MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dszd0g | 2025-07-02 23:13:56+00:00
If you read the text of SB690, it isn't just excluding IP addresses and session cookies which would be a valid change in the law in my opinion. https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB690/id/3186917

Instead, it is allowing wiretapping for a "commercial business purpose", basically anything a company can do to make money like sell your private data to a data broker or the government.

Proponents argue that CIPA is not necessary because we have the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) protecting us, but the CCPA is only opt out and you can't opt out of every company or surveillance you don't know about. The current CIPA is opt in where you have to consent to your communications being wiretapped, so SB690 would change the status quo from requiring companies to get your consent to record your communications to you having to opt out of every possible company.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/californias-corporate-...
by nilkn | 2025-07-02 23:14:08+00:00
Lack of differentiation within a tiny elite circle of candidates does not imply that salaries do not reflect individual differential value broadly. While these people control a large amount of capital, they do not own that capital -- their control is granted due to their talent and can be instantly revoked at any moment. They have no leverage to maintain control of this capital except through their own reputation and credibility. There is no "tenure" for executives -- the "status" of the role must essentially be re-earned constantly over time to maintain it, and those who don't do so are quickly forced out.

The researchers being hired here are just as accountable as the execs we're talking about -- there is a clear outcome that Zuck expects, and if they don't deliver, they will be held accountable. I really, genuinely don't see what's so complicated about this.

Accountability to a business line does not imply that if that business does poorly then every exec accountable to it was doing poorly personally. I'm actually a personal counter-example and I know a number of others too. In fact, I've even seen execs in failing BUs get promoted after the BU was folded into another one. Competent exec talent is hard to find (learning to operate successfully at the exec level of a Fortune 50 company is a very rarefied skill and can't be taught), and companies don't want to lose someone good just because that person was attached to a bad business line for a few months or years.

Something important to understand about the actual exec world is that executives move around within companies constantly -- the idea that an executive is tied to a single business and if something goes wrong there they must have sucked is just not true and it's not how large companies operate generally. When that happens, the company will figure out the correct action for the business line (divest, put into harvest mode, merge into another, etc., etc.), then figure out what to do with the executives. It's an opportunity to get rid of the bad ones and reposition the top ones for higher-impact work. Sometimes you do have to get rid of good people, though, which is true of all layoffs -- but even with execs there's a desire to avoid it (just like you'd ideally want to retain the top engineers of a product line being shuttered).
by andrewflnr | 2025-07-02 23:15:04+00:00
I don't know about the sniff test. The paper here does a little bit of the amateur scientist thing where they belabor details that real experts tend to take for granted. That doesn't make it wrong, but it increases the skepticism warranted.

I do agree the religious link is weird. The mere presence of a 12800 year timeline contradicts YEC. Then again, that kind of logic doesn't always stop pseudoscience people, especially the more conspiracy-flavored ones.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-02 23:15:23+00:00
Ada has that too, for what it is worth: https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-ada/chapters/cont... and https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Contract_Based.... It can be verified at compile time.

But what I love the most is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43936007

Instead of:

const MIN_U32 = 0; const MAX_U32 = 2 ** 32 - 1; function u32(v) { if (v < MIN_U32 || v > MAX_U32) { throw Error(`Value out of range for u32: ${v}`); } return leb128(v); }

You can do this, in Ada:

subtype U32 is Interfaces.Unsigned_64 range 0 .. 2 ** 32 - 1;

or alternatively:

type U32 is mod 2 ** 32;

and then you can use attributes such as:

First : constant U32 := U32'First; -- = 0 Last : constant U32 := U32'Last; -- = 2 ** 32 - 1 Range_ : constant U32 := U32'Range; -- Range 0 .. 2**32 - 1

Does D have anything like this? Or do any other languages?
by andrekandre | 2025-07-02 23:15:23+00:00
> Whatever happened to the immigrants eating cats and dogs in Ohio? Nothing, that's what. It was bald-faced lie. And people believed it

i have no idea if people actually believed it or just wanted what they wanted and ignored it (cognitive dissonance?) but like most recent elections the votes of the battleground states is the decider, and like 2016, issues there were not appreciated sufficiently and we got what we got... people are spiteful and ignorant but they've didn't have to win this time or last imo
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-07-02 23:16:17+00:00
1. it is well established that human pyschology makes relative income and wealth much more significant than absolute. And it doesn't matter which quintile you're in for that to be true.

