MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-07-13 22:21:22+00:00
I don't think there are objections to Wikipedia developing the community.

The objections are primarily around the aggressive and deceptive fundraising.

Wikipedia collects donations by essentially saying (in some years more directly, otherwise more implying) "if you don't donate Wikipedia WILL DIE", rather than "Please give us some money so we can build an even bigger community to make Wikipedia even better".

They are also making the banners incredibly obnoxious. From "donate or ask later", full-screen interstitials, to delayed popups that interrupt you after you've started reading, and with increasing frequency. During their "yearly" fundraisers (I think it's actually 2-3x a year, masked behind "local" vs. "global" campaigns) they pop them up every few days on every device you use, and now they're introducing "experimental" banners every month (again per device) so several times per month, and more frequently if they delete cookies. [1]

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Proposed_ch...
by gpderetta | 2025-07-13 22:22:12+00:00
I recently decided that it was time to properly learn C++ coroutines. I looked at a few tutorials, but by far the best was Raymond Chen coroutine series[1]. It is a long series, but every article is just the right size. Strongly recommended.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210504-01/?p=10...
by lc9er | 2025-07-13 22:22:21+00:00
Same. Back when I first got into IT, I was surrounded by (similar) nerds whose self-esteem was defined by being the smartest person in the room. Compensation was often higher than other white-collar jobs, so they (we) were happy to overlook the long hours and non or poorly compensated on-call shifts.

Most IT work now, whether dev or admin side, is not rocket science. It’s mostly approachable work and no one should settle for being abused by employers for some outdated, ingrained, cultural baggage.
by ta8645 | 2025-07-13 22:22:24+00:00
That's incredibly naive. Spend some time watching police body camera footage. By and large, the police are doing exceptionally well in hostile and difficult circumstances. We're all safer because there is a real counterforce to tough guys, mafias, and paramilitary strong men. They don't exist or are heavily controlled, because the police are a powerful force for good. Taking away the police would create a power vacuum that would be filled faster than you can imagine; and by people who will treat us all much worse than the police ever have.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-13 22:22:54+00:00
> Unburdened by housing costs, affordable and accessible healthcare, transportation, child care, groceries, etc.

Few European social welfare systems unburden their populations of all of these. Those that do are comparable to America’s wealthiest states.

> It is possible to live comfortably in most of Europe for €1000-€1500/month. This is almost impossible for most of the US

It’s also a lot easier to earn more than that wage in America [1][2]. (And you can absolutely live an okay life in NYC if you got your subsidies right on a job that pays ~$20k/y.)

[1] https://kagi.com/images?q=average+monthly+wage+eu+member+map...

[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-median-income-by-sta...
by bastawhiz | 2025-07-13 22:22:54+00:00
99% of consumers don't care about web standards, they just care that their site works. Nobody is paying for the minimum viable browser. It's not going to get anyone up in the morning.

What gets people excited are quality of life improvements, like video chat picture in picture, or new ways of grouping and managing tabs (your reminder that Mozilla killed Tab Candy). Firefox only got a cookie cutter clone of Chrome tab groups on v137.

There is no shortage of ways browser vendors can ship features that make browsing the web better without getting in anyone's way. Hell, they could have a build of Firefox that just has all the new stuff and merge it back to trunk when it's been proven out.

The thing is, for people like my mom, every other browser has features she uses and likes. Firefox hardly does more in the core experience than it did fifteen years ago when they started shipping every six weeks. My mom has every single department store's app installed on her phone, she's not choosing a browser based on how much it may respect your privacy.
by terminalshort | 2025-07-13 22:23:12+00:00
People who want to misuse the medication are going to be the ones most willing and able to jump through the bureaucratic hoops. Increasing the difficulty to get the medication will only make it more difficult for legitimate users and won't decrease abuse. In 1920, 1970, and now, heroin was legal, illegal with minimal enforcement, and illegal with harsh enforcement (except in SF), and the same percentage of the population was addicted at each time.

Doctors' jobs are to deal with the cases that go wrong. These anecdotes have no relevance without actual data on how often these problems occur.
Ask HN: Business logic that runs everywhere. Solo dev looking for feedback
by bTal | 2025-07-13 22:24:15+00:00
I’m a solo developer building something called Variable Engine (VE) — a logic infrastructure layer that separates business rules from web code, so that users (not just devs) and the system can define and enforce real-time logic inside tools they don’t own.

I have two working MVPs:

1. Used on any website: VE enforces budget logic on Amazon.com right now (could be any web-based site). If you’re over your budget, the Buy button is blocked. If you're below your budget — or raise the budget — the purchase is allowed. All logic updates happen in real time.

