MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by frollogaston | 2025-06-24 20:40:55+00:00
Too many issues with remote employees disappearing to do other stuff during the day. Amazon and others are requiring employees to go to any office, not necessarily the one with their teammates, so it's evidently not about in-person collaboration. My manager (different company) told me straight up, the dept is ok with me working remote but not other people.

Older than this is the "open office" thing. We saw over time how this wasn't about collaboration or even space-saving, but about keeping employees under watch.
by tdhopper | 2025-06-24 20:41:18+00:00
I write an ebook on Python Developer tooling. I've attempted to address some of the weaknesses in the official documentation.

How to migrate from requirements.txt: https://pydevtools.com/handbook/how-to/migrate-requirements.... How to change the Python version of a uv project: https://pydevtools.com/handbook/how-to/how-to-change-the-pyt...

Let me know if there are other topics I can hit that would be helpful!
by CSMastermind | 2025-06-24 20:41:27+00:00
Social security, Medicare, and Medicaid are ~60% of the federal budget.

Interest payments are another ~15% and there's no way to reduce those.

You could cut literally every penny of the rest of the budget, including all of defense, all of transportation, all of education, and every single program being discussed here. We'd still have a deficit.

So unless a politician is going to propose a way to spend less on those three programs, then they're not talking seriously about reducing our deficit.
by olalonde | 2025-06-24 20:41:34+00:00
Nope, they barely even talk to you. I've crossed the Chinese border literally hundreds of times, mostly from Hong Kong. They usually don’t ask anything and if they do, it's just a basic "What's the purpose of your visit?" I’ve never had my bags searched or been sent to secondary inspection. Even crossed with one barefoot once (long story) and wasn't even asked about it.

In contrast, my worst border experiences have been in the U.S. and Canada (and I've traveled to over 30 countries).

In the US, I was nearly denied entry at SFO while on a valid TN visa simply because I didn't have a business card with me. The officer also referred to my wife as a "Chinese bitch" - within earshot (this happened during the Obama years). I had to let them handle my phone a bit to verify work emails, etc. But they didn't really search through it beyond that.

In Canada, I was sent to secondary inspection, had my bags searched, and was asked to show the photos on my phone. I was questioned for over an hour and they never told me the reason for it. It felt like they suspected me of smuggling drugs because the guy kept asking me what I had for breakfast... I'm Canadian btw and don't do drugs.
by comex | 2025-06-24 20:41:51+00:00
Yes and no.

In this case, the plaintiffs alleged that Anthropic's LLMs had memorized the works so completely that "if each completed LLM had been asked to recite works it had trained upon, it could have done so", "almost verbatim". The judge assumed for the sake of argument that the allegation was true, and ruled that the conduct was fair use anyway due to the existence of an effective filter. Therefore there was no need to determine whether the allegation was actually true.

So - yes, in the sense that the ruling suggests that distributing an open-weight LLM that memorized copyrighted works to that extent would not be fair use.

But no, in the sense that it's not clear whether any LLMs, especially open-weight LLMs, actually memorize book-length works to that extent. Even the recent study about Llama memorizing a Harry Potter book [1] only said that Llama could reproduce 50-token snippets a decent percentage of the time when given the preceding 50 tokens. That's different from actually being able to recite any substantial portion of the book. If you asked Llama for that, the output would quickly diverge from the original text, and it likely wouldn't be able to get back on track without being re-prompted from the ground truth as the study did.

On the other hand, in the case where the New York Times is suing OpenAI, the NYT has alleged that ChatGPT was able to recite extensive portions of NYT articles verbatim. If true, this might be more dangerous, since news articles are not as long as books but they're equally eligible for copyright protection. So we'll see how that shakes out.

Also note:

- Nothing in the opinion sets formal precedent because it's a district court. But the opinion might still influence later judges.

- See also riskable's sibling comment for another case where a judge addressed the issue more head-on (but wasn't facing the same kind of detailed allegations, I don't think; haven't checked).

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06370
by legitster | 2025-06-24 20:42:03+00:00
Very unpopular opinion, but I personally find price discrimination somewhat appealing. Both me and the richest person on the plane get to the same destination at the same time. And yet he payed 4x as much for the same privilege. It's one of the few forces left in the economy that actually reduces inequality (somewhat).

I'm an absolute cheapskate and I love flying, so I never really fall for the need to upsell. I'll fly with my family and not pay for assigned seats (I've joked with gate agents "I dare you not to sit me next to my children" - in reality they are happy to make sure you sit together anyway).

I get that people value different things differently, but with so much price discrimination the value gets more efficient and you increasingly get exactly what you pay for - no more or less. Which just unlocks the hacker ethos in me.

