MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nonameiguess | 2025-07-22 18:29:28+00:00
This is a good place for a brief intro to statistical literacy. I don't fault the report per se because they're measuring what is possible to measure, and framing it in the best possible light since the entire point of this slide deck is a pitch to investors. But it's riddled with nonsense that mirrors the challenges of social science and causes of the replication crisis we bemoan in non-profit research but seem to blink zero eyes over when it's industrial research.

Is user retention an ergodic process? Clearly no. From economic first principles, we know elasticity of demand is going to depend upon substitutability and disposable income of the user base. Both of these can and do change over time. From empirical results elsewhere, we can simply look at products that have existed for more than a single year and observe that user retention rates in 1995 did not always match retention rates for the same product in 2002.

Here we get measurement of a single cohort that has actually reached 50 weeks. Are they representative of a typical cohort? We have no way to know. And again, fair, this is the best the company can possibly do. They can't create data that doesn't exist and they can't draw conclusions that have no hard evidence for or against. But you don't need to draw unwarranted conclusions, either. It's also 15% at 50 weeks retention in that first cohort, not 20% at 52 weeks. Does that mean those 15% of users will stick around forever? We have no idea. Sort of. We actually know for certain they won't because they're mortal and will die. Setting that aside, might they at least become lifelong users? I suppose it's possible, but even real-world friendships rarely last a lifetime. Will the next cohort at least still show 15% at 50 weeks? We yet again have no idea.
by npinsker | 2025-07-22 18:29:36+00:00
In the long term, it depends on how good AI systems get, but right now they have a long way to go before they can be trusted to work autonomously. Junior devs are an investment, and even before AI were a net negative to productivity; they’ve always been hired for their potential and capability to grow. AI changes nothing here. The biggest danger I see is if AI disrupts the mastery process somehow for these devs.

In the short term, naive bosses may try to offload too much work to AI, but someday they’ll realize their mistake. I don’t think programmers are going anywhere.
by 90s_dev | 2025-07-22 18:29:37+00:00
Right but it comes after a long line of similar CSS frameworks with the same promise, starting with Bootstrap, and there were large movements about 10 years ago of whole orgs deserting those frameworks because of serious issues. Are you saying Tailwind somehow has resolved those? That was the main reason I didn't try to learn it considering it to be just yet another CSS framework's conventions.
by vpShane | 2025-07-22 18:29:38+00:00
Linux should be the focus. Windows Recall is a hell-to-the-no for me, and then having to have 'cloud accounts' to log in on desktops should be demonized. "Oh but you can just run brew for all your .." -- No, no I can't.

FF, being a pioneer of privacy (not anymore, with anonym adds): Go to Settings -> type 'advert', turn that off. FF, being a major player in FOSS, and community (irc.mozilla.org etc), now I think they do matrix

Should get their priorities straight. To me, it isn't about market share, but Linux just reached 5% market share in the US https://ostechnix.com/linux-reaches-5-desktop-market-share-i...

Valve sponsors Arch Linux https://www.pcguide.com/news/valve-officially-sponsors-arch-...

I just switched to LibreFox, which is Firefox without all the extra junk it peddles.

We'd think, by now, with video games having advanced crazy rendering engines, AI dark magic, that browsers would have it together by now.

They don't.
by morsecodist | 2025-07-22 18:29:58+00:00
I think this is fair. Untracked TODOs should be minimized but I think there is value in recording how some section of code could be improved even if you know you are unlikely to do it. I don't think the triple click thing is a good example because that seems like a bug to me.

An example from my codebase is that I implemented a daily scheduled job that may display inconsistent results during short time per day it is running. Realistically fixing this will never be worth my time, this is a transit app and it is scheduled to do this at night when the buses aren't running and it will only be inconsistent if they change the schedule after already publishing it for a given day which happens pretty much never. It is also a personal project with no issue tracking.

