MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sublinear | 2025-07-07 08:04:43+00:00
Yes.. y-y-yessss

This world is in the shitter and for what?

Far too many people with their mouths "occupied" to see things for what they are and say it. Don't make me say this in a more vulgar way.

Do you seriously think that people are investing in "AI" because they think AGI is just around the corner? Fuck no! They invest because everyone else does and they think they can time the market (and many reading this right now probably will).
by ithkuil | 2025-07-07 08:04:45+00:00
I grew up in southern Switzerland and the dialect situation is the same as you describe.

Not necessarily every town retained their distinctive dialect in practice because people move, not all parents pass the dialect down to their kids etc.

But I remember a friend of mine lived in this village of 40 inhabitants where they said "e peu que?" instead of italian "e poi cosa?"
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-07 08:05:26+00:00
Who called them "english characters"?

Pinyin uses s in a very common way, z in the way of Italian, and c more or less in the manner of various Slavic languages. They are a sequence of related sounds: s is the fricative, z is affricated, and c is both affricated and aspirated.

Sh, zh, and ch are a sequence of sounds related to s, z, and c. Sh is a fricative articulated farther back in the mouth, zh is its affricated form, and ch is both affricated and aspirated.

And as a bonus, sh and ch match English usage, which isn't likely to have been a primary concern.

It's also worth noting that for many Chinese speakers, there is no difference between s/sh, z/zh, or c/ch.

(x, j, and q are what you get if you use the middle of your tongue, instead of the tip, to pronounce sh/zh/ch. They occur before front vowels; sh/zh/ch only appear before back (or central) vowels.)

A friend of mine remarked to me once that when she was in school, her teacher informed the class that English speakers would not understand what the pinyin letter "q" was supposed to mean, which I immediately confirmed. She thought this was hilarious.
by cluckindan | 2025-07-07 08:05:37+00:00
I mostly agree with your viewpoints, but why would you leave some drugs unregulated and could you provide some examples of such drugs?

Opioids are only dangerous due to variance in purity (overdoses) and availability (withdrawal-motivated crime).

Of course addiction and dependence can be exploited for profit, but how is opioid dependence different in that respect from alcohol dependence, gambling addiction, sex addiction or even TikTok?

We already know what causes compulsive behaviors linked to addictions and also how to undo them. Amphetamines, cocaine, opioids, gambling and sex have a common denominator, namely overexpression of Delta-FosB protein in the orbitofrontal cortex. Those changes can be eradicated overnight with histone deacetylase inhibitors, but this treatment is not generally available.
by Nursie | 2025-07-07 08:05:54+00:00
It's interesting to think about, and yes, I would think it's more accurate to consider that homo (sapiens) neanderthalensis are part of what became us, and in that case it seems odd/wrong to talk about them being outcompeted when there was interbreeding and their descendents are still here.

However they are still extinct!

It reminds me of the historical narratives in the UK about Viking settlers. We were taught (in the 80s and 90s) to think of the vikings as an invasive force, who were and remained an alien population, who raised levies from the poor, honest britains, and who eventually left or were overcome or just faded from view or whatever. We tended to then skip to the Norman conquest and not talk about it too much. But it's clear in the narrative that the Vikings are 'them' and the saxons are 'us'.

Only when you look at the actual history, the viking people settled and intermarried, cross-pollinated culturally and religiously and are firmly 'us' (if you're British). As a political force, the Norman conquest put an end to their rule of the northern part of England, but it's not like they suddenly all went 'home' after a couple of hundred years of settling.
by mrweasel | 2025-07-07 08:06:22+00:00
"Seværdigheds knappen" (The attraction button) as a former co-workers calls it.

The "control" button is slightly weirder. Why is that a ^ on some of Apples keyboards, while only having the text "ctrl" on others. The "control" vs. ctrl isn't related to space, the laptop keyboard have "control", but my full size wired Apple keyboard just have "ctrl" despite the button being physically bigger.
Niche Communities or a General One?
by Beerus017 | 2025-07-07 08:07:00+00:00
I built Clavikl (https://clavikl.com) — a community for medical students and healthcare professionals.