At the end of the day, you are paying for insanely fast travel across the sky. It's a miracle, let alone at the insanely low prices you can get these days.
by maverwa | 2025-06-24 20:42:59+00:00
And just to add to your point: an European with the same level of knowledge and curiosity (me, an overweight unhealthy European) would not think a PBJ is healthy at all. For me, at least the PB and the J sound like „basically pure sugar“. We make the same misjudgments about other foods, but it’s entirely learned behavior. What I mean is: these judgments are rarely objective, but always subjectively derived from learned behavior.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-24 20:43:01+00:00
Welcome to the most ignored (even by Apple) App Store guideline [0]

> 4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.

Specifically:

> Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.

Literally NO apps follow this rule but Apple doesn't care, it's really annoying since they randomly pull out one of these guidelines to smack you with during app review but it's completely unclear which ones are actually enforced until you get hit with one. Even then, enforcement is uneven (understatement of the century).

[0] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
by 9rx | 2025-06-24 20:43:13+00:00
> I can walk 15 minutes to a coffee shop and grocery store

Not to make it sound like a competition, but I can do it in 5 not living in a city. Why does it take so long in a place that should be optimized for keeping everything close by?

> drive 20 minutes to a Walmart

I can be to two different Walmarts given 20 minutes. That is also an unusually long time for a heavily populated area. Are you actually living in a rural area with a train and I misunderstood?

> and take a train 35 minutes to the office.

Okay. You got me there. I don't have a train in my backyard. It would take me 20 minutes to get to the station.

But, to be fair, when I lived in a big city downtown it also took me 20 minutes to get to the station, so perhaps your situation of having a train sitting right outside your door waiting on you is a bit unusual?

That said, perhaps you have included, say, 20 minutes to get to the station, and a few minutes waiting on the train. But in that case is the 5-10 minutes of actual train time really that advantageous? In this scenario you're almost at your destination before you even get on the train. Presumably this isn't what you meant.

> you have to want to manage that kind of business.

You'd have to report your income to the government. What else is there?

The onus will be on the farmer working the land to do everything else. I know that well, because I'm one of those farmers. The industry is much too competitive to think you can make the landowner do anything.
by sho_hn | 2025-06-24 20:43:14+00:00
It's actually a somewhat bad and uninformed post, or perhaps the mistake (unclear whether knowingly or not) is to disprove a claim made by uninformed people.

No one with a good grasp of the space ever claimed that it wasn't possible on X11 to call into APIs to retrieve physical display size and map that to how many pixels to render. This has been possible for decades, and while not completely trivial is not the hard part about doing good UI scaling.

Doing good UI scaling requires infrastructure for dynamic scaling changes, for different scale factors per display within the same scene, for guaranteeing crisp hairlines at any scale factor, and so on and so forth.

Many of these problems could have been solved in X11 with additional effort, and some even made it to partial solutions available. The community simply chose to put its energy into bringing it all together in the Wayland stack instead.
by tantalor | 2025-06-24 20:43:24+00:00
That essay is actually linked in the lead:

> As it's been pointed out countless times - if the trend of ML research could be summarised, it'd be the adherence to The Bitter Lesson - opt for general-purpose methods that leverage large amounts of compute and data over crafted methods by domain experts

But we're only 1 sentence in, and this is already a failure of science communication at several levels.

1. The sentence structure and grammar is simply horrible

2. This is condescending: "pointed out countless times" - has it?

3. The reference to Sutton's essay is oblique, easy to miss

4. Outside of AI circles, "Bitter Lesson" is not very well known. If you didn't already know about it, this doesn't help.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-24 20:43:26+00:00
You can also, in the US, use it for any purposes which fall within the domain of "fair use", which while now also incorporated in the copyright statute, was first identified as an application of the first amendment and, as such, a constitutional limit on what Congress even had the power to prohibit with copyright law (the odd parameters of the statutory exception are largely because it attempted to codify the existing Constitutional case law.)

Purposes which are fair use are very often not at all personal.

(Also, "personal use" that involves copying, creating a derivative work, or using any of the other exclusive rights of a copyright holder without a license or falling into either fair use or another explicit copyright exception are not, generally, allowed, they are just hard to detect and unlikely to be worth the copyright holder's time to litigate even if they somehow were detected.)
by floxy | 2025-06-24 20:43:37+00:00
How was Iran storing the enriched uranium? If these were just ingots, why couldn't they just dig them out of the rubble? Seems like uranium is used for armor plating, so presumably pretty tough and heat resistant. Different story if it is in solution (uranium hexaflouride?) or in a non-metalic form. Although even in those cases, as long as you weren't storing it in the same area as your depleted stock, it seems like you could leach it back out of the soil and it would still be enriched. Right?
by bananalychee | 2025-06-24 20:43:48+00:00
Is it so blatant, or does it just seems like it because of the sheer amount of spin being spun? I can think of a few stories that I think qualify as evidence of overstepping, but I can also think of several from 2021-2024. I don't like it, but none really come close to the level of the UK's speech policing. Reading the comments here you'd think we're worse than China.

