MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by piltdownman | 2025-07-14 08:53:25+00:00
// There’s a price to be paid for being on stage, all the time

No, there's a price to be paid for espousing values outside of the Overton Window - and there always will be in the absence of continuously exercised civil rights.

The last time there was this level of collective punishment and erosion of civil rights (with self-policing sycophants pleading for clemency with the abusers) it was known as McCarthyism. Given that McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, was Trump’s core mentor and lodestone on the American Real Politik, it's easy to chart the ideological fingerprints across the decades.

Clay Risen’s book 'Red Scare' represents a comprehensive overview of the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible - from executive orders and congressional-committee hearings to conservative control of vital media outlets - all of which can be directly mapped to the actions of the current cabinet.

//I wonder how many people have lost (or failed to get) jobs, because of stuff they’ve posted on LinkedIn (or here). I know a couple of teachers lost jobs, because they posted pictures of themselves, on vacation, with drinks in their hands.

It starts with the public 'admissions', the low-hanging fruit. Then you get the private investigators leaning on soft-sources for anything that can use as dirt or parallel construction.

The FBI had the Responsibilities Program - where they would share information with PTAs and local school boards. You know: ‘This teacher has a background that’s kind of suspect,’ ‘Here’s a list of books that you want to remove from your library.’

How long until the photo used as grounds-for-termination contains a same-sex couple, or a possible illegal immigrant, or Jerome Powell?
by dmurray | 2025-07-14 08:53:40+00:00
Surely North Korea could arrange people to do this, too. They already have people on the ground in the US e.g. to open bank accounts, and they only need this for candidates that actually get the job, not every interview.

You might say the people who interviewed the candidate should be there when he picks up his laptop. But this is already an extremely remote-friendly company, the interviewers might never be in the office. He's going to pick it up from the IT department in the basement and at best they will take a photograph of his face.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-07-14 08:53:54+00:00
First, is it just me, or can I not scroll your website (tried different browsers), though I can click the links to hop around.

Second, I’d love this to be like Obsidian. Takes care of the organization without dumping it in a local database with metadata. As part of my digital chores, I back up and export a copy of each month’s photos from Apple Photos. I want to organize them decoupled from Apple’s App. Will “Photo Organizer” do that? The idea is that any Picture Viewer in the future should just be able to browse the folders and show me around, organized into whatever organization pattern I do now.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-14 08:54:15+00:00
> UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1

I think there's an important middle step here, which is stuff that wasn't "banned" but was nevertheless not on the playlist, and the pirate radio stations whose personnel gradually went mainstream. Both from the Radio Caroline era (Jonnie Walker, rock) and Kiss FM (Trevor Nelson, UK garage). Let's not forget the government's attempts to ban the rave scene.

In comics you had 2000AD and Judge Dredd, inspired by the French Metal Hurlant.

> If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies

Not movies, but TV: Doctor Who (often dystopian), Blake's 7, the Prisoner, and the little-seen but extremely prescient Doomwatch. And of course the darkest nuclear apocalypse movie, Threads. Filmed in the parts of Thatcher-era Sheffield which looked like they had already been nuked.

UK always simply had less money and a narrower set of TV/radio gatekeepers. The diversity and inventiveness is there nonetheless. So, yes, a lot of things have to get American money and licenses in order to be made.
by moffkalast | 2025-07-14 08:54:37+00:00
That would partially explain why abliteration usually results in major performance loss, as trying to force the model to forget a specific type of reply probably causes a cascading effect with catastrophic forgetting all the way down.

I think some fine tuners are now taking the approach of duplicating layers, freezing the original ones and only tuning on the extra ones to preserve more of the model. Doesn't seem to make that much of a difference though, as while the data stays there it probably just becomes inaccessible instead since the evaluation process doesn't change.
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-14 08:55:54+00:00
> The Eastern Indian state of West Bengal has a similar complex, where all the international scam-calls targeting English-speaking nations originate.

Yup. But - as much as I love to dunk on India for not doing anything on a federal level to combat the scammers - it's not exclusively India that's got issues with running scam callcenters. The Philippines are a hotspot as well [1], and Turkey is also ramping up [2] although their scammers mostly target Germany [3] as there is a sizable Turkish-origin diaspora here and a lot of Turks speak decent-enough German.

[1] https://www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/media-release/afp-partner...

[2] https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/turkiye-to-contain-fra...

[3] https://www.dailysabah.com/turkiye/istanbul-police-uncover-i...
by guenthert | 2025-07-14 08:55:55+00:00
In embedded systems using MCUs with very little memory (AVR comes to mind) assembly might be preferred over high level languages (very generously counting C as HLL here). It might even be fun (for truly launch-and-forget projects -- don't even think about maintaining such code) to forgo structured programming and get creative with control flow and self-modifying code.

