MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rolph | 2025-08-23 21:34:45+00:00
Do we not impact both those with our industry and even minor changes can upset the balance?

TLDR: yes.

physical processes cyclicaly source, and sink chemical compounds as part of energetic exchange. biology has slewed the balance a number of times; the great oxygenation; the great eutrophication ; the neoanthropic carbonization.

these set a new balance and a new regime of physical processes tied to energetic exchange, and relative abundance of chemical reactants and products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_cycle.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle

the physical circumstances make it complicated, the underlaying engine, is chemistry.

consider, millions of years worth of carbon sequestration being released [burned] over a span in the order of centuries.
by schrodinger | 2025-08-23 21:36:15+00:00
Thanks -- totally agree that curation is essential, and I suspect my original point may have come across as advocating against curation, which I wasn’t.

My goal isn’t to randomize the homepage or flatten quality, but to involve a broader swath of users in the curation process. It’s currently dominated by the few who browse “new”, essentially a self-selected minority of curators.

Concretely, I was imagining something like: * Every new post is shown to a small % of users as part of their regular homepage (not in a “new” tab they’d have to seek out). * Posts that get engagement from that slice are shown to more users, and so on — a gradual ramp-up based on actual interest rather than early-bird luck.

So it’s not removing filtering; it’s just moving from a binary gate (past the goalpost = homepage) to a more continuous, probabilistic exposure curve.

Curation still happens, but more people get to participate in it, and the system becomes more robust to time-of-day luck or early vote pile-ons.

Anyway, I mostly wanted to clarify that I’m not against filtering -- just having a thought experiment about how we might make it more adaptive and inclusive.

Does that clarify my point? Any thoughts? I appreciate your engagement!
by jolmg | 2025-08-23 21:36:41+00:00
> Never seen it prescribed to manners if someone picks up a phone or not. Is that a US thing?

I would see it analogous to someone in real-life saying hi and the other person ignoring them. Is that rude? Depends on your relationship with the person. A salesman? No. Someone you're really close to? Maybe; depends on your relationship with them. Boss? Likely.

It also depends on whether you call back, in case you were driving or something.

> "When I see 'Dad mobile' pop up on my screen, I will let it ring. I don't have the energy to answer a barrage of questions. I'd rather just text him after he hangs up," says 16-year-old Mehdi.

If they didn't text back, I might see it as reasonable grounds for some type of punishment, depending on a number of factors (time of day, where they're supposed to be, how they've been behaving lately, etc.).

Another comment talked about not being obligated to answer, but towards one's parent when they're a teen? This is one of those relationships where they would have an obligation to answer.
by mothballed | 2025-08-23 21:36:53+00:00
My friend "showed" the plates were not his (he couldn't prove the car wasn't stolen because it wasn't -- they only copied his plate) but they kept sending him tickets because apparently it only counts for one ticket. They wanted him to go through a laborious process every time. I think he finally just stopped challenging them because it took too much time, and probably can't go to that state again unless he wants his car seized.
by prmph | 2025-08-23 21:37:15+00:00
> In other words, healthier people live longer. Nothing "unique" or surprising in this article that I could find.

Did you really read the article to the end? because it explores interesting questions beyond simply "healthier people live longer".

From the article: > Some questions researchers have long pondered is whether one of the keys to a centenarian's resilience mainly lies in their ability to postpone major diseases, or whether they're simply better at surviving them. Or, could it be that they avoid certain diseases altogether?
by BeetleB | 2025-08-23 21:37:46+00:00
Both true and irrelevant.

I've yet had the "forgets everything" to be a limiting factor. In fact, when using Aider, I aggressively ensure it forgets everything several times per session.

To me, it's a feature, not a drawback.

I've certainly had coworkers who I've had to tell "Look, will you forget about X? That use case, while it look similar, is actually quite different in assumptions, etc. Stop invoking your experiences there!"
by vunderba | 2025-08-23 21:39:29+00:00
The Dreamcast was an odd system particularly with the VMU acting as a memory card that also had games on it (though it is kind of interesting though that the Nintendo Switch at least nominally borrowed this idea of an all-in-one regular console + mobile gaming experience).

Dreamcast aside - the story of the rise and fall of Sega is pretty fascinating. They fragmented the hell out their product offerings - at one point in the mid-90s having seven platforms - Genesis, Saturn, Game Gear, Pico, Sega CD, 32X, and the 32X CD.
by blululu | 2025-08-23 21:39:29+00:00
Exif data is really fascinating, and exiftool is really worth playing around with for an afternoon. The metadata on color space, focal distance, aperture are all really useful tools for making photos look correct on an arbitrary display surface, and it is pretty fun to swap them out to see the effects on rendering.