When it comes to border control, I've looked into several of these outrageous claims, and they consistently omit critical details that point to a valid reason for denial. Being denied entry and then having an overzealous border agent tsk-tsk at your meme is not nearly the same thing as being denied entry or thrown in jail because of it. And now OP primes us to think that the details don't really matter. I think they do, because every conversation on the current administration is now tainted by propaganda (in both directions).
by marssaxman | 2025-06-24 20:44:49+00:00
I wrote a lexer-driven date parser like that as one of the first contract jobs I ever did - maybe the first, I can't quite remember - at the very beginning of my software development career, back in the previous century. I remember feeling rather proud of it.

(In hindsight, I'm not sure that trying to accept any conceivable date format as if by magic was really such a great idea, but that's what my client wanted, and building it was an enjoyable challenge.)
by KaiserPro | 2025-06-24 20:45:04+00:00
bangs head against the table.

Look, fitting a single metric to a curve and projecting from that only gets you a "model" that conforms to your curve fitting.

"proper" AI, where it starts to remove 10-15% of jobs will cause an economic blood bath.

The current rate of AI expansion requires almost exponential amounts of cash injections. That cash comes from petro-dollars and advertising sales. (and the ability of investment banks to print money based on those investment) Those sources of cash require a functioning world economy.

given that the US economy is three fox news headlines away from collapse[1] exponential money supply looks a bit dicey

If you, in the space of 2 years remove 10-15% of all jobs, you will spark revolutions. This will cause loands to be called in, banks to fail and the dollar, presently run obvious dipshits, to evaporate.

This will stop investment in AI, which means no exponential growth.

Sure you can talk about universal credit, but unless something radical changes, the people who run our economies will not consent to giving away cash to the plebs.

AI 2027 is unmitigated bullshit, but with graphs, so people think there is a science to it.

[1] trump needs a "good" economy. If the fed, who are currently mostly independent need to raise interest rates, and fox news doesn't like it, then trump will remove it's independence. This will really raise the chance of the dollar being dumped for something else (and its either the euro or renminbi, but more likely the latter)

That'll also kill the UK because for some reason we hold ~1.2 times our GDP in US short term bonds.

TLDR: you need an exponential supply of cash for AI 2027 to even be close to working.
by natebc | 2025-06-24 20:46:09+00:00
26 years with Linux. I use starship but primarily because I administer multiple kubernetes clusters and having the kube context staring me in the face is critical. I don't adjust the default config more than just making sure the kube bits are enabled.

That said my vimrc is 2 lines that i can configure manually, I don't touch bash config from Debian defaults and my fish config is vanilla save for a handful of functions because I'm a lazy. My ssh config is pretty heavily customized but mostly around what keys/usernames to default to for which hosts (see previous about lazy).
by tossandthrow | 2025-06-24 20:46:17+00:00
I don't think it is an unpopular opinion at all.

The airline sector had this memory of its "hey days" - but the price has conviniently been forgotten.

From my perspective I would love if the airlines would skip entertainment systems and food on long haul flights. I use my phone for l entertainment, and see the value of airline food as a negative value (i try to fast when I travel, but I am bad at declining food).
by vel0city | 2025-06-24 20:46:23+00:00
I agree there's a growing divide there, and even a decent middle ground there of people who value maybe having a yard but want a park and shops and what not within bicycle distance and not be entirely car dependent.

I'm not entirely sure it's fully an age divide. Definitely age-weighted, I can agree. Other than family that grew up in NYC, most of my family >50 thinks I'm crazy for taking my kids on public transit and can't understand why I'd like to live closer in the city with kids compared to living in the sticks on a large property and a 15 minute drive to the grocery store. But there's also a lot of conservative younger-ish (millennial and younger) people who also seem to have that same mindset of wanting to live further out of the city and don't care or are against things like transit and tax dollars spent on city parks and bike lanes.

That example of the family of four where a four bedroom house is just too cramped for their needs I gave elsewhere? They're barely 30. They're absolutely not alone in what they're looking for.
by madcaptenor | 2025-06-24 20:46:41+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_Street has: "The street was named for Dr. William J. Powell, surgeon of the U.S. sloop of war Warren, which was active during the conquest of California.[1]".