As a systems engineer it's good to know _some_ x86-64 assembly as sooner or later you're facing a stack trace / register dump and will have to try to make sense of it. Personally, I would take it only further, if you're interested in building compilers.

As an odd twist to the whole assembly vs. HLL dichotomy, sbcl is used by some as assembly playground: https://pvk.ca/Blog/2014/03/15/sbcl-the-ultimate-assembly-co...
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-14 08:56:27+00:00
Does that imply you have to like it or be labeled a hypocrite?

Life isn't a series of black or white choices, but full of multifacetted grey areas where some bad will always be mixed in with the good.

I can very much dislike restaurants sleuthing me even if I have sites with add revenue.

I do not care for their imagined 'marginal service improvent potential'. For excellent service and good food, you do not need to know anything about me beyond my reservation and any food allergies me or my party might volunteer.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-14 08:59:10+00:00
"Standing on the toes of giants" is a great phrase.

Unfortunately a lot of CS theory really is of limited application. The stuff that is, then takes a very long time to make it into implementations, and then the implementation has to climb the adoption curve. Facing at every step of the way entrenched users who don't like change. See the C++ -> Rust transition, for example.

Personally I like the way that C# has gradually introduced functional-flavor material into an OO imperative language.
by Amwam | 2025-07-14 08:59:40+00:00
> First, is it just me, or can I not scroll your website (tried different browsers), though I can click the links to hop around.

It is the same for me. Looks like there is an `overflow:hidden` style applied to the body for some reason

Edit: Tried a different browser, there is a cookie popup that was getting blocked. I think that is blocking the scroll
by bayindirh | 2025-07-14 09:00:17+00:00
Even as a solo developer, I can swear by decision logs, test and documentation, in that order. I personally keep a "lab notebook" instead of a "decision log" which chronicles the design in real-time, which forms basis of the tests and documentation.

Presence of a lab notebook allows me to write better documentation faster, even if I start late, and tests allow me to verify that the design doesn't drift over time.

Starting blind-mindedly for a one-off tool written in a weekend maybe acceptable, but for anything going to live longer, building the slow foundation allows things built on this foundation to be sound, rational (for the problem at hand) and more importantly understandable/maintainable.

Also, as an unpopular opinion, design on paper first, digitize later.
by fabian2k | 2025-07-14 09:00:39+00:00
The simple fact that they restrict this to the EU, where they are forced to provide the option, shows that Apple is not serious about this. They're barely fulfilling the letter of the law here.

If this would be only about security as Apple claims, there would be no reason to restrict this to the EU and to force Browser vendors to publish other engines as separate apps after they meet the security conditions Apple imposes.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-07-14 09:02:40+00:00
It’s by degrees right? You can make a business that treats people as well as you can manage while feeding yourself, but almost anybody will want more than that, and some people want way more than that for a variety of social and innate reasons. Eventually you cross some arbitrary threshold where you’re doing, or at least enabling, really awful mistreatment of people and you use the level of indirection you have or some ideology or some excuse to justify it, but that’s when it’s a problem. People above the parent commentor’s wage class just so happen to also be the people most susceptible to this process, which is why they’re in a high position in the first place. Also, not that this is particularly important, but many or most of them (the extremely rich) dislike and look down on you because they need to in order to feel alright about their position. You don’t owe them kindness that they won’t return.
by perihelions | 2025-07-14 09:03:21+00:00
> "why don't those rich people make space telescopes just for fun?"

They do! You can look up why the Simonyi Telescope, or the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, bear those names. (Two examples from memory; there's many others). (edit: Or the Allen Array, for Microsoft fans)

The world's largest telescope of the mid (20th) century was a Rockefeller donation. Several of its peers were Carnegie's.

Observational astronomy was, for much of history, a useless hobby for kings and idle rich. It's a very recent thing that democratic societies decide to fund this kind of no-applications research through public institutions—and to do so on the megaproject scale. There are no precedents in human history for JWST.
by cjs_ac | 2025-07-14 09:04:00+00:00
It's fine if the tool has severe limitations at this stage. However, it's crucial to clearly state what those limitations are: not only does it prevent the flurry of complaints and chargebacks from customers who were disappointed that their specific case is unsupported, but it's also an opportunity to introduce a 'we're on this journey together' aspect that helps to make customers emotionally invested in the product.
by rsynnott | 2025-07-14 09:04:08+00:00
Quite a lot of the US right-wing is of the opinion that, basically, science is bad and shouldn't happen, or at the very least that only ideologically correct science should happen (for instance see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-mischaracterizes-study-as-... - while part of the story there is that, unsurprisingly, a Musk thing is really incompetent, they were _trying_ to do an ideological purge).