Would you prefer a centralized platform for all kinds of discussions like Reddit (https://www.reddit.com), or niche, topic-specific platforms like Stack Overflow (https://stackoverflow.com)?
by HaZeust | 2025-07-07 08:07:29+00:00
>"The global high-frequency trading (HFT) market was valued at USD 10.36 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 16.03 billion by 2030"

>

> (unverified by a human, use at your own risk).

Honorable for mentioning the lack of verification; doing so would have dissolved the AI's statement, but jury's out on how much EXACTLY:

Per https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...:

"While estimates vary due to the difficulty in ascertaining whether each trade is an HFT, recent estimates suggest HFT accounts for 50–70% of equity trades and around 50% of the futures market in the U.S., 40% in Canada, and 35% in London (Zhang, 2010, Grant, 2011, O’Reilly, 2012, Easley et al., 2012, Scholtus et al., 2014)"

In my original reply, I used the literal median of that spectrum @ 60%

Jane Street - who has recently found themselves in hot water from the India ban - disputes that AI summary ALONE. Per https://www.globaltrading.net/jane-street-took-10-of-of-us-e... , Jane Street booked 20.5B in trading revenue, primarily though HFT's, just in 2024.

Brought to you by someone who takes these market movements too seriously for their own good.
by dwattttt | 2025-07-07 08:07:31+00:00
"inline(always)" I expect matches Clang's "always_inline", and Clang's documentation makes what it does clearer:

> Inlining heuristics are disabled and inlining is always attempted regardless of optimization level.

So it should be interpreted as "always attempt to inline", as opposed to "this must be inlined", or other attributes that instead influence the "should this be inlined" heuristic.

EDIT: as curious an attribute as it might be, I didn't mean to be talking about inclines
by squatin64 | 2025-07-07 08:09:02+00:00
why does this not mention ai? these layoffs are essentially only because of ai both indirectly and directly, perhaps not because of current impactful productivity gains but realignment of strategic resources to invest in ai infrastructure (capital vs labor) and then also likely preparation for the continued exponential improvement of models and coding agents which will require humans to get out of the loop

essentially imo all 'pacts' between employers and companies is going to change because basically the entire category of economic work we are doing as a society will become not necessary over the next decade due to this

its just that software development is going to come earlier due to its critical nature to the roadmap of model improvement and increasing lab research speed. also due to the fact that RL works quite well for software development, including the more advanced applications like model research

also as a preemptive rebuttal for anyone saying i have no idea how swe/ai research works i am a swe who also does ai research work
by DidYaWipe | 2025-07-07 08:09:15+00:00
Ah yes, this old argument. Except nobody slams his cursor against the top of the screen in real life, assuming that the menu bar is "infinitely tall." Watch real users interact with a Mac's menu, and you simply won't see this behavior. Not to mention that it doesn't work if you're using a laptop and a second monitor positioned behind and above it.

And we're talking about a GUI here, so when I minimize an application's GUI then yes, I expect that I've minimized the application. And again, I think you'll find that the vast majority of users work under this M.O.

But your observation raises another usability issue caused by the single menu: Instead of an "infinite" desktop, the Mac reduces the entire screen to a single application's client area... so, historically, Mac applications treated it that way...littering it with an armada of floating windows that you had to herd around.

The problem is that turning the whole screen into one application's client area fails because you can see all the other crap on your desktop and all other open applications' GUIs THROUGH the UI of the app you're trying to use. It's stupid.

So, to users' relief, the floating-window nonsense has been almost entirely abandoned over the last couple of decades and single-window applications have become the norm on Mac as they have been on Windows forever. Oh wait, hold on... here comes Apple regressing back to "transparent" UI with "liquid glass;" a failed idea from 20+ years ago.

Full circle, sadly.
by Frieren | 2025-07-07 08:09:25+00:00
Ecology and economy are the same thing. The only way it is misaligned is because quite often the environmental impact is an externality.

