MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-31 11:48:01+00:00
The person suggesting it had simple heuristics like "this proposition was asserted by three sources". This has obvious flaws (e.g. I can cite three lying sources). But even on Wikipedia, there is no automatic checking that sources say what's claimed. So it wouldn't be useless despite having obvious flaws.

But anyway, if you have heuristics like this you can make them propositions and do inference with them. Instead of thinking of it as "I've proved this false" or "the citations are correct" perhaps think of it more like a lint that runs against your code base and tells you whether you've done something that falls below expectations.

A more natural way to model it would be something like a Bayesian system where you assign probabilities, build up a hierarchical model, and flow probabilities through the model. But there's something nice about a simpler system that doesn't pretend to do more than it can.
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-31 11:48:15+00:00
It's a threshold thing. The easier you make reading, the more likely yo are to do it.

I've been using e-ink readers for about a decade, starting with the first Kindle (the one with a tiny keyboard) and now a Kobo Libra Colour (because f. the dude who can rent a whole city for his wedding).

I can pick it up, open the cover and it's _exactly_ where I left it the last time.

It weighs exactly the same whether I'm reading a 100 page novella or the latest Brandon Sanderson 1500 page brick. My eyes don't get tired because the display only updates on page change and it can ONLY read books, there's no way for me to get distracted by a notification.

Now I've started to train my brain to pick up my e-reader when I have the urge to start doomscrolling some algorithm shit hole. I've gone through 4 books in the last month already =)
by shepherdjerred | 2025-07-31 11:49:58+00:00
You can prevent quite a lot of these issues if you write rules for Cursor or your preferred IDE

Linters can also help quite a bit. In the end, you either have your rules enforced programmatically or by a human in review.

I think it’s a very different (and so far, for me, uncomfortable) way of working, but I think there can be benefits especially as tooling improves
by kasey_junk | 2025-07-31 11:49:59+00:00
I run the numbers every couple of years and I’ve never had a year that shows individual Congress people are particularly better at trading than an index over the course of their terms.

The fact is, the vast majority of Congress people _own index funds_ or similar portfolio construction.

When there are outliers they regress after a few years. The last time I ran the numbers the the majority of the outliers just got into Nvidia a little early. They mostly had tech heavy portfolio construction.

The big outliers were people like Pelosi who were married to wealthy spouses who were doing exotic trading, but several of them did poorly as well.

The fact is, Congress people have more scrutiny on their trades than the average person and more downsides.

We should restrict trading by Congress people because of the image of impropriety not because it’s actually common to make a bunch of money doing it.
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-31 11:50:30+00:00
I saw a nice 4 quadrant chart about this somewhere (but can't find it now).

Basically when a task has JUST the right urgency and/or difficulty level, my ADD superpowers engage and I can Just Do It.

But anything outside of that I just get bored and instead build a tool to filter and enrich RSS feeds, because it tickles my brain the right way.

I can kinda force myself to focus, but not always.
by benreesman | 2025-07-31 11:50:56+00:00
I take as dim a view as anyone of hyper-financialization: the incentive for a sophosticated market participant to market high complexity instruments to cless sophisticated counter parties is clear and pernicious. If we had allowed the CFTC to regulate OTC derivatives products in the 90s we'd be living in a different timeline.

But standard American and European options contracts are neither complex nor uniquely suited to speculation. These instruments are so fundamental that in many treatments you use them as the atoms from which to build more familiar instruments (theres a great MIT OpenCourseware about the martingale construction of an equity from binaries and calls, British guy, forget his name). You can explain such instruments to a precocious child and they've been in use by merchants and farmers and all kinds of people into the mists of antiquity.