As an aside, the location/time data is useful for somethings but also kind of creepy and I really wish there were more privacy considerations in how these pieces of meta data are handled. There was a period where I routinely set these fields to be taken in Pyongyang, North Korea, 100m below sea level and one day in the future.

exiftool -GPSLatitude=39.0738-GPSLatitudeRef=N -GPSLongitude=125.8198 -GPSLongitudeRef=E -GPSAltitude=-6 -GPSAltitudeRef="Below Sea Level" -AllDates="$(date -v +1d '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')" FILENAME.jpg
by derbOac | 2025-08-23 21:39:39+00:00
The problem for me, speaking from personal experience with a spouse, significant others, friends, colleagues, my own degrees, reading job posts here on HN, is that it is the case that there are those who filter on elite schools before even considering any actual qualifications otherwise. It happens too often. After seeing this repeatedly, I personally do not believe that the selection effects associated with these institutions, controlling for other factors, is mostly due to markers of attributes like "motivation and team orientation" or even intelligence or skill, at least relative to other institutions. My sense of reading about other things like Navy Seals is similar — that some of the selection criteria are performative and of very little real-world utility, or might even be detrimental to the functioning of the institution or its aims.

This isn't to say that there aren't exceedingly competent people going into these elite institutions, only that my personal experience is such that the "magic sauce" beyond all the life history, accomplishments, test scores, grades, and so forth, is often bias or distributed gatekeeping.

Looked at differently, let's say you have an institution that aims to be elite, but the information provided by your selection criteria hits a wall, and the number of actually qualified individuals by prediction exceeds your capacity. In that case you have to either (a) basically do a lottery, which is honest but weakens the rationale for your institution over others, or (b) create criteria that are essentially useless but have a false veneer of rigor.

I'm not sure I think diversity quotas and so forth are the way to go either, but I also believe we need to stop pretending that these selection criteria are perfect or even near perfect, and that there's no bias either. I feel as if these discussions always proceed the same, that questionable or even objectively harmful (to the institution) criteria are pointed out, and then there's some outcry that lowering them will decrease standards, even as alternatives are never tested.
by BeetleB | 2025-08-23 21:40:13+00:00
That's because jj is relatively new, and constantly changing. The official tutorial is (by their own admission), out of date. People's blog posts are fairly different in what commands/usage they recommend, as well.

I know it, because I recently learned jj, with a lot of struggling.

If a human struggles learning it, I wouldn't expect LLMs to be much better.
by pas | 2025-08-23 21:42:27+00:00
sure, but they have both human and machine stuff in the same "universe" - again, sure, it made sense, but maybe it would make sense to have a parser that helps to recover "human stuff" from "machine gibberish" (ie. filter out the presentation and control stuff), but, but, of course some in-band logic makes sense, after all, for the combinations (diacritics, emoji skin color, and so on).
by StMichael | 2025-08-23 21:42:53+00:00
You are wrong. Child predator activity is a priority for Roblox. Their corporate team has stated that if you investigate child predator activity, you will be banned immediately.[1][2]

The virtual world called Second Life, considered similar to Roblox, also has a rampant child predator problem[3]. It is interesting because Second Life and Roblox are similar 3D worlds. Both experiences have a similar visual feel. Both experiences do very little KYC, resulting in a rampant alt problem. In fact, Second Life will begin using the same version of Lua used by Roblox, so in some ways they are even technologically-related 3D experiences.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox_Schlep_ban_controversy

[2] https://corp.roblox.com/newsroom/2025/08/more-on-removal-of-...

[3] https://archive.is/yjprF (Feb 2024)
by kylecazar | 2025-08-23 21:43:03+00:00
I do have one experience with Singaporean lightning, pre the 2020 regulation! I was on a ship that was anchored overnight for fueling right outside of the port of Singapore, and saw an otherworldly scene. I was on the smoke-deck in a storm, late at night. There was lightning every 5 seconds, the port in the distance, horizontal rain, dozens of huge cargo ships around, and some gigantic flames coming from land that looked like Mordor (a refinery or plant of some sort?).

Not sure if the crazy lightning was because of sulfur, but I still remember it!
by TZubiri | 2025-08-23 21:44:02+00:00
My guess is that when you are self taught and don't know what the hierarchy of technologies looks like, you can learn several advanced technologies without knowing the basic technologies that they are built upon and the challenges the basic tech can't solve.

So you just solve all problems with advanced tools, no matter how simple. You get into tech by learning how to use a chainsaw because it's so powerful and you wanted to cut a tree, now you need to cut some butter for a toast? Chainsaw!
by lithocarpus | 2025-08-23 21:44:15+00:00
It is excreted by the kidneys, but according to the studies I looked at, for aluminum that gets in the blood some of it gets into bone and brain and other places where some portion stays there for years.

Point being that for a given amount of aluminum, many orders of magnitude more of it is still in the body years later if it was injected as compared with ingested.

I'm not saying this is harmful necessarily, but it is not something I would simply dismiss.
by sfpotter | 2025-08-23 21:44:47+00:00
Hmm, I don't buy it. The simplicity of just normalizing some Gaussian random deviates (especially since you generate them two at a time using Box-Muller) seems better than accept-reject. Especially considering that the ratio of the volume of the n-dimensional ball to the volume of [-1, 1]^n tends to zero as n tends to infinity exponentially fast...
by majormajor | 2025-08-23 21:45:32+00:00
So solve "ETLs into a data warehouse are hard to make low-latency and hard to manage in a large org" by... just hypothetical better "off the shelf tools". Or "don't want low latency because you're 'just' a recruiting tool, so who cares how quickly you can get insights into your business."