E.g. A big oil corporation gets the profits of selling oil but the environmental price is paid by everybody else. Accounting the increase in climate disasters, oil becomes way more expensive that it is currently reflected in its price.

So, when someone argues that "taking into account the environment is too expensive" they are really arguing that "I should not pay for the environment damage but society at large should be paying while I collect profits".
by seadan83 | 2025-07-07 08:09:51+00:00
> It is similar to how human brains operate.

Is it? Do we know how human brains operate? We know the basic architecture of them, so we have a map, but we don't know the details.

"The cellular biology of brains is relatively well-understood, but neuroscientists have not yet generated a theory explaining how brains work. Explanations of how neurons collectively operate to produce what brains can do are tentative and incomplete." [1]

"Despite a century of anatomical, physiological, and molecular biological efforts scientists do not know how neurons by their collective interactions produce percepts, thoughts, memories, and behavior. Scientists do not know and have no theories explaining how brains and central nervous systems work." [1]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10585277/
by demetrius | 2025-07-07 08:10:01+00:00
> to dramatize what would otherwise be a dry spelling shift

I don't think that's how it was developed, though. I really doubt there are real-world cases where cwen was scrubbed and queen written above it (correct me if I'm wrong!).

I think it’s more like “people stopped writing English for time being, only learned to write Norman and Latin, so when they needed to write a word or two, they’s use the spelling they knew. Eventually, this spelling because the way of writing English”.

I don’t think a situation with Godwin is plausible.

> I never realized the irony that English avoids > diacritics because of French influence

I'm not sure that's the best way to put it. Old English also generally didn’t use diacritics (modern texts add them: we’d use cwēn instead of cƿen, but these are modern invention).

So, English didn't use diacritics before Normans, and Normans didn't change this.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-07-07 08:10:23+00:00
I heard that private equity does the equivalent. They show you balance sheet of a potential takeover candidate then ask for feedback. I assume that good candidates will need to do some Excel to answer their questions. Also, interviewing for trader roles at ibanks is similar. Show a trading scenario, ask what they would do and why. I guess law must be similar as well.
by ay | 2025-07-07 08:11:52+00:00
You will need to first sit and ballpark, and then sit and benchmark, and discover your ballpark was probably wrong anyhow:-)

Some (for me) useful pointers to that regard for both:

1. https://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf - an extremely nice resource on micro architectural impacts of instructions

2. https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/llvm-mca.html - tooling from Intel that allows to see some of these in real machine code

3. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t... - shows you whether the above is matching the reality (besides the CPU alone, more often than not your bottleneck is actually memory accesses; at least on the first access which wasn’t triggered by a hardware prefetcher or a hint to it. On Linux it would be staring at “perf top” results.

So, the answer is as is very often - “it depends”.
by notfish | 2025-07-07 08:12:09+00:00
Yeah I’ve wanted to build this for ages (and have tried a couple times). The use case is festivals/sporting events and other places where permanent infrastructure doesn’t really exist. The hard part is keeping messages small if you wanna include any of the token tech you’re talking about - probably, a system where your payment for usage is that you be an active relay node is more effective. Something something trust models, ala existing cert signing models.
by gwd | 2025-07-07 08:14:05+00:00
> Also, I never realized the irony that English avoids diacritics because of French influence

But is that why they avoid diacritics? It sounds like English probably wouldn't have had diacritics even if the Normans hadn't come in.

Seeing my son try to learn to read things like "cycle", I feel like diacritics would make English writing a lot more accessible.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-07-07 08:15:18+00:00
The real problem: How you accurately evaluate a candidate without these questions? I dislike them as much as the next person, but I don't know a better way. Literally, all the best tech firms and ibanks do it. They pay the most and are most profitable. They must be doing something right. The real trick is finding a "fractically complex" question with many levels. The one in this blog is pretty good! No candidate can solve it perfectly in the allotted time, but you can have a good discussion about the "edges" of the problem -- where good candidates shine.
by ykonstant | 2025-07-07 08:15:23+00:00
I love this, because I always do a double take and start pronouncing it as coOUUUperate and REEEElect, giving me much entertainment (I am easily entertained!).