That comes from this document on the website of the Museum of the City of San Francisco: https://sfmuseum.org/street/stnames5.html

Seems like that would be a good additional source to add to the map.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-24 20:46:49+00:00
So aside from potentially allowing more price-limited consumers the ability to fly via Basic Economy fares, it’s just enshittification of the Aviation Industry: worse products at higher prices.

We really need to step up regulation to disincentivize “infinite growth” as a mindset and prioritize stable returns over time (e.g., dividends and profit sharing). Everything is slowly getting worse and more expensive, and contrary to (seemingly) popular belief there is no “floor” to reach in this foolish pursuit. Businesses and capital will always pursue more money for themselves no matter the cost to consumers, workers, vendors, or governments, unless something incentivizes more societally-healthy behaviors.
by legitster | 2025-06-24 20:46:55+00:00
> All told, is all this chicanery benefiting airlines?

Yes.

An example is paid baggage. It used to be that stowage space was mostly a waste of capacity on an airplane. But with the help of modern software making coordinating shipping easier, they can make lucrative money shipping cargo on passenger flights.

So encouraging passengers to not bring bags and keeping that capacity for cargo is a feature, not a bug.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-24 20:47:41+00:00
The demands to relocate to the same office as your team should eliminate the "only to do most remote meetings" problem, but woof. I can't imagine demanding either jerking around your talent like this (forcing a big move) nor commuting 5 days a week.

Just feels like a billionaire commitment to insuring a better world isn't possible.
by kerakaali | 2025-06-24 20:48:14+00:00
Read through their "industry advice" section and thought this interesting:

> If you chop something on a plastic cutting board (because wood cutting boards are outlawed in commercial kitchens, apparently), test before and after chopping.

Who banned wood cutting boards from kitchens and for what purpose? I did some digging and some sources cite that neither FDA nor USDA strictly ban wood cutting boards, but individual state health departments are often strict on commercial kitchens that use wood instruments. I get concerns of wood being porous and all, but with the alternative being I have to ingest shavings from the plastic cutting board with every meal... Maybe it's time for a paradigm shift.
by frollogaston | 2025-06-24 20:48:26+00:00
Letting people work at a slow pace for a while, PIPing them, then ultimately firing, is very expensive. An unproductive teammate not only doesn't get stuff done but also brings down the rest of the team.

Edit: Some companies also don't like the morale effects of sink-or-swim, though Amazon is fine with it I've heard.
by freeone3000 | 2025-06-24 20:48:34+00:00
Right, they have to call the guy with a gun over. Is the problem the luggage search, as in, the invasion of privacy? The explicit threat of force in the absence of immediate compliance? The assumption of guilt for the general populace? The ever-present security state continually looking to oppress?

Or is it “huh europe is weird they give their TSA agents guns instead of having the transport security and also airport police?”
by crop_rotation | 2025-06-24 20:49:05+00:00
The problem is it is very hard to make changes and build innovative new products within big tech, at a pace to compete with smaller companies. Big tech succeeds despite it since the resource disparity is too much.

Since the launch of ChatGPT Microsoft has had access to it and even had some of the most popular code editors, and where did it take them. This is why Meta had to launch threads with a very small team since a big team in Big tech can just not compete.

Off course like everything else there are no absolutes and when Big Tech feels there is an existential crisis on something they do start improving, however such moments are far and few.
by okanat | 2025-06-24 20:49:06+00:00
And also doing it for multiple monitors with differing scales. Nobody claims X11 doesn't support different DPIs. The problems occur when you have monitors with differing pixel densities.

At the moment only Windows handles that use case perfectly, not even macOS. Wayland comes second if the optional fractional scaling is implemented by the toolkit and the compositor. I am skeptical of the Linux desktop ecosystem to do correct thing there though. Both server-side decorations and fractional scaling being optional (i.e. requires runtime opt-in from compositor and the toolkit) are missteps for a desktop protocol. Both missing features are directly attributable to GNOME and their chokehold of GTK and other core libraries.
by Tronno | 2025-06-24 20:49:50+00:00
> Karoline Leavitt: “This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”

All the juicy intel is right here in this press statement. The bombs struck bullseye and killed satire dead.
by egometry | 2025-06-24 20:49:50+00:00
Andy Schatz, the independent game creator of Monaco, said something at a GDC talk that really resonated with me along these lines

I'm paraphrasing but -

"Do the hard work that you need to do, but always give yourself an hour a day for the bullshit 'i don't have time for this but I want to do it' stuff.

It'll keep you happy, which will keep you productive through the slog... and those little touches will stand out and make SOME people happy"

For the unfamiliar (the man, not the talk): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Schatz