MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spankalee | 2025-07-14 17:54:32+00:00
I live in Oakland and this is a difficult topic.

The type of crime common here is nearly impossible to address without technological assistance. People steal cars, drive into neighborhoods, then break into other cars and houses. They're gone sometimes before a 911 call can even be made, and far before the police arrive. The criminals know this and are just incredibly brazen about it. They'll finish the job with people watching and recording because they know there's no way for them to be caught. People get followed home and held up in their driveway. The criminals are often armed, and people have been shot and killed for even the mildest of resistance. One guy was killed a block from where I was standing for knocking on the window of a getaway car of some guys stealing another car in broad daylight.

Leaving aside broader and more fundamental fixes for crime, which are much longer term projects, the only near-term thing that actually reduces this kind of crime is arrest and conviction rates. In SF, drones have helped reduced car break-ins, because they've actually caught some crews. Oakland doesn't have drones that I know of, but Flock cameras have enabled enough tracking for police to sometimes actually find these people quickly, even several miles away, and make an arrest.

Those are just the plain facts of the situation. It's understandable that people want some kind of solution here. Without at least starting from that understanding, it'll be very difficult to convince people that a solution that is having a positive impact already is not worth the other costs and risks.

And to me, this is the core conflict at a really high level: the economic and societal fixes for crime are usually opposed by the same people who abuse these kind of surveillance systems for authoritarian purposes. To me it's no coincidence that their preferred solution to crime just happens to help them keep an eye on the whole population.
by almatabata | 2025-07-14 17:54:34+00:00
> Interestingly the developers predict that AI will make them faster, and continue to believe that it did make them faster, even after completing the task slower than they otherwise would!

In this case clearly anecdotes are not enough. If that quote from the article is accurate, it shows that you cannot trust the developers time perception.

I agree, its only one study and we should not take it as the final answer. It definitely justifies doing a few follow up evaluations to see if this
by nancyminusone | 2025-07-14 17:54:44+00:00
Thankfully, they are doing IPv6, although one day I had some weird issue where IPv6 was broken but if I disabled it ipv4 was still working. Could have been my fault, IPv6 is generally new to me (not much of a network person).

I get the impression that they are still learning to run an ISP, both technically and customer facingly. It's weird - I learned more about them from this article than from actually being living here with them.
by glitchc | 2025-07-14 17:54:44+00:00
No, that's not how code review works. Getting inside the mind of the developer, understanding how they thought about the fix, is critical to the review process.

If an actual developer wrote this code and submitted it willingly, it would either constitute malice, an attempt to sabotage the codebase or inject a trojan, or stupidity, for failing to understand the purpose of the error message. With an LLM we mostly have stupidity. Flagging it as such reveals the source of the stupidity, as LLMs do not actually understand anything.
by davidclark | 2025-07-14 17:54:55+00:00
> That PR, would have taken me at least a couple of days and up to 2 weeks to fully manually write out and test

What is your accuracy on software development estimates? I always see these productivity claims matched again “It would’ve taken me” timelines.

But, it’s never examined if we’re good at estimating. I know I am not good at estimates.

It’s also never examined if the quality of the PR is the same as it would’ve been. Are you skipping steps and system understanding which let you go faster, but with a higher % chance of bugs? You can do that without AI and get the same speed up.
by afavour | 2025-07-14 17:55:00+00:00
I do wonder how we'll look back on this era in future generations. My theory is that COVID lockdowns in 2020 had a lasting impact few of us have really reckoned with. I think one understated impact is that the tech billionaire class disappeared (even further) into their own world and they haven't come back since.

A lot of the stuff mentioned in the article feels downstream of that. They're all in their own private chats frothing themselves into a storm over a crazy array of reactionary things and there's no-one in the room saying "hey, this sounds kind of nuts to me?". It's notable that Andreesen cites the summer of 2020 was an inflection point. The BLM protests are framed by these folks as an overcorrection of anti-racism or something like that. I see it differently: it was a large scale, somewhat cohesive social movement that came from the ground up. This terrifies Andreesen and his ilk and they see it as a personal affront. Couple that with the competition for hiring tech workers in the same era that gave engineers more power than they used to have... I'm convinced this even extends to the current hysteria for AI, too. They want to permanently reduce worker power in tech.
by nradov | 2025-07-14 17:55:21+00:00
People said the same thing about the printing press. When you look across human history it's tough to make a moral case that slowing down technology development was ever a net positive. We can't reliably predict or prevent the problems anyway and it's pointless to even try. Just move forward and deal with the actual problems (which are usually different from the expected problems) as they arise.
by dmpayton | 2025-07-14 17:55:25+00:00
I first started using Django in 2006, v0.95, the "magic removal" release. I was 19 and doing PHP at a small startup. I'd heard the hype around Rails, and wanted to check it out. Several hours and many head-desk moments later, I still couldn't get everything set up properly on my laptop (running Ubuntu). In my research, I discovered Python and Django and decided to give it a whirl. Twenty minutes later, I had the Django Hello Word page on my screen, and I haven't looked back since.