2. Installed on your own site: VE is dropped in via a single <div> and <script>, and mapped in under a minute. If your site were selling computers, you could define: - computers = teams * 4, teams = 10 - 1 motherboard per computer - 4 sticks of RAM per computer - 1 power cord per computer Update the number of teams or computers, and the parts logic updates cleanly and instantly — without touching your backend. These are lightbulbs built with VE — but VE is the electricity and the grid behind them — logic overlays that run independently of app code or APIs, using a simple, AI-usable syntax.

VE is integrated with GPT-3.5-turbo today, but it doesn’t break if AI goes down.

Your logic is enforced on both third-party sites and websites that VE is installed on.

What inspired this post? Around minute 24 of a conversation between @sivers and @michaellynch, Derek says the best ideas help valuable people inside companies build what they need — and how the market for that is infinite. Michael mentions Retool. I believe that VE has that type of potential. VE helps any user inject logic — budgets, allocations, constraints — into any interface using simple rules for simple situations all the way up to and including tying into HR and AAD (RBAC anyone?) And it installs and activates in seconds.

I’m not showing the full system publicly yet, but as a solo developer, I’d love to walk a few thoughtful folks through it. Derek and Michael are at the top of my list, but if this resonates with you, I’d be glad to talk.

I’m asking: - Is this a real pain you’ve felt before? - Would you use a logic layer like this — even on apps you don’t own? - Where’s the line between helpful logic enforcement and overreach?

About me: I got my start at Microsoft as a freshman — still no degree. I’ve been an SCO Unix SA, a System Architect at Boeing, a web developer for multimillion-dollar ecommerce systems, and a Delivery Engagement Manager / Jr. Consultant for Oxford Computer Group, NA. I’ve also worked retail, driven transit buses, and rebuilt after bankruptcy.

Now I’m here — and I’ve filed multiple provisional patents covering all aspects of Variable Engine.

Thanks in advance for your time. Happy to answer questions.
by degamad | 2025-07-13 22:24:41+00:00
It is well known that people are bad at taking drugs that work for them. This is particularly well studied when it comes to heart medication, the kind where you take it regularly or you die, and yet adherence is often around 50%.

From a quick search, Jarrah et al. (2023) "Medication Adherence and Its Influencing Factors among Patients with Heart Failure: A Cross Sectional Study" [0] discusses some of the relevant details.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10224223/
by asdff | 2025-07-13 22:24:51+00:00
If the answer is to just not use the internet that is basically like saying "broken arm? use the other one." The issue is that it didn't used to be this bad. You could browse a forum and not have it be shills or shill accounts farming points so as to not appear as shill accounts. It was a more personal world without people trying to market themselves as none of that was incentivized in any way at the time. People prolifically posting videos for all 43 viewers for years and you'd never see them turn the camera at their face.

It got too big and then it became worth the investment to advertise in, the meta was established, and then that was that.
by another_twist | 2025-07-13 22:25:16+00:00
I see and are these studies public ? Could we see the data and the methodology here ? Thing is there are benchmarks to judge software engineering capability of AI. I am more interested in how the jobless predictions made ?

I understand all the theory but it can largely be condensed into - AI makes workforce more efficient so you need less people. But there are no good studies afaik that measure AI powered efficiency and surely nothing about how to model workforce reduction due to AI. I am curious what the science is behind these opinions.
by ivraatiems | 2025-07-13 22:25:21+00:00
I absolutely believe that a large proportion of new code written is at least in-part AI generated, but that doesn't mean a large proportion of new code is 100% soup-to-nuts/pull-request-to-merge the result of decisions made by an agent and not a human. I doubt that very much.

I think the difference between situations where AI-driven development works and doesn't is going to be largely down to the quality of the engineers who are supervising and prompting to generate that code, and the degree to which they manually evaluate it before moving it forward. I think you'll find that good engineers who understand what they're telling an agent to do are still extremely valuable, and are unlikely to go anywhere in the short to mid term. AI tools are not yet at the point where they are reliable on their own, even for systems they helped build, and it's unclear whether they will be any time soon purely through model scaling (though it's possible).

I think you can see the realities of AI tooling in the fact that the major AI companies are hiring lots and lots of engineers, not just for AI-related positions, but for all sorts of general engineering positions. For example, here's a post for a backend engineer at OpenAI: https://openai.com/careers/backend-software-engineer-leverag... - and one from Anthropic: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/4561280008.

Note that neither of these require direct experience with using AI coding agents, just an interest in the topic! Contrast that with many companies who now demand engineers explain how they are using AI-driven workflows. When they are being serious about getting people to do the work that will make them money, rather than engaging in marketing hype, AI companies are honest: AI agents are tools, just like IDEs, version control systems, etc. It's up to the wise engineer to use them in a valuable way.

Is it possible they're just hiring these folks to try and make their models better to later replace those people? It's possible. But I'm not sure when in time, if ever, they'll reach the point where that was viable.
by Andrew_nenakhov | 2025-07-13 22:25:52+00:00
> Russian culture considers translated (I think) Shakespeare to surpass the original.