2. real median household income stayed relatively flat between 1970 and 2012. Since then it has risen again in a significant way.

3. despite the gains in real median household income, the rise in the household income (and net worth) of various upper percentiles (20%, 10%, 5%, 1%, 0.1% ... take your pick) has been very, very much larger. consequently, the "double my income, double Musk's income" line is not a description of what has happened.

4. the percentage of GDP that accrues to capital rather than to labor have gone steadily up since 1980.
by camel-cdr | 2025-07-02 23:16:42+00:00
> All digitized books ever written/encoded compress to a few TB.

I tied to estimate how much data this actually is:

# annas archive stats papers = 105714890 books = 52670695 # word count estimates avrg_words_per_paper = 10000 avrg_words_per_book = 100000 words = (papers*avrg_words_per_paper + books*avrg_words_per_book ) # quick text of 27 million words from a few books sample_words = 27809550 sample_bytes = 158824661 sample_bytes_comp = 28839837 # using zpaq -m5 bytes_per_word = sample_bytes/sample_words byte_comp_ratio = sample_bytes_comp/sample_bytes word_comp_ratio = bytes_per_word*byte_comp_ratio print("total:", words*bytes_per_word*1e-12, "TB") # total: 30.10238345855199 TB print("compressed:", words*word_comp_ratio*1e-12, "TB") # compressed: 5.466077036085319 TB

So uncompressed ~30 TB and compressed ~5.5 TB of data.

That fits on three 2TB micro SD cards, which you could buy for a total of 750$ from SanDisk.
by defrost | 2025-07-02 23:17:11+00:00
From a civil engineering perspective, across thousands of km of Roman roads a statement like "and sometimes needed excavations up to 2m deep" would be true but uncommon.

( There's always going to be that vast length of bog, to long to justify going around, that needs crossing )

The main point here is that other large road systems existed at the same time as Roman roads.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-07-02 23:17:48+00:00
Oh no, a whole new bunch of time-wimey words I hadn't even considered! :-)

I'm no authority but to me using "the other day" as a phrase is trying to impart a rough reference to a point in time.

Which means we're talking in "day" timeframes where week or month wouldn't be suitable. I would expect "the other day" to be within a week, but accept no more than a month.

Similarly "some months ago" = probably less than 6 months but definitely no more than a year.

The world is a wonderful place and the ways we humans can confuse communication seemingly knows no bounds. But I don't want a proscriptive definition for each little casual phrase as I think this flexibility in language is why it keeps changing and being alive!
by remram | 2025-07-02 23:18:13+00:00
As an outsider, it seems weird to me that you would go to Edge when you are unsatisfied by Mozilla's spotty long-term support. Edge exists because Microsoft dropped support for IE (and then for their own rendering engine altogether when they switched to Chromium). It seems to me that they have a strictly worse track record in the aspect you care about.

Or maybe I am wrong about the facts? I never used Edge.
by KrisGulati | 2025-07-02 23:18:15+00:00
Leveraging a novel dataset of U.S.-based academics’ ‘cancelled’ for their speech, we employ a series of difference-in-differences designs to estimate the effects on individuals’ career outcomes. We find that, following a controversy, affected scholars experience a decline in their productivity, publishing 20% fewer new papers than the counterfactual. Furthermore, affected scholars experience a 4% decline in citations to their prior body of work, reflecting a form of peer-to-peer sanctioning. This decline is disproportionately driven by scholars who are closely connected to the affected individual, consistent with a mechanism of professional distancing. These findings highlight the professional costs of speech-related incidents and contribute to the literature on workplace and employee activism as well as the career consequences of speech-related scandals.
by const_cast | 2025-07-02 23:19:21+00:00
Well there's multiple problems here, so one by one:

1. Mozilla didn't fire anyone. My understanding is they actually tried to keep him.

2. Public pressure, dollar voting, and boycotts is just the free market at work. The invisible hand is real but it seems to me as soon as the invisible hand starts pushing stuff we all get uncomfortable.