It wasn't long before newforms became a thing, and the 1.0 release, lots of cool database features, migrations (I remember debating South vs. Nashvegas at work), class-based views (amazing!), Postgres-specific features (built-in JSONField, finally!), Py3k support, ASGI... It's been a long, cool, productive road.

I was at the first DjangoCon in 2008 (leaving my wife at home with our two month old!), and giving a conference talk for the first time a decade later at DjangoCon 2018.

I owe my career to Django. It has been my framework of choice for projects large and small, and I've always felt solid in that decision -- thanks in no small part to the community.

HBD Django! <3
by techpineapple | 2025-07-14 17:55:25+00:00
I find Marc Andreesen's mindset interesting and troubling. I could probably right a short book on it; He's so angry, it's very interesting to me the way he describes "the Deal". As like, I dunno, I'm really a narcississtic sociopath who doesn't want to help people, but if you were going to write a nice obituary I guess I would have but now I won't anymore. It's like I think behavioral economics and incentives are interesting, and an important part of how we conduct social policy and face reality, but to lean into like "well fuck you for not providing the right incentives" rather than doing things because of the world you want to create; help people and build non-profits and etc. It all feels very pathological. If this is who he is, then I guess this is who he is! But don't blame the media for "Forcing you" to be shitty.

Also, I just don't buy into his whole "the woke elite kept people who grew up in my home towns down through woke/dei" because this is the same person who said: "I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet."

The thing is, I'm sure Marc's arguments make sense to alot of the people he's trying to talk to - other rich folks with grievance.
by parpfish | 2025-07-14 17:55:34+00:00
I like the concept of “liquid democracy” —- it’s direct democracy, but you can select somebody to act as your proxy so you don’t need to stay up to date on everything. But you can revoke proxy status at any time or for any particular issue if you want to override them.

No idea how it could active implemented, but it seems like a great compromise between the individual freedom of direct democracy and the labor-saving of representational democracy

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
by thinkingemote | 2025-07-14 17:55:46+00:00
Exactly! Waze the navigation app tends to route users on longer routes but which feels more fast. When driving we perceive our journey as fast or slow not by the actual length but by our memories of what happened. Waze knows human drivers are happier with driving a route that may be longer in time and distance of they feel like they are making progress with the twists and turns.

Ai tools makes programming feel easier. That it might be actually less productive is interesting but we humans prefer the easier shortcuts. Our memories of coding with AI tells us that we didn't struggle and therefore we made progress.
by mellosouls | 2025-07-14 17:56:09+00:00
- Audiobooks: I love reading but I have a hard time getting into audiobooks. Same issue with podcasts, I often want to stop and research topics and that would take me away from the treadmill.

Sounds like you are only listening to non-fiction? You don't need to research topics to enjoy (say) a genre thriller, so listen to fiction.
by kldg | 2025-07-14 17:56:19+00:00
yeah; I don't recall if I had to mess around with it at all to get it that way, but I have a couple addons I wrote which stay loaded after browser restarts and PC reboots. Edit: in about:config set xpinstall.signatures.required to false

(also sorry for going so aggro on FF in earlier comment; I guess I was hungry or something)
by daxfohl | 2025-07-14 17:56:25+00:00
I've had some luck in these cases prompting "your context seems to be getting too bloated. summarize this conversation into a prompt that I can feed into a new chat with a fresh context. make sure to include <...>".

Sometimes it works well the first time, and sometimes it spits out a summary where you can see what it is confused about, and you can guide it to create a better summary. Sometimes just having that summary in its context gets it over the hump and you can just say "actually I'm going to continue with you; please reference this summary going forward", and sometimes you actually do have to restart the LLM with the new context. And of course sometimes there's nothing that works at all.
by vannevar | 2025-07-14 17:56:28+00:00
It's an interesting idea, I've kicked something similar around with politically-minded friends for years. I don't know that a completely random group is the answer, but a hybrid approach might solve some critical problems:

- A largely unrecognized problem with our legislature here in the US is vote inflation: the number of representatives in Congress has fallen way behind the population growth, so that one rep is shared by a much larger group of constituents, devaluing the individual vote of each constituent and making it less likely that a given voter has a personal connection with their legislator.

- The increasing partisanship has reduced the number moderate and independent voices in the legislature.