Edit: also see rôle, which invokes this classic: https://i.redd.it/qrfr7o4ue2z51.jpg
by fcatalan | 2025-07-07 08:15:35+00:00
As a lifelong Tolkien fan I have always been fascinated by Old English. Not enough for any serious study, but when things like this pop up I always take a look.

Then I like to sound a bunch of verses, it feels epic even if you don't understand anything, but then suddenly you get to:

"þæt wæs god cyning"

or

"Hē hæfde gōd ġeþanc þā hwīle þe hē mid handum healdan mihte bord and brād swurd"

and it feels like you solved a fun riddle.

Also, I'm sorry but I must:

For þone andweardan mycelan lust þæs geworhtan wites on þisse stowe, ic sceal cyðan þæt þa niwostan miclan spræc-endebyrdnessa sind swiðe gōde tō awendanne fram and tō ealdum Englisce.
by Fluorescence | 2025-07-07 08:15:44+00:00
It can mean they suffered serious health problems for 15 years until a particularly bad seizure or some such took them. TBI can cause long-term conditions like epilepsy, physical disability, organ dysfunction, sleep problems etc.

I was very struck reading about about a mass-shooting "survivor" dying 20 years later and it being considered a murder. It sounded wrong but when reading the account of the terrible health problems they suffered every day until their death, I was left in no doubt it was not just murder but a far crueler one than those that died on the day.
by ghxst | 2025-07-07 08:16:07+00:00
I can see how recommending the right books to someone who's struggling might actually help, so in that sense it's not entirely useless or could even help the person get better. But more importantly I don't think most people are suggesting LLMs replace therapists; rather, they're acknowledging that a lot of people simply don't have access to mental healthcare, and LLMs are sometimes the only thing available.

Personally, I'd love to see LLMs become as useful to therapists as they've been for me as a software engineer, boosting productivity, not replacing the human. Therapist-in-the-loop AI might be a practical way to expand access to care while potentially increasing the quality as well (not all therapists are good).
by yorwba | 2025-07-07 08:16:22+00:00
In this case, the lookup table is used for popcount, and there's a comment in the Z80 assembly that says "One lookup vs eight bit tests." If the code could make use of a hardware popcount instruction, the lookup table would lose, but if that isn't available, a 256-byte lookup table could be faster. So it's less "lookup tables are always faster" and more "lookup tables can be faster, this is one such case."
by popwatch | 2025-07-07 08:16:44+00:00
Built this Chrome extension that generates professional emails using AI while keeping all data processing local to your browser. Unlike other AI email tools, EffiMail integrates directly with existing workflows (Salesforce, HubSpot, Gmail, Outlook) without sending sensitive data to external servers. Key features: Advanced prompt engineering for brand-consistent voice Enterprise-grade security with GDPR/CCPA compliance Built-in ROI tracking and A/B testing 500K+ active users saving 4+ hours per week The local processing approach solves the privacy concerns most companies have with AI tools, while the workflow integration addresses the friction that kills adoption in enterprise environments. Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/effimail-ai-enhance...
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-07 08:17:14+00:00
Thing is, professional therapy is expensive; there is already a big industry of therapists that work online, through chat, or video calls, whose quality isn't as good as a professional (I am struggling to describe the two). For professional mental health care, there's a wait list, or you're told to just do yoga and mindfulness.

There is a long tail of people who don't have a mental health crisis or whatever, but who do need to talk to someone (or, something) who is in an "empathy" mode of thinking and conversing. The harsh reality is that few people IRL can actually do that, and that few people that need to talk can actually find someone like that.