Can't say about Shakespeare, there are many translations, and in my eyes all of them lack something that the original has, but Russian translations of such writers as O'Henry, F.S. Fitzgerald and Jack London have some irresistible charm and familiarity that is completely absent in original English texts.

I attribute it to censorship: many talented writers couldn't actually write because of it in soviet times, and to provide for themselves they took jobs as translators.
by mkl95 | 2025-07-13 22:26:31+00:00
> As US-based companies become more aware of the fake IT worker problem, the job seekers are increasingly targeting European employers, too.

All the US companies I've worked for made sure I was legit before I could log into anything, so I assume background checks to be ubiquitous there, save for the cheapest companies. European employers on the other hand...
by crop_rotation | 2025-07-13 22:27:04+00:00
> Is this a real pain you’ve felt before? - Would you use a logic layer like this — even on apps you don’t own? - Where’s the line between helpful logic enforcement and overreach?

This is a pain in most companies, and several companies end up building a non generic version of it. I believe retool and other internal tool builders are kinda similar.
by jlaternman | 2025-07-13 22:27:26+00:00
The author is describing the socially (and physically) destructive percentage of the population who just want to grab power through manipulation and control and the way they express this through social media, I believe (dark triad personality disorders, loosely). The only danger I see is an embrace of passivism in the form of “anyone who objects to things that are happening in passionate terms is the real problem.” Which would be even worse, when that percentage has real power, and real ability to pull levers. Not to say everyone should go around screaming or protesting with every tweet, etc. It's the balance of these things I think is off-kilter, not a simple solution “just act aloof and block the right people, and all will be well in the world, just like it is in Starbucks when I leave my apartment each morning.” In any case, that's my two cents. There's a balance to be struck, that this article doesn't really get at.
Show HN: A Lisp for code generation and metaprogramming in non-Lisp languages
by antilisp | 2025-07-13 22:28:36+00:00
Antilisp is a Lisp designed for code generation in non-lisp languages. The interpreter is written in RPython, and the language is designed for easy adoption by non-lispers. The project is still young, but the language can be played with if you don't mind missing some important features like modules and pattern matching.

I have not published the source code yet, because I am not completely sure how to base a sustainable business on this project and I don't want to risk having to rugpull after raising expectations.
by gnabgib | 2025-07-13 22:28:43+00:00
(2018) Discussion at the time (127 points, 30 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18570076

There was also a good NYT article in 2017 (293 points, 210 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15436943
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-13 22:28:49+00:00
> Tetsuo: The Iron Man

It's not actually framed as cyberpunk: Shinya Tsukamoto positionned it as "human size kaiju".

On the perception...I think its fans are mostly outside of Japan, and it was basically reversed imported. Tsukamoto sent it to foreign film festivals first, and only brought it to domestic theaters after it won at the Rome festival. Even now in interviews it's only brought back as it's directorial debut, and a stepping stone for getting money for bigger movies.

I have the feeling the whole notion of mixing human and technology just doesn't resonate as much in a country that is way more technology friendly and doesn't see robots as much as a threat than in the west.

PS: the "action hero" genre is basically humans transforming into machines, that speaks to the wide acceptance of the concept.
by PostOnce | 2025-07-13 22:28:51+00:00
TFA says "How Anthropic uses AI to write 90-95% of code for some products and the surprising new bottlenecks this creates".

for some products.

If it were 95% of anything useful, Anthropic would not still have >1000 employees, and the rest of the economy would be collapsing, and governments would be taking some kind of action.

Yet none of that appears to be happening. Why?
by Spivak | 2025-07-13 22:28:51+00:00
Of all the responses, this was perhaps my least expected one when I was talking about being chained to an async framework. Async isn't a replacement for threads, async doesn't let you spread your work out over multiple cores and doesn't give you time slicing. In Python the asyncio module actually gives you a threadpool to run computationally intensive work in as kind of one-offs. But when you need something like background job processing and want to also reap the benefits of asyncio, like being able to pull multiple tasks off the queue, and progress on others while a job does io, then you need an event loop in the other thread. It was specifically avoiding locking up FastAPI that lead me to use multiple event loops in the first place.

You're free to spin the job worker off to another process but however you swing it it's still multiple event loops you deal with. But with threads you get to only load your Python app into memory once.
by xg15 | 2025-07-13 22:29:06+00:00
> When I scroll through social media, I often leave demoralized, with the sense that the entire world is on fire and people are inflamed with hatred towards one another. Yet, when I step outside into the streets of New York City to grab a coffee or meet a friend for lunch, it feels downright tranquil.

Alternative explanation: The online world is "real" and the real-life interactions are "fake", at least as far as political opinions are concerned.