NASA is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of NASA's science is related to climate and weather, and a large part of the US right is still doggedly pretending that global warming isn't happening.
by KronisLV | 2025-07-14 09:04:14+00:00
The initial rough draft almost reminds me of the old "Build One to Throw Away" approach, which I think is pretty nice - not getting caught up in making something production ready, but rather exploring the problem space first.

I do admit that modern frameworks also help in that regard, instead of just stitching libraries together, at least for typical webdev stuff instead of more minimalistic CLI utilities or tools. The likes of Ruby on Rails, Django, Laravel, Express and even the likes of ASP.NET or Spring Boot.
by systemtest | 2025-07-14 09:04:53+00:00
Those popups I get multiple times a day about how this website works better on Chrome , which cover half my screen and which forward me to the App Store, are incredibly misleading. I have misclicked many times and then the App Store opens up. If you go back to the browser and hit the back button, it will again open the App Store. I have to press and hold the back button and skip multiple pages to get back to what I was doing.
by dave333 | 2025-07-14 09:04:57+00:00
According to BLP for a molecule like water the electrons don't form distinct bonds or lone pairs in the quantum sense. Instead, they form a single, shared, physical electron shell (a prolate spheroidal orbitsphere) that encompasses all three nuclei. The bent shape and specific bond angle are the direct, deterministic result of the nuclei and this orbitsphere arranging themselves into the most stable, lowest energy configuration dictated by classical electrodynamics and mechanics, without any reference to quantum uncertainty, probability, or abstract orbital shapes.
by tarsinge | 2025-07-14 09:04:58+00:00
You forgot the largest factor for price increases: manufacturers positioning all models as luxury ones. All the while cutting corners on quality control. Take French ones, they went from not the most well built but affordable cars for the masses to pseudo luxury expensive cars that still fall to pieces after 5 years. Who’s gonna buy that?

Stellantis for example knew about the problem of their engine blowing up since before 2020, but they chose to ignore it. Small turbocompressed engines are or new at this point and how to make them reliable is known too.

Or take VW, cheating before 2015 so regulation is not an excuse, and since a decade most failures are parts like coolant circuits because of cheap plastic, gearboxes, and a lot of non safety related electronics features. And what is the replacement for family mmovers? Luxury SUVs or 75k€ iD Buzz.

Edit: So in short multiple things can be true: legal reasons for price increases, but also bad marketing choices.

Edit2: actual study showing at least half the price increase was chosen: https://institut-mobilites-en-transition.org/publications/le...
by ks1723 | 2025-07-14 09:05:28+00:00
One of the major problems with dark matter and dark energy is, that the standard model has been experimentally confirmed to such high precision. All possible extensions proposed so far which tried to explain dark matter /dark energy have been basically falsified by the experiments.

The standard model is so descriptive and accurate, there is just no room for extensions which predict new physics but are still consistent with existing data.
by sgoody | 2025-07-14 09:05:59+00:00
I agree here. When I take notes more formally in a structured way, I often feel like there isn't a good place to store something. Or I think something is so scrappy that it doesn't "deserve" to be a note in a carefully curated store, so I don't write it down.

When taking daily notes... I can just literally fire anything into the note and forget about it.

If it's something I'm actively working on, it'll be in a note from a couple of days back.

If it's something more historic, it can sit gathering dust and I never need to worry about it and maybe if I need something I can just search over the notes files.
by rmdashrfv | 2025-07-14 09:06:58+00:00
> It can reveal “unknown unknowns”. Often, prototypes uncover things I couldn’t have anticipated.

This is the exact opposite of my experience. Every time I am playing around with something, I feel like I'm experiencing all of its good and none of its bad ... a honeymoon phase if you will.

It's not until I need to cover edge cases and prevent all invalid state and display helpful error messages to the user, and eliminate any potential side effects that I discover the "unknown unknowns".
by account42 | 2025-07-14 09:09:34+00:00
> with a things like brand, ethics, and environment coming second

I don't think that's true at all - usually brand comes first and ethics are not even considered.

> the product itself still has to a good choice for the customer to make a purchase

Not at all, the consumer only needs to be made to believe that it's a good choice which is very far from being the same thing.
by LightBug1 | 2025-07-14 09:09:54+00:00
Tragic that I spent much of my economics classes at high school and university learning about "perfect competition". I get that it's a theoretical underpinning, and rarely a reality, but still. I remember learning that monopolies being really frowned upon ... and yet here we are ... in a world of increasing monopoly.