We could increase the number of representatives in Congress by tripling the number of reps from each district, which would bring the rep-to-voter ratio back more in line with where it was when it was essentially frozen in 1929. Then one of those new reps would be chosen at random from a pool. Since the distribution of moderates in the general population is much higher than in Congress, this should have the effect of moderating partisanship.
by dmonitor | 2025-07-14 17:56:33+00:00
Most people don't have the equivalent of home internet plumbing in general. They have a hole drilled into the wall (by the ISP) where the all-in-one modem-router-switch-wap sits on a shelf. There's probably a third party service to get ethernet run through your walls, and maybe even replace your all-in-one box with something good, but most people are just doing the equivalent of getting water straight out of the water company's tap with no plumbing.
by aquariusDue | 2025-07-14 17:57:12+00:00
gptel is great, its one of the must have packages for Emacs and I'm pretty sure that with time it will be one of the reasons to use Emacs like org-mode has been for a long time.

For people wanting to get up and running with vanilla Emacs (instead of a distribution) so that they can try out gptel sometime this week, I recommend emacs-bedrock: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock

And for a gptel backend Gemini is the fastest route (excluding something local) from generating an API key to using a LLM in Emacs (for free).

Bonus points because Emacs is useful for things other than coding you can use gptel on your notes or any buffer really to ask/talk about stuff.
by f1shy | 2025-07-14 17:57:46+00:00
MHO: the myth is broader: that everybody gets more or less what he deserves. I have heard many times, justification of why person X is poor, pointing he is lazy, wastes money in alcohol, etc. but I have seen poor people, and is (typically) not the case. The problem is, when people is poor, there are no pleasures, often only alcohol is a way out. Only people who were there or had vey near people in that situation understand what is like to be poor…

OTOH, people think that rich people made it by hard working.

I’m not saying there is no correlation whatsoever. But there is much less than most think, and great amounts of luck playing a bigger role, including, but not limited to, where you were born, family, contacts, etc.
by ecshafer | 2025-07-14 17:57:47+00:00
Besides the curious absence of the word 'sortition'. Their historical examples are mostly totally wrong or missing key bits of nuance. Their example of picking the Doge of Venice misses that the convoluted process of "randomly" picking the doge isn't that random. They randomly choose electors only from the great families and randomly choose candidates from the great families and then choose. This is like if we chose the President my randomly choosing electors amongst the Senate, Governor, and the House, who would then choose candidates from amongst that same group, then randomly choose electors to decide amongst the candidates. Their example of hereditary monarchy assumes that murder and killing off competitors was common, however in European history that was pretty rare (instead putting them in the church was the way to thin the herd). If anything switch from gavelkind (all sons get a claim and split the lands between them) and going to a pure primogeniture succession greatly reduced said murdering and warring by reducing claimants.

My experience with KPIs also doesn't match the poster. KPIs are mostly ignored and it ends up going back to relationships and who has a better "deck" of accomplishments each year.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-14 17:57:51+00:00
> It was never about the recidivist bastards and always about the normal guy with a job he doesn't want to lose not losing that job when he can't come up with bail for a DUI

And that’s why I supported it. But for every one of the latter there are many of the former because they started cycling through arrests so fast.

Keep the recidivist bastard in jail, on the other hand, and they are incapacitated for the time being. I’ll admit I didn’t see the utility of that until it was too late.
by NathanKP | 2025-07-14 17:57:51+00:00
You can do that!

There is an AWS IAM Identity Center option for login as well: https://kiro.dev/docs/reference/auth-methods/#aws-iam-identi...

We really need to add some more step by step docs for setting this up, but it's very similar to the Amazon Q Developer integration with AWS IAM Identity Center if you are familiar with that: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/sec...
by timdellinger | 2025-07-14 17:57:58+00:00
This perspective under-appreciates the role of a leader's charisma when it comes to attracting staff that will actually execute the ideas of that leader.

Anyone who has worked in a presidential administration (or a congressional office) can tell you that a leader is effective if and only if they have staff that believes in their message and agenda, and that is willing and able to execute on that agenda.

The practical reality here is that charisma isn't just a way of gaming the "getting elected" part of the job, it's also a requirement to be effective at the job.
by igouy | 2025-07-14 17:58:12+00:00
A sequence of 5k race times (and ages) from yesterday:

21:34 — 65 22:49 — 64 23:04 — 61 23:41 — 64 24:45 — 75 24:57 — 63 25:06 — 67 25:41 — 66 25:52 — 66 26:37 — 63 27:01 — 73 27:31 — 70 27:52 — 74 28:49 — 76 29:29 — 61 30:34 — 78 30:55 — 86 31:03 — 72 31:14 — 68 & another 14 older than 60
by meatmanek | 2025-07-14 17:59:13+00:00
Ballot propositions have a number of shortcomings that sortition-based legislatures won't necessarily fall into:

- Most people filling out their ballots aren't spending very much time on each prop -- they'll typically either vote based on their gut reaction to the title of the prop, follow a voter guide from an advocacy group they want to align with, or just vote based on whose advertising campaign was most influential. - Ballot props, at least in CA, are pretty much directly pay-to-play. There's a price tag for getting a prop onto the ballot, because signature gathering companies charge per signature. (Though at least in SF, conservative ballot props cost more per signature because there aren't as many conservatives to sign. This implies there's _some_ correlation between the cost and the popularity of a particular proposition.) - Ballot props are both high-latency and low-bandwidth. Coupled with the fact that they often cannot be overridden except by another ballot prop, and we're basically stuck with any flaw in the bill that passes (unless it's egregious enough that someone's willing to foot the bill for another round of signature gathering and advertising, which will cost about as much as it did for the original bill.) - Ballot props don't go through several rounds of amendment before being passed, nor do they really have any debate; there's just a single round of "should this be on the ballot" followed by a single round of "should this be law". This means flawed bills are more likely to end up on the ballot. Because of the high latency mentioned above, voters are often stuck with a choice between a bad solution and no solution to whatever problem the ballot prop is trying to solve.

If we assume it works sorta like jury duty, a sortition-based legislator would have their schedule forcibly cleared, so they'd have all day to think about laws. (Presumably for some sufficiently-long term, like 6mo to 2yr.) Campaign finance-based lobbying (i.e. legalized bribery) would cease to exist, though you'd definitely still have paid lobbyists -- people who are good at influencing the members of the legislature. Bribery would almost certainly happen, but at least it would be illegal so hopefully less common than it is now. The legislature could still have committees and debates and proposed amendments, allowing for refinement of bills before they make it to a vote.
by xphos | 2025-07-14 17:59:24+00:00
I disagree that consider the effects on supply and demand that taxes have is simplification or ignoring real economics is fallacy?

My only point was that its a supply issue not really a tax issue. Houses already have tax on them called property tax its small yes but the reason investors are buying houses is not because the tax is small but because the demand for them is extremely high and the supply is very low. Adding a tax does not in any way fix the demand imbalance. This is why things like price controls only create shortages the problem is that its impossible to build houses because of nimbism.

A Tax doesn't make more houses exist even without investors there isn't enough houses because of local zoning and protesting prevents cheap housing from entering the market. A Tax that does not solve this problem still means that there are to many people buying / renting chasing to few houses.
by kube-system | 2025-07-14 17:59:34+00:00
Having worked with the public before, I have no doubt that a lot of people likely do contact utility companies for issues inside their home. Some of them even do have repair programs with outside contractors. People often simply call whoever they have an existing business relationship with for issues related to that product/service. It may be ignorant but it isn't illogical.

Also, as the other commenter pointed out, ISPs don't terminate their service at the edge of your premises. Basically all of them today will connect one of your devices to confirm installation.
by jtrn | 2025-07-14 17:59:50+00:00
Reminds me of a client I had once. He said that the only thing that made him reset was to "pig out" with a carb-overdose, then just sit in front of the TV with a sugar high.

Incidentally, I had been nagging him about trying ANYTHING (in addition to the therapy we were doing to find a life goal he believes in) that might help him get SOME help. Be it Adderall or Ozempic. But people are complex, and at best, a person is a Venn diagram with massive overlapping "biological susceptibility," "life situation," "negative thinking style," and inertia. The best one can do is to pull at as many threads as possible to hope the suffering unravels. So one of the threads one can pull at are medication.

Not to give advice, but just for shits and giggles, look into "vulnerable narcissism." Many describe stuff like you do and fit those traits. And don't give a shit about the negative associations and stereotypes regarding this personality. I love narcissists! It's one of the coolest personalities there is! But when you are not allowed to be proud of yourself, and all the desire for status and power gets refocused onto self-hate and learned helplessness, then it's a monster of a situation. Had so many people become awesome versions of themselves when they stop being so afraid of being arrogant :) .

Just to remember when you read about it, that the descriptions are only in the context of things having gone wrong. Every trait can manifest as something good or negative. Even psychopaths can have good and prosocial lives. For instance, some of the best ambulance workers often have high loading on psychopathy, and that makes them better at their job. Because they don't get scared. I’d rather be picked up by an ambulance worker that is curious and thinks the situation is interesting than one that is panicking and losing due to anxiety and empathy overload.

This is just a long-shot association/pattern I noticed, though. It's not worth a dime more than the sentences you put into the machine. :P
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-07-14 18:00:15+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clienteling

Anyone in service-oriented business is or ought to be familiar with the general concepts. I have a whiteboard next to my desk with the names and ages of people's kids.

And for those worried about the creepiness of it all, privacy and discretion are also core concepts of service/hospitality when done well.