3. Nobody takes anyone seriously who says "woke". That word means absolutely nothing to anyone, it's just a dog whistle. A type of inverse virtue signal that you are not a serious person worth listening to.
by muzani | 2025-07-02 23:19:41+00:00
A "generation" is roughly 5 years on front end in my experience. Measured by say, the time when people make fun of jQuery when they can use vanilla JS to the point where people make fun on jQuery as an 'outdated' stack.

Mobile is shorter, because it's highly centralized around Apple and Google who can declare something obsolete. It's not simply opinion; I literally got an email saying that I had to meet the target API level requirements by 31 Aug for an app that was at the latest one less than a year ago.

A 'generation' in AI is 1-2 years now - GPT-4o was state of the art in May 2024, now deprecated.

I can't tell if the models being up to date make other stacks faster or slower.
by jemiluv8 | 2025-07-02 23:19:53+00:00
When I first came across the idea of vibe coding, my first reaction was that this was taking things too far. Isn't it enough that your LLM can help you do - autocomplete - suggest possible solutions to a problem you've taken the time to understand - helps you spend less time reading documentation and instead help guide your approach and sometimes even helps you identify obscure apis that could help you get shit done - help you review your code - come up with multiple designs for a solutions - evaluate multiple designs you come up with for trade-offs - help you understand your problem better and the available apis - write a prototype of some piece of code

I feel like LLMs are already doing quite a lot. I spend less time rummaging through documentation or trying to remember obscure api's or other pieces of code in a software project. All I need is a strong mental model about the project and how things are done.

There is a lot of obvious heavy lifting that LLMs are doing that I for one am not able to take for granted.

For people facing constraints similar to those in a resource constrained economic environment, the benefits of any technology that helps them spend less time doing work that doesn't deliver value is immediately visible/obvious/apparent.

It is no longer an argument about whether it is a hype or something, it is more about how best to use it to achieve your goals. Forget the hype. Forget the marketing of AI companies - they have to do that to sell their products - nothing wrong with that. Don't let companies or bloggers set your own expectations of what could or should be done with this piece of tech. Just get on the bandwagon and experiment and find out what is too much. In the end I feel we will all come from these experiments knowing that LLMs are already doing quite a lot.

TRIVIA I even came by this article https://www.greptile.com/blog/ai-code-reviews-conflict. That clearly pointed out how LLM reliance can bring both the 10x dev and 1x dev closer to a median of "goodness". So the 10x dev is probably worse and the 1x dev ends up getting better - I'm probably that guy because I tend to mis subtle things in code and copilot review has had my ass for a while now - I haven't had defects like that in a while.
by rtpg | 2025-07-02 23:20:17+00:00
What would USB printing on a SunRay look like? Even in general, how do thin clients work with accessories and the like? It does feel like there's some tension between "this USB device is plugged directly into a computer" and "the computer is not 'the' computer"?

Seems like a tricky problem but clearly at least some of it was solved given USB ports were on the machine
by hermitcrab | 2025-07-02 23:21:12+00:00
I'm guessing there isn't much overlap in the venn diagram of people who buy green energy products and the people who want to be in any way associated with Musk.

Musk has:

-Alienated a very large part of his customer base.

-Wasted resources on the 21st century Edsel that is the Cybertruck.

-Picked a fight with the President of the USA.

-Consistently failed to deliver on his promises.

I can't see how this ends well for Tesla.
Hey, If You Know Anything About SAP – I Need Your Brain for a SEC
by Njord01 | 2025-07-02 23:21:57+00:00
Hey HN! We're a small team building supply chain optimization tools for emerging markets. One of our core focuses is public procurement – we're building modules to analyze tenders, score suppliers based on risk, performance, compliance, and even recommend matches based on the tender specs.