It gives responsible financial regulation a bad name to be like "its the puts and those damn calls!"
by lynx97 | 2025-07-31 11:51:27+00:00
CAPTCHA was always a totally flawed concept. At the time they were invented, proponents were more then happy to ignore that accessibility issues related to CAPTCHA made the concept itself deeply discriminating. Imagine being blind (like I am) and failing to solve a CAPTCHA. Knowing what the acronym actually stands for, you inevitably end up thinking: "So, did SV just proof I am subhuman?" Its a bit inflamatory to read I guess, but please take your time to ponder how deep this one actually goes, before you downvote. You were proposing to tell computers and humans apart.

That said, I find it deeply satisfying to see LLMs solve CAPTCHAs and other discriminatory measures for "spam" reduction.
by jrockway | 2025-07-31 11:52:20+00:00
It's worth finding an optometrist that you have a good rapport with for that reason. I got lucky and get along really well with the person that I see; the results are worth speaking up for.

(I had two somewhat persistent problems before I started seeing her... One was that my prescription was focused a little before infinity because the sign is 20 feet away and not infinity feet away. We tweaked some stuff and fixed that problem. The other was that if I'm tired and it's pretty low contrast outside, I always see double. We added some extra prism for that and it's helped a lot. I've had the same prism prescription for 30 years but adding more was a noticeable improvement.)
by Waterluvian | 2025-07-31 11:54:26+00:00
Thanks for this. So I have half a thought I’m trying to flesh out from what you’ve shared. Bear with me, whoever reads this:

Are there essentially two flavours:

- the maths based on axioms that are fundamentally, cosmically true such as x = x. And in doing so we’re formalizing on paper the universal truths and all subsequent rules we know to be true given these

- the maths that incorporate those plus additional axioms that aren’t necessarily fundamentally true (or maybe just not provable), but work very well at laying a foundation for further rules that build a practically useful, but not necessarily “correct” toolbox

With the latter, is it kind of a “they won’t hold up under normal conditions but if you accept these axioms, there’s interesting things you can explore and achieve?”
by ninjin | 2025-07-31 11:54:38+00:00
That is not the same as in base though. For example, the NixOS developers maintain a large chunk code to generate scaffolding around systemd and to build code via Nix. They do not take a web server, fork it, and maintain it (alternatively, write that web server from scratch as is the case for httpd(8)). When I set up that OpenBSD server, I install the base system, place the configurations, start the daemons, and I am set. Not a single line of code runs outside of what is in the base repository.

I realise that the way BSDs do things is very different from Linux, but in BSD land the same people write the kernel, user land, and maintain the ports tree. With this I am not saying it is superior, but it does lead to a very different experience both as a developer and user. Yes, there are some exceptions to this like clang, the AMD GPU driver, etc. But the overall picture is true.
by astrobe_ | 2025-07-31 11:56:29+00:00
A program is not a novel, despite the arguments of literate programming fans. It is more like interactive fiction. In the small, it is just short pieces of text. In the large, there is an invisible network connecting each of them. And the challenge you are facing when assigned to legacy code, is to make changes in the small pieces of text that are consistent with that network, or even sometimes changing the connections.
by nicoco | 2025-07-31 11:57:15+00:00
That article loses its credibility because of this, my thoughts too. Facebook and Instagram websites are among the worse offenders when it comes to "time-to-content" or whatever metric cool kids use these days. Maybe the apps are faster, but I'd rather avoid spyware on my pocket computers. Probably the author is running a $3k+ laptop and renews it every year?
by johnecheck | 2025-07-31 11:58:24+00:00
"And other forms of speculation"...

Like buying the stock? You're not talking about reform - you can't remove speculation from the stock market without banning stock markets entirely.

I agree that market manipulation (especially by those in power) is an enormous problem. Can we hope to truly fix that? Or are we just going for damage control by banning derivatives or the entire stock market?
by lynx97 | 2025-07-31 11:59:51+00:00
This is really just a PoC. pure.md is a pragmatic solution, since it gives good results. I was looking at markitdown but didn't find a way to disable href targets (noisy) nor did my tests of youtube transcripts work with markitdown. Keeping it on my list to monitor. Whatever works best is going to be used.
by squidbeak | 2025-07-31 11:59:54+00:00
You seem to be replying to a completely different post. You'll see I didn't once use the term 'intelligence', so the reprimand you lead with about the use of that term is pretty odd.

