:06:04+00:00
why call it a tape recorder instead of a digital recorder? nothing in the skeuomorphic design even hints at a tape recorder and looks much more like a digital recorder. if it's a tape recorder, do you introduce tape hiss based on a preference of what tape formula is being used? maybe then introduce a NR option? also, what type of tape are you recording too? is it cassette tape, or a professional studio tape? that would also have quality implications to consider. what about dirty heads or pinch roller that is sticking so the tape doesn't move at a constant rate? also, is it assumed that it's always a new tape with each recording, or will it emulate sound quality degradation of multiple re-use of the same tape? could be a cool easter egg like the crayon color picker with a system clock set far into the future

or is this just a for the lulz throw back because it's kool type of name?
by SlowTao | 2025-06-20 00:06:17+00:00
Personally, when it came to buying a house it was based on something that I could pay down quick and be happy with until my last days. I call it the cottage but it is really just a very small house. But work hours are staggering reasonable because of it.

If you have low needs and wants, you do not have to strive as hard to get places. I live small so that I do not have to serve the king.
by nickzelei | 2025-06-20 00:06:50+00:00
Hm, 600 symmetric with monkeybrains?? I’ve had monkeybrains for over 3 years and have never seen over 200 down. In fact, I reached out to them today because for the last 3 months it’s been about 50 down or less. Like, I can barely stream content slow. What gives? I am in a 6 unit in lower haight. Most of the units also have MB. The hardware is relatively new (2019?). What gives?
by hodgesrm | 2025-06-20 00:07:02+00:00
This analysis seems wrong for at least a couple of reasons.

1. Freight is easier to manage and has better economics on a dedicated network. The US freight network is extremely efficient as others have pointed out. Other networks, e.g., Germany, instead prioritized passenger service. In Germany rail moves a small proportion of freight (19%) compared to trucks. [0] It's really noticeable on the Autobahn and unlike the US where a lot of truck traffic is intermodal loads.

2. The US could have better rail service by investing in passenger networks. Instead we have boondoggles like the California high-speed rail project which has already burned through 10s of billions of dollars with no end in sight. [1] Or the New Jersey Transit system which I had the pleasure to ride on earlier today to Newark Airport. It has pretty good coverage but needs investment.

[0] https://dhl-freight-connections.com/en/trends/global-freight...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail
by model-15-DAV | 2025-06-20 00:07:17+00:00
I think that we should encourage elections to _not_ be standardized. The problems among various polities in the USA have many different issues and should not be forced to conform to a specific way that elections should be done. This is a social problem and we should not cram it into a technical solution. Legibility of elections should be maintained at the local level, trying to make things legible at a national level is in my opinion unwanted. As much as I would like the data to be clean, people are not so clean. Even if they used slightly more structured formats than PDFs, the differences between polities must be maintained as long as they are different polities.

The way that OpenElections handles this, with 'sources' and 'data' directories I think is a good way to bridge the gap.
by tptacek | 2025-06-20 00:07:34+00:00
I don't see you responding to the question. You're fixating on protections for DNS servers, because that is the only circumstance in which DNSSEC could matter for these threat actors, not because they can't target the address space of the TLS servers themselves (they can), but because if you concede that they can do this, DNSSEC doesn't do anything anymore; attackers will just leave DNS records intact, and intercept the "authentic" server IPs.

So far your response to this has been "attackers can't do this to Cloudflare". I mean, stipulated? Good note? Now, can you draw the rest of the owl?
by georgeecollins | 2025-06-20 00:07:40+00:00
For anyone who takes Effective Altruism or Rationalism seriously I strongly recommend reading "You Are Not a Gadget" It was written more than ten years ago and was so prescient about the issues of social media and also contained one of the most devastating problems with EA, the idea of a circle of empathy.

You don't have to agree with any of this. I am not defending every idea the author has. But I recommend that book.
by gnabgib | 2025-06-20 00:07:45+00:00
Talk about a lot on some recent releases:

1.1 (138 points, 5 months ago, 79 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884930

1 (2319 points, 6 months ago, 681 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517447
by antonfire | 2025-06-20 00:08:26+00:00
> We could make a lot of progress in trans acceptance very quickly by just reframing the whole thing in these terms. [...] But arguing that males shouldn't need to live up to an artificial and incredibly outdated standard of masculinity? That would be a much, much easier sell.

It's an "easier sell" of a different thing.

I'm not seeing a "we" forming here as far as "trans acceptance" is concerned.

Judging from your comment history, your perspective on this seems to basically be grounded in an objection to (more generously: apprehension about) transgender healthcare practices. On purportedly scientific grounds, while ascribing a "politically-driven" motivation in terms of groupthink to people who support these practices. So I think your motivation to ascribe this to a "cultural thing" is grounded in a desire to decouple it from the healthcare thing, because you think it serves an overall political project better.

I'm with you on loosening gender roles. I'm not with you on reducing trans acceptance to that.

> why are we doubling down on gender binaries and talking about switching genders instead of creating a campaign that would both get at the root of the issue and be easier to swallow for a larger portion of the country?

In my personal life, I am probably about as far from "doubling down on gender binaries" as anyone you are likely to encounter. In my experience, I find many more people who are genuinely working past "doubling down on gender binaries" in transgender spaces than I do outside them.

My not-doubling-down-on-gender-binaries approach to it is not an easy pill to swallow for a large portion of the country. It may not even be an easy pill to swallow for you. (E.g. "which" bathroom do you want me in? How easily do you think the rest of the country will swallow that?)
by mort96 | 2025-06-20 00:08:28+00:00
The way I see it, I shared thoughts on Zed, as someone who was once really interested in Zed and once tried to switch to it, in a discussion about Zed. It's not about the Zed debugger, but it's not like this thread is lacking in discussion of the debugger.

Am I an AI curmudgeon? I wouldn't necessarily use that word, but it's not entirely inaccurate.
by Kirby64 | 2025-06-20 00:08:35+00:00
> No, no it isn't. We can keep units within half a percent of starting output all day long.

On what, exactly? How can you possibly guarantee output using purely voltage control of an LED? LEDs (and laser diodes) are fundamentally current controlled devices. You need current feedback to set the output brightness operating points.

> Voltage control is done explicitly on laser diodes, to boot. And those are WAY MORE FINICKY than an LED.

Maybe if you don't care about the output power of the laser diode. Just not practical, and will change output power at the same voltage as temperature changes.