The last two decades have been a joke in relation to anti-monopoly action.
by 123yawaworht456 | 2025-07-14 09:11:27+00:00
>There’s no clear answer on whether open-source AI is good or bad for society. Sure, it addresses a growing concentration of power among Silicon Valley companies; but as free models become more capable, giving them away raises the risks of misuse. Chinese military researchers have used Llama to build their own intelligence tool called ChatBIT, for instance, using it to gather data and make operational decisions. Researchers also created a “BadLlama” model with no safety features, something they wouldn’t have been able to do with closed systems like ChatGPT.

was this paragraph written in 2023? that genie is not going back into the bottle. China has the tech, the talent, and the compute.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-07-14 09:11:33+00:00
> Apple does pay the money... to the artists.

Spotify pay something absurd like 80% of revenue to the record labels (who theoretically pay artists).

And obviously Apple will need to invest more into their competing service to get scale.

None of this changes the fundamental point that Apple are self-dealing here, which might be fine in a world where they didn't control the app store.
by nasretdinov | 2025-07-14 09:12:16+00:00
One important aspect, also highlighted by others, is that for the long term you actually _don't_ want to focus solely on the immediate task you're solving. Sure, short term the tasks are getting done quicker, but since the end goal typically is implementing a full coherent solution you _have_ to step back and take a look at a bigger picture every now and then. Typically you won't be allocated specific time when to do this, so this "take a bird's eye view" part has to be incorporated into day-to-day work instead. It's also typically easier to notice bigger issues while you're already in the trenches, compared to doing "cleanup" separately "later".
by mtrovo | 2025-07-14 09:12:39+00:00
I totally agree in theory, in the same way I agree that Amazon delivering everything from a nearby warehouse is far more optimal than having thousands of small bookshops or random shops in prime locations.

I think that's the main vision behind Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens since he left Uber. You could order food prep for your week from a choice of menus, and the food would be prepared in an industrial kitchen for you and thousands of other people around you. It's basically restaurant-quality food that you can eat at home and isn't frozen.

Unfortunately for the meal prep market, I believe the break-even point for scale is much more difficult to achieve. Food is like hardware but with a much shorter end-of-life. You would need consistency in ordering to avoid excess spoilage and to operate at scale within small geographical pockets to make the delivery worthwhile. I really believe this could work with the right demographics and in the right geography, it's just much harder than simply delivering takeaways.
by tok1 | 2025-07-14 09:13:03+00:00
I think what you are asking falls into "cluster member evacuation and re-balancing" [0], combined with live migration [1] with minimal downtime.

[0] https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/howto/cluster_ma...

[1] https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/howto/move_insta...
by pjc50 | 2025-07-14 09:13:07+00:00
Interesting - I took a look at how this works and why it needs a reference, and the answer is the usual one of the 'moov atom': a critical piece of metadata. Lots of programs output it at the end of the file, but that makes it vulnerable to truncation, and for streaming it's useful to move it to the beginning of the file. ffmpeg refers to this as "fast start".
by Kon5ole | 2025-07-14 09:14:58+00:00
>To this day, I still re-read it every year or two, and it never loses its magic. And I can still describe what's happening on any given page although this has faded a lot.

That's interesting! I have a similar experience but for the opposite reason. I like the book and have enjoyed reading it several times, and listened to the audiobook just before the pandemic.

I know I like it and consider it to be a good book, but every time it's like I'm reading it for the first time. I can only remember thew "mood" so to speak, nothing about when, where, who, what. Even now, just 5 years after the last time.

I think it is related to Gibson's prose, but I remember Pattern Recognition quite well despite having read that only once.

Neuromancer is just a complete blank, except I know I like it. Wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience with a book?
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-07-14 09:15:08+00:00
> I'm operating under the assumption that most tech giants (and in particular Meta) are doing everything in their power to keep violating people's privacy as long as they can get away with it.

This is a bad take. They want to make money and make the stock price go up (at the exec level) but lots of people there want to make good products (even in ads). Encouraging them to find less privacy invasive ways of doing this is probably a better approach.

> Since it's impossible to audit everything such a huge corporation is doing and since cases can take a very long time to resolve (after which the damage is often already done), the huge fines are for scaring companies into submission. I am perfectly fine with that, no actually: I wish the fines were so big that they were actually threatening the business's survival.

But it doesn't work. We've had GDPR for 7 years now, and while it's definitely made some things a lot better, I don't see much decrease in privacy invasion from the Big 2 (Google and Facebook). Depressingly, the biggest impact on privacy has been from Apple's anti-competitive ATT moves.

> I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I think that Facebook simply shouldn't exist.

Yeah, this is a wild take. Do you feel the same about Google who do basically all of the same stuff?