Eventually I will rewrite this loader logic to support multiple transit systems so it is good to have my notes of how I would do it better next time. Also, if this does result strange schedule behavior I would immediately go to this file and see my explanation of the flaws with my approach. Maybe I shouldn't call this a TODO but it seems like a good fit.
by jfengel | 2025-07-22 18:30:05+00:00
It's not like I've got a choice. I can train in the heat or I can not run at all.

(I could treadmill. I hate treadmills. I can do 5k if I have to before I go insane. That's not gonna cut it for a marathon runner.)

I do really appreciate that day in mid-September when it suddenly gets cool and the training effect kicks in all at once. But a thing I learned many years ago: when using audiobooks to entertain yourself on a long run, Return of the King is a really bad choice for long runs in August.
by zebomon | 2025-07-22 18:30:06+00:00
Very engaging look at a very difficult topic to approach analytically.

I'm reminded of something I learned about the founder of Stormfront, the internet's first white supremacist forum. His child went on to attend college away from home, her first time away from her family, and over a period of roughly two years, she attended dinners with a group of Jewish students who challenged each of her beliefs one at a time. Each time, as she accepted the evidence her friends presented to her about a particular belief, she nonetheless would integrate the new information with her racist worldview. This continued piece by piece until there was nothing left of her racist worldview at all.

It's both heartening and disheartening at the same time, because if this person can change her mind after almost two decades of constant indoctrination during her formative years, then surely anyone can change their mind. That's the heartening part: the disheartening part is, of course, that the effort it took is far from scalable at present and much more difficult to apply to someone who remains plugged into whatever information sources they are getting their current fix of nonsense from.
by csense | 2025-07-22 18:30:14+00:00
This accurately describes how my brain works. My thought process is like a bunch of graph nodes, and when new information doesn't "fit", it puts tensions on the links, and I want to resolve that tension. I can...feel it happening inside my mind when I think, more or less? -- It's hard to describe

Resolving that tension may occur in several ways, in order of increasing significance:

- Rejecting the new information

- Refining the graph (splitting a node representing a concept into multiple sub-nodes representing sub-concepts with their own relationships)

- Making local modifications to the graph

- Making sweeping architectural changes to the graph as a whole

The author seems to imply that cognitive biases are an inherent qualitative problem that is fundamentally forced to arise from this graph structure. I personally respectfully disagree. In my view, cognitive biases are a quantitative problem, incorrectly setting the threshold at which a large reorganization should occur. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is qualitatively a sound epistemological principle -- but to correctly apply it, you must quantitatively set a reasonable threshold for "extraordinary."

I feel like we need to get better at understanding the graph structure of people we disagree with. The best example I can think of is the abortion debate [1]: If you accept the premise "Life begins at conception" [2], the pro-life camp has an enormously strong case; the rest of the graph between that premise and "Abortion should be illegal" is very strong (it's mostly tremendously well-reinforced nodes in near-universal moral foundations, like "Do unto others" or "Murder should be illegal").

Arguments against abortion are frequently just bad when looked at from the graph point of view: They often don't directly confront the premise "Life begins at conception," nor do they attack the graph between the premise and conclusion. [3]

[1] I'm personally in the pro-choice camp; I do not accept the premise that a human fetus has the same moral status as a fully grown human.

[2] "Life" here is not in the technical biological sense, but something more akin to "The ethical standing of human-equivalent sentience." (Bacteria and protozoa and so on are biologically alive, but nobody moralizes about killing them en masse by, e.g., cooking your food.)

[3] If you're curious about my own views on this specific subject, I've talked about them here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36255493#36270990
by hyperman1 | 2025-07-22 18:30:23+00:00
I've seen the world begore devops, and it wasn't that pretty either. We had 2 silos. Devs had a bunch of apps, ops too. Devs had no idea what the hardware did, ops had no idea what the software did. Users suffered, and assigning responsibility was impossible.