Now we're working on integrating this logic with SAP systems, especially around SRM and sourcing modules (think Ariba-level workflows, but more local and smarter).

If you’ve ever worked with SAP procurement, SRM, Ariba, or similar – or just have thoughts on supplier scoring, tender ranking, sourcing automation, or vendor risk analytics – we’d love your input!

We’re still early, but aiming for a modular plugin-type integration. Gotchas? Ideas? Warnings? War stories? I’d really appreciate hearing anything that might save us pain or open new doors.

Thanks in advance
by MangoToupe | 2025-07-02 23:23:26+00:00
Of course I know Thiel is probably one of the most evil people alive. But I suspect he's a lot more evil than he's let us know. But this guy seems to have built his career off of actively propagating resentment and hate. If you read about Thiel's upbringing it's entirely unsurprising the two get along so well.

CF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swakopmund#Until_Namibian_Inde...

> Swakomund was known for its continued glorification of Nazism after World War II, including the celebration of Hitler's birthday and "Heil Hitler" Nazi salutes given by residents. In 1976, The New York Times quoted a German working in a Swakopmund hotel who described the city as "more German than Germany". As of the 1980s, Nazi paraphernalia was available to buy in shops.
by hellojesus | 2025-07-02 23:23:42+00:00
> I'll advocate for something every other developed nation has, like paid paternity leave or a sane healthcare system

Paid parental leave creates both deadweight loss and moral hazard. It also tends to reduce labor inversely proportional to labor's cost, with the largest reduction in labor hitting highly skilled, sub middle-aged females. This should be obvious as it lowers the expected productivity of workers, moreso when you extend parental leave to family leave and allow for the care of ailing elders. The argument for it seems to hinge on the dollars allowing greater workforce participation, but I'm not sold that greater participation with lower expected productivity is greater than fewer productive workers.

Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?

Regarding healthcare, it's well known that decreasing prices increase demand. While some healthcare demand is totally inelastic (injuries, cancer, etc.), the front line pcp interactions are elastic. Compound in people's willingness to decrease self care since they don't have to pay for future healthcare, and you've increased the rate of inelastic demand instances in the future, increasing demand. Now consider that prices would no longer be dictated by free markets, and now we have trouble with price discovery, with the power seemingly going to the single consumer, so it's likely treatments will be underpaid, which may lead to fewer practicioners and fewer innovations. Maybe I'm wrong... I haven't thought about heath economics in a long while. My preference would be to see a forced decoupling of healthcare provided as work benefits such that everyone had to purchase it on the open market (even if that loss of negotiating freedom between private parties irks me).
by deepsun | 2025-07-02 23:23:51+00:00
Yes, and I don't even see the value in generalizing to one Monad concept. It only makes things worse, as then one is tempted to share terminology between different kinds of monads. E.g. there's no reason Maybe's flatMap is called the same as List's flatMap, it might be more readable to call them differently, as some libraries do.
by danans | 2025-07-02 23:25:06+00:00
> Unless workers unionize and demand higher wages.

This is at odds with

> Perhaps we'd even see, with the influx of people

... because that influx of people will increase labor supply, lowering unions' bargaining ability. Unions primary leverage is their ability to withhold labor (AKA a strike).

> ... who haven't yet accepted being stuck in monotonous, menial labor and with an outsider's perspective, a renewed emphasis on bottom-up innovation and efficiency-creation.

Innovation and efficiency creation happen as the result of capital investment, via incentives to labor or by education, not as the result of hordes being forced into lower skilled labor at lower pay.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-07-02 23:25:22+00:00
By the time you could act it's too late, if you don't want to dismantle the nukes independently. It's a consequence of the existence.