The ramble that follows has its curiosities, not least the compulsion you have to demean or insult your 'gullible', 'credulous' opponents, but is otherwise far from any point. The contention of yours I was replying to was your curiously absolute statement that human performance doesn't degrade with the introduction of irrelevant information. I gave you instances any of us can relate to where it definitely does degrade. Rather than dispute my point, you've allowed some kind of 'extra information' to bounce you around irrelevancies from one tangent to the next - through torture, blenders, animals as systems, etc etc. What you've actually done, quite beautifully, is restate my point for me.
by speed_spread | 2025-07-31 12:01:25+00:00
As OP demonstrated, Rust compiler performance is not the problem, it's actually quite fast for what it does. Slow builds are rather caused by reliance on popular over-generic crates that use metaprogramming to generate tons of code at compile time. It's not a Rust specific tradeoff but a consequence of the features it offers and the code style it encourages. An alternative, fast building crate ecosystem could be developed with the same tools we have now.

By comparison, Go doesn't have _that_ problem because it just doesn't have metaprogramming. It's easy to stay fast when you're dumb. Go is the Forest Gump of programming languages.
by lapcat | 2025-07-31 12:01:47+00:00
> So religious nuts and ideologues?

I'll await your answer to my question about your criteria before I answer this unfortunately phrased follow-up.

Actually, I won't wait: Democracy depends on voters getting what they voted for. It's essential that there's consistency between a candidate's election campaign and the elected representative's behavior in office, otherwise you might as well vote for Mickey Mouse for all it matters. So yes, I'd take a consistent "religious nut" any day over someone who sells their soul to the highest bidder.

I have respect for people who do what they say and say what they mean, even if they don't agree with me. I have no respect for liars and con artists, regardless of their "intelligence" or "skill". The latter will always screw over the people they were elected to represent.
by mrjay42 | 2025-07-31 12:02:50+00:00
Worked in Norway for six years in a research lab (50% private | 50% public).

First thing I noticed when I arrived: they are using Google for emails, sharing documents, drives, meetings, research projects, etc. The loss of sovereignty that this represents AND the major risk for leaks/theft is MAD.

It was a research lab entirely focused on tech/CS/computational science So it's not like they don't know stuff about technology.

Years prior to this, I'm in Finland in a tiny lab in Turku/Åbo (the city has two names, one in Finnish the other in Swedish.

I remember there was a dude doing his master's trying to integrate a bunch of devices (phone, desktop, laptop, cloud, etc.) so that basically your AI assistant can automatically handle stuff. This implied A LOT of constant (or almost constant) data collection.

During one of the meeting, I think I'm the one who asked: "But wait, isn't this a massive issue in terms of privacy?" The big boss of the lab, replied: "Oh I know you're from France, and you guyz care a lot about this. But here we simply do not"

Conclusion:

I haven't looked at sociological studies trying to build an historical overview of the Nordic people and their relation to electronic privacy. But my experience goes so much against the idea I had about Nordic "culture" (this word means nothing here: Finnish and Norwegian are VERY different societies, but bear with me).

I really believed that in those countries I'd find some high priority, super secured, home made, safe solutions for handling messaging, data, research -> it is REALLY NOT THE CASE, I haven't seen ANY OF THAT; they're all using USA made cloud-(AI)-tech.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-07-31 12:05:05+00:00
Yeah, one of the reasons why I started to for all my dev side projects to be under a single wildcard subdomain, because I used to create new certs automatically with letsencrypt and everytime this spam happened. If I do things right it shouldn't matter, but I still feel better with the wildcard if I was to make a mistake...
by pjmlp | 2025-07-31 12:05:15+00:00
Yeah, but I am speaking about the out of the box experience, and culture of people using those systems, not the do your own distro kind of thing that nowadays plagues Linux.