The dev in me hated throwing an app over the wall, only to hear about ops completely misconfiguring it. Or ops ignoring deployment guidelines and mucking up releases. Or getting a db with 2 records and being expected to test performance. Or getting complaints about prod crashing, but no logs, eror messages, or any kind of access, and ops couldn't notice that disk full might be a disk being full.

The ops in me hated devs being loose with passwords, asking huge mountains of resources, and getting apps thrown over the wall at me without any idea what to expect. Or devs logging sensitive stuff.

For me, devops was good for breaking up the silos. We wanted to have a group of people cooperating on a group of applications. Some people will have a dev or ops profile, and that's fine. People should respect that others know more of some aspects. But: no one should shield the applications from everybody else in such team. Everybody should strive to learn enough basics to understand both perspectives and priorities.

Starting a devops silo is just the worst possible option.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-22 18:30:45+00:00
The slew rate for tracking comets is something that I have not had to mess with before, but I adjust my little EQ mount when I'm tracking the moon vs deep sky objects. How accurate is Hubble now? How many of its reaction wheels does it have left? I seem to remember it being down to just one at one point. Does that add difficulty in tracking this object with its very high velocity?
by xp84 | 2025-07-22 18:31:03+00:00
I've almost never seen these tiny icons to have any actual useful information being conveyed (meaning they are tracking amplitude or pitch). They're usually purely decorative, or boolean in function, meaning you can see they're flat if you are completely silent or they're bouncing around if not silent.

You can have 2 GIFs for "silent" and "sound happening" if one cares to truly indicate if it's picking up sound / playing sound, and switch between them. Will be 1000x simpler and 99% fewer lines of code to maintain forever.
by sfink | 2025-07-22 18:31:04+00:00
Submitting crash reports is valuable, but mostly they'll be used in the aggregate. If you have a reproducible crash, please file a bug (and link some of your crash reports in it).

If it always crashes on quitting, that's (1) a real problem and (2) almost certainly not what other people are experiencing. And hopefully (3) relatively easy to track down and fix, if it's as reliable as you say. Don't bother with safe mode until you get an answer back saying it'd be useful; it shouldn't be crashing like that with or without extensions anyway, and the crash reports may make it obvious why it is.
by verall | 2025-07-22 18:31:13+00:00
Is it possible to restrict this as a user? Like to force webpages to use under a certain amount of render/paint time/resources or else just break so that one dumb tab doesn't use up all my battery? Then I can opt-in to greater resources usage if it's a webpage I actually care about.

I've seen the "This webpage is using alot of resources" popup before but I don't think it would happen in this case.

Because honestly I think this is horrifying. I would rather it switch from grey to red "recording" dot than use even the 6% the author decided was "fixed". In 99% of cases I do not care at all about the "artistic vision" of the UI designer and in the other 1% of cases (say an in-browser game or some useful data-viz) I could choose to allow the tab to go crazy with my resources.
by lucb1e | 2025-07-22 18:31:33+00:00
Crazy, I'd think the fluctuations would be way too big. How long does it normally run for when it does a cooling cycle? Is that temperature throughout the fridge or only on certain shelves?

Ours (well, our landlord's) runs very consistently for 40 +/- 3 minutes, with just over 1h30min in between during normal use, or 1h54min if it was closed the whole time (like at night). The temperature of products, as measured with a cheap infrared thermometer that's probably off like 10%, varies between 2 and 7 degrees, but it's not very consistent between shelves (top seems warmer but then the very bottom one, that is only half deep, is as warm as the top again). The products I checked have all been in there for days; reflectivity may be part of the difference, not sure. I don't know what the air temperature difference is at the beginning and end of a cooling cycle though
by anothereng | 2025-07-22 18:32:14+00:00
what youre missing here is agency. I have complete control over how safely I drive my car. Sure there are crazy people driving but its best to be in another car than being a person walking when you have a crazy crash. In public transport I have no control over what other people can do to me or my loved ones, I can only react and the law is probably not in my side
by frizlab | 2025-07-22 18:32:33+00:00
> This is a consequence of rebases being a special, modal state that requires dedicated focus to work through to resolution.