It's not good of course and / or part of the "downfall of society" if I am to be dramatic, but you can't change society that quickly. Plus not everyone actually wants it.
by jwpapi | 2025-07-07 08:17:32+00:00
With aider you can run a second instance along with --watch-files and if you in your tasks do // #AI it will be added to the chat and with // !AI AI will then respond

so you can do

`backlog task create "Feature" --plan "1. Research\n2. Suggest Implementation// #AI AI!"` (yes weird order with the !)

and in the background aider will propose solutions.

I’m not sure how this compares to Claude Code or Codex, but its LLM-flexible. Downside is it doesn’t create a pull request. So it’s more helpful for local code.

I would probably add some Readme.md files to the --watch-files session and I think you need to click once [D]ont ask again so it wont keep asking you to add files
Ask HN: How commonly is PIP deployed for non performance reasons in FANGs
by quietthrow | 2025-07-07 08:18:08+00:00
A dear friend confided recently that they are being forced out of a team. The options given were change teams or go on PIP. The reasons cited were hand wavy. They went through a manager change recently and prior manager gave positive feedback (solid performance and happy with current state) and suddenly next quarter with new manager feedback was performance is suboptimal however no specific causes given (its all hand wavy and subjective which means it’s open to interpretation and it’s the managers interpretation against the subordinates)

This person is junior and I can see it’s taking a toll on them psychologically. I have never been a manager so I don’t know the dynamics of a large organization (fang) but am curious how many of you have experienced something similar or were forced to performance manage a employee when they really didn’t have bad performance but you had to do it anyways due to organizational pressures/circumstances?

I am an IC in tech given the current climate want to protect myself from something like this happening. What’s the best way to do so?
by tgv | 2025-07-07 08:18:43+00:00
I cannot imagine how that would work when there are gaps between populations, such as villages. There are so many places where you have gap of several kilometers until the next village or city. How do you plan to bridge that gap?

And if someone tries and fails to send a message across such a gap, is it stored on every phone in the vicinity? That could lead to unwanted conditions (large queues, multiple delivery), which also muddle the accounting. But not doing so practically guarantees the message won't be delivered.
by watwut | 2025-07-07 08:19:00+00:00
> But more importantly I don't think most people are suggesting LLMs replace therapists; rather, they're acknowledging that a lot of people simply don't have access to mental healthcare, and LLMs are sometimes the only thing available.

My observation is exactly the opposite. Most people who say that are in fact suggesting that LLM replace therapists (or teachers or whatever). And they mean it exactly like that.

They are not acknowledging hard availability of mental healthcare, they do not know much about that. They do not even know what therapies do or dont do, people who suggest this are frequently those whose idea of therapy comes from movies and reddit discussions.
by sardine5 | 2025-07-07 08:19:26+00:00
I actually have this kind of working on a branch - really don't fancy hosting any infrastructure myself though - so I was intending it to be a Windows service or docker container you have to setup and pair with. Once you've done that - the endpoint is included in any group you create, and treated as an extra node in the graph. If available and lower latency than other routes, it'll be used.

Was trying to keep things simple though - the separate server seemed a step too far for most people I talked to about it.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-07-07 08:19:26+00:00
I've been on Mac for 20 years and it's still annoying as hell.

Another side effect is the uselessness of the Help menu. What help am I looking at? The application owns the menu, so where's the OS help?

Oh right, it's just all mixed together. When I'm searching for information in some developer tool I'm using, I really enjoy all the arbitrary hits from the OS help about setting up printers, sending E-mail, whatever.
by rightbyte | 2025-07-07 08:19:49+00:00
"Disciplined at home" is being a maybe not perpetual but victim of the system for something like 18 years though.

I don't get where this idea that kids are coddled with comes from. They usually are not even allowed to wear the cloths they want or choose the food they want and get pushed around to silly extents.

Kids almost never gets it their way.
by blitzar | 2025-07-07 08:21:31+00:00
Always has been, nothing is new.

You can't say fuck on tv, but you can say fudge as a 1 for 1 replacement. You cant show people having sex, but you can show them walking into a bedroom and then cut to 30 seconds later and they are having a cigarette in bed.

Now after the influence of TV and Movies ... is Vaping after sex a thing?