Or all the other UNIX clones that were basically UNIX System V (or BSD derived) + twm, latter CDE, with the only visible difference being the vendor's name.
by alpaca128 | 2025-07-31 12:06:25+00:00
Perhaps a more fitting variant would be that the trustworthiness decreases with increasing number of sponsored channels and ad frequency. Although I have never seen any video directly sponsored by Apple, Dell or HP for example, same for GPUs and many smartphone brands. They provide free units for review at most, and those at least go to channels with fitting content and the trustworthiness can be judged more easily. Whereas some new brand you never heard of aggressively sponsoring videos of every major channel for months basically guarantees there's something wrong with the company, product or both.

I thought it goes without saying that I don't mean ads shown directly by YouTube, if you don't already block those in 2025 I don't know what to say.
by alecco | 2025-07-31 12:07:16+00:00
Terrible advice. Let me guess, you live in a big city, or in an anti-social suburb, or something along the lines.

My family's tight-knit small city is great for raising families and almost everybody has some interesting hobby. Even mothers of toddlers. Sure, they don't have six figure salaries, but their cost of living is low and quality of life is high. YMMV, not all small cities. Also, they are reluctant to let strangers into the fold. You need to earn their respect.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-07-31 12:07:19+00:00
> Youtube will still be accessible it is just the account making/usership which will be banned

Then what difference will it make in practice? Do the legislators really think that kids being able to comment on videos was the most harmful thing about the platform? YouTube will still be able to give you suggestions and send you down a rabbit hole of smoothbrain content even if you use it without an account.

> I support this- in part because I know those who want to get around enough or be private will always find a way, but it has a positive, reality affirming effect on the public.

It sounds like you admit that this has mostly signal value.

I really don't understand how you can support this.
by rwmj | 2025-07-31 12:08:47+00:00
Reminds me a bit of the BBC 1 ident from the 1960s-1980s, which was a physical model that was broadcast live (not even recorded!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noddy_(camera)

It was replaced with a custom-built electronic system which was itself pretty crazy. One of the COWs came up for sale a few years back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Originated_World
by thinkingemote | 2025-07-31 12:09:09+00:00
Hardest currently is reading AI assisted articles. Not slop, but good, assisted, even useful ones. The formatting, cadence, word choice, the bullet points, the lists, the use of that long dash. It's a smell and a pattern that is recognised. Its not human

What I like is story or witness or testimony. A person's own story about themselves where the topic is brought in and made relevant towards that. It's human.
by menaerus | 2025-07-31 12:09:54+00:00
Anything can be improved. Or almost anything. The question is by how much, 5%, 10% or 300%. In this case, I am not really I understand the problem oxide is set to solve so I can't really comment precisely but to me it sounds that if we generally say that data center equipment is suffering from power budget and cooling issues then I don't see this as a problem that software can solve.
by atoav | 2025-07-31 12:10:14+00:00
I did not say the author is not advocating for friction, I said the authors wording about the tech world wanting everything to be fictionless is wrong (as I think I demonstrated with my example of customer support).

To quote the author:

> In tech circles friction is seen as bad, everything needs to be frictionless. Every interaction with anything needs to be smooth and uninterrupted.

This is the claim I refuted. This is what the tech circles like to appear like, all while using friction when it comes to their AGBs, when it comes to rejecting their tracking cookies, when it comes to opting out or unsubscribing, you get the idea. Don't want a path to be taken often? Add friction.

These are all examples for neferious use of friction, but in itself there is nothing bad about friction. E.g. the "Format" button on a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera needs to be hold for three seconds (animating as you hold it). This added friction gives you enough time to reconsider whether you really want to erase all those videos you recorded.
by nicoburns | 2025-07-31 12:11:48+00:00
> The current roadmap lists Shadow DOM and CSS Grid as priorities

I've been working on the CSS Grid support. About to land "named grid lines and areas" support which should make a bunch more websites layout correctly.