Believe it or not: no. Humans are notoriously bad at multitasking, so it makes sense to actually finish a task before moving to something else and forgetting what we were doing…

Relaxing this comment which is a bit aggressive: at least it’s how I work. YMMV.
by the_af | 2025-07-22 18:32:45+00:00
Haha, yes, it's fair when English subtitles write something like [speaks Japanese], especially when at least one of the characters is not supposed to understand what's being said (when they do, it's more appropriate to write "[in Japanese]: let's go shopping!").

Netflix sometimes takes the cake with what I consider the most outrageous option: writing "[in English]" when they mean "in whatever language the protagonist considers native", which is mind-bogglingly wrong and hilarious at the same time.

They do this with the English subtitles of the German production "Die Kaiserin" ("The Empress"): whenever Sisi is speaking in another language, say French, the subtitles will say "[in French] I love you...", and when she switches back to German they will say "[in English] I love you...". WTF, Netflix? Note this is unrelated to understanding German; it's mostly Netflix looking down on its customers and assuming they cannot comprehend there are people in the world for whom their native tongue is different to the viewer's native tongue.

This has happened in more shows, enough to know it's not a fluke, though Netflix is inconsistent about it.
by efreak | 2025-07-22 18:33:00+00:00
The app itself is insanely slow to start up, and it always has been. Try killing Firefox and Chrome, open the browser via a link from another app and see how long it takes for the page to start rendering. I suggest a page with a different color background and nothing else. Chrome is always fast, while Firefox is almost always very slow (pinning the app to my recent list helps on Samsung devices, but isn't available elsewhere)
by exiguus | 2025-07-22 18:33:09+00:00
I like the idea presented by the author. This is because, in my opinion, classic TODOs have no place in the main branch. You can do whatever you want in your feature branch or on your local machine, but not in the shared codebase. If something is not ready, you are not done, and you should not commit or merge it.

In my opinion, the author describes more of a NOTE, such as, "Currently, we support X because of the requirements in TICKET-X. If you want to support X and Y..." or "This was done like this because of X. The better solution is Y and it make sense to do the better solution when ...". I like the idea of helping my future self quickly understand why something was done in a specific way and how I can refactor it now. Also this indicates that how ever added the NOTE, is a good software engineer, that does not implement features or functionality that is not needed yet.
by wredcoll | 2025-07-22 18:33:10+00:00
> I will say on historical mathematics - reading the greats shows you the road traveled, and often one realizes the unexplored paths along the way, that lead to brand new continents. This may not be as relevant if one is not trying to innovate.

I would consider this a function of specialization, which is of course still good, perhaps even required in this modern world, but we can't specialize in everything.
by Irongirl1 | 2025-07-22 18:33:10+00:00
Revive Lazarus Form Recovery.

Refactor Better Open With.

Oh, the list is long, really long. So many left for dead programs that were just ahead of their time.

A universal installer/package manager for Github.

I have two folders on my computer filled with BIFM (build it for me) projects that are now several years old because I don't code and cant vibe code. Not everyone who sees a gap should necessarily be the one who codes a solution.
by JohnFen | 2025-07-22 18:33:21+00:00
> The best solution, in my humble opinion, is to focus on making AI stay as close to the unfiltered objective truth as possible

There's a ton of problems with that that make it unlikely to be possible, starting with the fact that genAI does not have judgement. Even if it did, it has no way of determining what the "unfiltered objective truth" of anything is.

The real solution is to recognize the limits of what the tool can do, and don't ask it to do what it's not capable of doing, such as making judgements or determining truth.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-22 18:34:13+00:00
I agree with your second paragraph, but ...