The social conventions for online and face-to-face interactions are still markedly different (with good reason). When face-to-face, we generally care a lot more about maintaining a pleasant conversational environment and usually avoid things that would insult or hurt the person we are talking with. The focus is also a lot more about everyday issues and a lot less about abstract political topics like it would be online.

All of this means that face-to-face, we will probably talk a lot less about divisive political topics than we would do online.

But it does not mean we have fewer opinions on those topics, only that we won't show them so easily.

So it could be that the online discourse really is a truthful mirror of the political division of society, only that in real life, those divisions are much more hidden behind layers of politeness.
by jongjong | 2025-07-13 22:29:42+00:00
It's totally not true that only a small number of people are spreading all the contrarian ideas online.

I remember where was some media coverage about 'The disinformation dozen' during COVID; what a load of rubbish. How can anyone believe this? In a world with billions of people connected to the internet, only 12 are spreading disinformation? This is impossible. There are surely at least 100 North Korean agents working full time being paid to spread non-stop disinformation... This is a really conservative guess. Now do that for every country who have a beef against the west you probably have tens of thousands of people being paid to spread disinformation. Then you probably have thousands of people spreading disinformation as a way to promote their books... Then you probably have millions of institutional insiders spreading various bits of contrarian information once in a while (which would be mislabeled as disinformation). It's not a small number of people either way. It's a LOT of people... Suggesting that it's only 12 people is comically wrong! I'm sorry but if you ever believed that, you need to adjust your worldview because you've been living in a bubble. It's not only physically impossible statistically, it's literally impossible to measure so you'd be wrong just for accepting any fixed number (let alone a tiny number)...

The mainstream view is a simplified view and so there will always be people who can see fundamental flaws in parts of the mainstream argument because they have deeper knowledge on certain aspects than a journalist has. Mainstream news is written by journalists, they never know quite as much as the insiders. So anytime a news article is published, there will be a small number of people out there who know the full story and they will be surprised at the discrepancies between the story and their first-hand experience of it. If you're an expert in anything, it's likely a matter of time before you come across some media story about your field which you know doesn't quite correspond to reality. Once you experience that, it makes you doubt all media coverage of other fields too. It's just a fact that the media isn't fully accurate. It doesn't matter how reputable the organization is; they have a near monopoly so this allows them to add a lot of spin and make a lot of 'mistakes'.
by zdragnar | 2025-07-13 22:29:48+00:00
I think there's a difference between an opinion being hard to find, and a place to express the opinion being hard to find.

The more suppressed a view is, the more extreme the place where that view is allowed ends up being.

Those places don't normally allow rational debate either. They're just a different kind of toxic, and have their own rules for what will get you dog piled.
by miki123211 | 2025-07-13 22:29:49+00:00
We have to distinguish between monopolies that keep their status by being great versus monopolies that have something else going on.

Google (search) is an example of the former. Search is a very expensive business to be in, but most of the costs are in scraping, indexing and software development, not actual query execution. The more users you have, the more you can spend while still keeping margins constant, and the more you spend, the better your engine is, which gives you more users.

This leads to the situation where you only have two competing search engines[1], one of which sucks and only exists because it's propped up by Microsoft. However, this is only true as long as Google keeps their quality up. If Bing suddenly became significantly better than Google, people would gradually start switching.

20th century AT&T is an example of the latter phenomenon. It was a monopoly because of US regulations, which made the barriers to entry insanely high. This meant AT&T could set almost whatever prices they wanted, as consumers didn't have a choice anyway.

[1] Engines like Kagi or DDG don't count, as they still fundamentally rely on Google's or Bing's indexes.
by sroussey | 2025-07-13 22:29:58+00:00
From the people I know on trizepitide, side effects were strongest when upping the dosage in the protocol, particularly two days after. The advice I have received while considering it:

- change your diet. you can't eat the same food at the same volume. or even is smaller volume if the food is a burger, etc.

- watch your drinking, your tolerance for alcohol is reset, and again on the volume thing

- drink a lot of water. apparently opposite to all the volume warnings above, lol

- split dosage and inject twice a week. (i dunno, talk to your doctor. also this only works when you have a vial and not the auto-injectors, though apparently the autoinjectors are way more expensive)

On the other hand, when i ask about what happens if you go on a bender and eat two burgers and lots of fries and drink a six pack?? From people that used to gladly do that: "gross, why would i do that?" That there is the real change.
by sfryxell | 2025-07-13 22:30:04+00:00
I have gotten multiple emails from wonky email addresses offering to have me interview for jobs and they will take care of the work if I get hired. fake names tons of money for me. I just have to nail the interview.

My resume is shiny enough and I've gotton hired enough times im a good candidate for this kind of scam.

This feels like a very ham fisted approach for them though. 99% of engineers are going to ignore or not take seriously these kinds of out of the blue offers.