Just imagine Biden having commanded to trigger a process which destroys the nuclear material (by triggering some degeneratio process or something) would that have been accepted or would everybody have said that limits U.S.'s strategic options permantly in too high degree?
by beaugunderson | 2025-07-02 23:25:23+00:00
back in the day at when I worked at a Seattle company there was a contest where a vase with an oblate spheroid shape was filled with M&Ms was left in the kitchen with some instructions for submitting guesses as to the total.

I created a 3D model of the vase in Blender, used some Python to get the interior area, and then found a figure for the average volume of M&Ms to get a count.

my guess was off by about half, but was very close to many of the other engineers' numbers, to the point where we asked them to recount. the recount revealed I was closest and it turns out they had used a method other than counting for the original number (they weighed them or something... it was way off).
Hetackling SAP supply chain pain. Got advice?
by Njord01 | 2025-07-02 23:25:42+00:00
Hey folks, We’re a small startup currently based in the UK, relocating to San Francisco next month. Our focus: building smarter supply chain modules that fix the real pain points in SAP environments – especially around public procurement, supplier risk scoring, tender analytics, and automated matching between vendors and government contracts.

We’re now moving toward integrating what we’ve built into SAP ecosystems – starting with Ariba and SRM-style modules. The challenge: SAP is massive, complex, and… let’s be honest, not always friendly to innovation.

Anyone here with experience working with SAP integrations, procurement workflows, supplier risk engines, or tender-based sourcing strategies? We’d love to hear your insights, warnings, success stories, or even just “watch out for that edge case” tips.

Also curious – if you've ever hacked around SAP, seen homegrown fixes, or built tools that sit on top of it, how did you go about it?

Thanks in advance – happy to share what we’ve learned too!
by taeric | 2025-07-02 23:26:22+00:00
You can personally believe it, but you also need to provide some evidence to the claim. Farmers that can't afford the R&D team necessary to learn a lot of this stuff will have trouble competing here. Such that, I'm comfortable claiming this sort of advantage will only consolidate the profits into bigger corporations.

And, indeed, if you look into high quality cotton supply, you find there are relatively few names.
by shagie | 2025-07-02 23:26:34+00:00
From the about page... https://asciimoon.com/about/

> ASCIIMoon is a small web app that tracks the moon's phases and uses ASCII art to create a basic visual representation of the moon's current appearance based on light percentage.

> This is a personal project, and is in no way a precise representation.

https://www.moongiant.com/phase/today/ is what it should look like. The moon for July 2nd should be something that is a half circle illuminated and a half circle in the dark.

The image on asciimoon shows a circle occluding the moon where it appears that the circle occluding the moon's edge is at 50%.

I'd have to sit down and do the math, but there is way more than 51.79% illuminated in today's rendering.

While I recognize that this is a personal project and not a precise representation... it has a fair amount of work to do to make it so that the correct percentage is illuminated.

This does have some interesting JavaScript and css tricks... but it needs some more math done.
by wilg | 2025-07-02 23:27:09+00:00
No it isn't. People buy movie tickets, annual passes, and other things all the time that are not "rented". These are things you buy, and you may lose access to them if something happens to the business.

The terms of the purchase of an online game that might shut down are quite clear and known ahead of time. It's just not a fixed amount of time.
by andyferris | 2025-07-02 23:27:20+00:00
> so that they can be interchanged or upgraded without jarring the user against the new version or device

I suppose this is a big point. I used to spend hours... days really... setting up a new PC. Partly because it would take ages just to get everything off the various floppy disks and CD-ROMs and installed onto the HDD, but also because everything was quirky.

Nowadays I hew to the default install of Ubuntu (or Windows + WSL2) and replacing my device (or SSD) or upgrading the OS is basically a seemless experience. I have some .bashrc/git config/etc stuff I can grab quickly and then I'm basically good to go.
by tverbeure | 2025-07-02 23:29:23+00:00
I shortly tried FSD during their May and November freebie month last year. There were times when an intervention wasn't strictly required, just like you can't intervene when your angsty teenager with learning permit is at the wheel, but it was still shockingly bad.

I have no doubt that there's a good percentage of FSD users out there who don't intervene to avoid lowering stats even if they rationally know that they should have.