I'm biased because it's my project, but IMO the approach Servo is using for CSS Grid is pretty cool in that the actual implementation is in an external library (Taffy [0]) that can be used standalone and is widely used accross the Rust UI ecosystem, including in the Blitz [1] web engine (which also uses Taffy for Flexbox and Block layout), the Zed [2] text editor, and the Bevy [3] game engine.

I'm hopeful that this approach of breaking down a web engine into independently usable modules with public APIs (which builds upon Servo's earlier work on modular libraries such as Stylo and html5ever) will make it easier for people to get involved in web engine development (as they can understand each piece in isolation), and make it easier for people to create new web engines in future (as they won't have to start completely from scratch).

[0]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy [1]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz [2]: https://zed.dev [3]: https://bevy.org/
by RHSeeger | 2025-07-31 12:11:55+00:00
> he proved out a viable business with just a few hundred dollars of investment

That statement is a bit of a stretch though, because

> charging a fraction of their monthly cost

I have to assume at least part of his success was the price point; and that price point was possible because he wasn't paying any software developers to do things right. So "having lots of vulnerabilities" was a core component of his business model. Once that part is removed, the model is no longer proven.
by Fischgericht | 2025-07-31 12:11:58+00:00
Ah, how I love americans still living in the bubble thinking they are relevant.

No, you will neither get an Intel N100 devkit in the US, nor any Realtek devkits.

No, your supply chains will not get "more resilient". The industry simply is no longer taking your country as a trustworthy an serious trading partner.

If you want to do R&D in electronics, you need quick imports from China.

Yes, the US is totally prepared now for a future of coal powered steam trains, true. Have fun with that :)
by entropsilk | 2025-07-31 12:12:02+00:00
We must live in different realities because most design has almost no creativity or originality at all. "Good design" means the website/design looks exactly the same as everything else.

We have the tools to do anything imaginable with film and video but the top box office films right now in the US are all completely derivative, non-creative human slop.

"Good design" is so trivial to do with generative AI.

We hardly live in 1910 Paris with all the cool people drinking absinthe in between cranking out all these artistic masterpieces.
by prmoustache | 2025-07-31 12:12:25+00:00
Kids don't really need a personal smartphone until they reach at least secondary school which put them quickly unto the early teens years.

During a transition period between 11 and 13 I applied a simple solution: smartphone stay in a drawer at home unless some communication with people is important for school work, parental control disallowed install of apps, data plan was limited to the bare minimum.

My eldest daughter is nearing 15 and now parental control has been off for a year. I can see she is not installing every dumb app possible she has a bit more liberty but screen hours is still caped and the smartphone stays out of the bedroom during the night. This is probably a rule that will sty for a while as she is sharing her bedroom with her smaller sister.

Again, rules will gradually relax with time. Key is to allows them to reach autonomy. Being divorced with the shared custody, with different rules in each household made it a bit more complicated, for example my EX didn't wanted to follow my rule of no screen time during at least a 2h time window every day where all devices are off or in a drawer, including for adults living in the household. So far I think she and her sister understand that it is OK feeling frustrated/limited and not being considered cool at school. Also that being cool at their age only gets you so far and most popular kids in my teenage years where those that ended up the worse at adulthood: early pregnancy, early addiction issues, most didn't get so far into studies and didn't have the luxury to be in a situation where they can steer their own path professionally, at least not at the extent I could. Having the example of 2 different houses, with their own mother having her own struggles help as well as sad as it can be.
Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?
by JFerreol_J | 2025-07-31 12:13:54+00:00
I’ve been chatting with a few dev friends and colleagues about Cursor, copilot etc

and what surprised me was that their biggest feeling about this was neither excitement nor concern, but sadness.

Sadness in the sense that they are afraid the “fun” parts of their job (thinking, building, solving) might slowly be taken away. That they’ll become bored reviewers.

It got me wondering if other devs feel this way?

Are we really on a path where engineering turns into a supervisory job? or is it just temporary until it shifts into something radically different?

Curious to hear from dev folks here !