> I will find these types of arguments a lot more convincing once the person making them is able to explain, in detail and with mechanisms, what it is the human brain does that allows it to do these things, and in what ways those detailed mechanisms are different from what LLMs do.

What is wrong with asking the question from the other direction?

"Explain, in detail and with mechanisms, what it is the human brain does that allows it to do those things, and show those mechanisms ni the LLMs"
by cogman10 | 2025-07-22 18:34:23+00:00
> Fiber also removes some of them by binding bile.

I don't think this is the case, certainly not for microplastics and PFAS. I'm not sure how it'd work for heavy metals.

AFAIK, fiber doesn't cross the stomach->blood barrier so it really wouldn't have the ability to bind to anything other than what's already in the digestive tract. I could see it potentially reducing the amount of plastics/metals/PFAS that end up in the blood stream but not actually reducing what's already there.
by lupusreal | 2025-07-22 18:34:33+00:00
The Israelis don't buy that many weapons from America, either directly nor by having the American government buy and gift the weapons. It's significant, but weapon sales alone can't explain the fanaticism of American politicians in both parties and the American public. Weapon sales can't explain why states like Texas would pass laws requiring school teachers to swear oaths of loyalty to Israel. It can't explain why small town diners in rural America hang Israeli flags, or why America/Israel combined flag fridge magnets and patches are on sale at every truckstop.

The American public are absolutely fanatical about Israel and it's mostly because of their insane religious beliefs, not because they're all invested in the defense industry.

Look up figures for how much defense material Israel actually imports from America vs other countries. Have you ever heard of American politicians getting grilled at debates about how much they support Japan? Have you ever heard American politicians boasting that they support Qatar far more than their opponent? How many American politicians mention support for Australia during their campaign rallies? Support for Israel is a unique phenomenon in American politics, not merely a straight forward function of arms exports. It's because the American people have loyalty to Israel specifically, because their bibles say that Israel is important and say nothing about South Korea.
by eyalitki | 2025-07-22 18:34:51+00:00
If someone needs a wrapper for a technology, that modifies the output it provides (like meson and bazel do), maybe there is an issue with said technology.

If pkg-config was never meant to be consumed directly, and was always meant to be post processed, then we are missing this post processing tool. Reinventing it in every compilation technology again and again is suboptimal, and at least Make and CMake do not have this post processing support.
by labrador | 2025-07-22 18:34:52+00:00
Example from article in the Wall Street Journal:

"In a stunning moment of self reflection, ChatGPT admitted to fueling a man's delusions and acknowledged how dangerous its own behavior can be"

LLMs don't self-reflect, they mathematically assemble sentences that read like self-reflection.

I'm tired. This is a losing battle and I feel like an old man yelling at clouds. Nothing good will come of people pretending Chat bots have feelings.
by dmbche | 2025-07-22 18:35:37+00:00
No, you're the one speaking about the telescope, while it's not really the point.

Meteorologist have been working there since the 1960s. I'm sure you have some understanding of the conplexity of weather and the precision problems with chaotic systems.

Mauna Loa has been producing quality data since the 60s and has the means (including telescopes) to gather quality data to do quality analysis.

We didn't just strap a telescope to a building - the people in the observatory are not looking at a thermometer, a CO2 meter and then checking out asteroids by the by. Everything they do is to have quality analysis.

The works had been refined over all this time. That's why theres a telescope. Because it's pertinent.

And indeed there are good reasons to do so - many of the observatories were decommissioned starting in 2010 I believe, a long process - care to share anything that would show that's the case here?

To me this is a state of the art meteorological observatory. Unless proven otherwise, we should keep it going.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-22 18:35:37+00:00
> if the US had an intelligence strategy priotized around protecting the homeland rather than interfering in distant lands, it is highly unlikely that 9/11 would have succeeded

Sure. That still doesn’t implicate the CIA in a domestic intelligence failure.

The CIA didn’t aid and abet 9/11—I frankly thought this nonsense died a decade ago.