Go back to the article, it wasn't about event-sourcing or replacing a DB for application code.
by treyd | 2025-08-23 21:45:39+00:00
People take it as an assumption that cronyism will always happen if the government invests too strongly/consistently in a certain thing. But cronyism is a policy and structural failure, it's usually because the incentives for the different parties involved encourage it to happen. Institutions can be designed carefully if policymakers actually want to do it.

USPS is a great example of an organization that's managed to largely avoid this. Whenever you mention that people crawl out of the woodwork to complain about the 7 different times they lost their package, but their logistics at scale is still unmatched by the private sector, while also not completely negating the value of private sector alternatives (which so often is argued would happen if the government actively started doing anything new).
by zrobotics | 2025-08-23 21:45:58+00:00
I do dev & IT for a <25 person company in ecommerce. If we had even half of the issues that were pointed out in this post, I'd be telling the owner that he should be looking to replace me. I get that they're not a software company, but these are super basic issues. These issues, coupled with no response to the reported issues, leads me to suspect that the c-suite deprioritized IT to the point that it's a skeleton staff and they can't hire or retain anyone that's even halfway competent. You don't end up with these kind of issues, as a company of their size, unless there are serious management problems. They are big enough that they should definitely have the budget to do basic stuff like auth properly, or at least not make so many 101-level errors.

That said, the author also comes across as a complete d-bag as well. I have about as much love for marketing people as the average software developer, but their description of their average consumer was pretty normal. The author got super-catty about what's a fairly basic description of their average consumer and a stock photo. They aren't saying the only people who drink monster are young white males, just that that is their largest market and the consumer group they are targeting. It does make sense for them to say internally "hey, FYI this is the group of consumers we intend to target with our marketing efforts", and I've definitely read very similar stuff in every marketing proposal I've read, just with different groups.
by noxer | 2025-08-23 21:46:22+00:00
The article seems deliberately misleading for example the "F-5s, which the U.S. Air Force retired out of service in 1990" is of course still in use in the Navy and Marine as well as in China, South Korea, Iran, Brazil and probably other countries.

Also the F-35 is an always was highly controversial in Switzerland from the very first day it was publicly considered that was around 2017. In 2020 the people voted in favor of the F-35 with 50.1% support. So the reality is that any and all reasons to stop or delay the purchase of these jets will be uses by the parties that opposed the purchase, it has little to nothing to do with the so called "trade war".
by godelski | 2025-08-23 21:46:23+00:00
I think we also forget that high schoolers are dumb and young. The difference between top high schoolers is not that different from the average. But as the years go by that gap widens. The gaps may seem big at the time but that's viewing it locally. I did a lot of teaching in grad school and while there were a handful of kids (<1%) who were just exceptional this was almost never clear on paper. For the most part the main difference was effort. Some of my favorite students started off terribly! Well below average. But I've seen that turn around in a single class and I've seen freshman who are at risk of flunking out get straight A's in their junior and senior years. (I've also seen the complete opposite!)

Because of this, I always wonder about how many more "geniuses" were missing out on because of this. I'm pretty confident that in an elite university if you threw out the bottom 50% (or fewer!) of candidates and then just randomly selected you'd end up with a pretty similar if not identical outcome. The gap is small and shaped by environments. At college admission time the gap is just so small compared when looking from a PhD level.

I think the admissions systems are fucked up. It's become an arms race over things that don't matter. The root of the problem is just that we're trying to measure systems with lots of noise in them. At some point you're fitting noise, not meaningful data. It'll look successful but it's not successful do to your metrics, it's successful because an arbitrary metric would have sufficed. That doesn't mean don't use metrics, but rather to use cautiously. Data and measures are meaningless without context. In this context we're talking about kids. What, they can't ever fuck up? If they don't fuck up in high school they're more likely to in college. Ultimately we're dealing with humans, who adapt, change, and where it's hard to predict their futures. Personally I'd rather those kids to figure out how to be human easier. I don't know about causation, but there definitely is a strong correlation between their ability to cross these gaps when they've already learned those soft skills (those kids come to college and don't need to learn skills like taking care of yourself, cooking, or other forms of independence. They often are more clear about their desires and not just going through the motions). Unfortunately these are often inversely correlated to grades (like B's, not F's).

We can't have meritocracy if you believe merits can be measured without noise. The irony is that often the pursuit of meritocracy hinders its progress. The unfortunate reality is that there are things you just cannot measure. We should always try and seek to improve but that can't happen without deep understanding of limitations.

I'm also reminded of a scene from Silicon Valley. Richard gets into an argument about the marketing team and Jack Barker says because they're the best you gave to give them easier things to sell. There's a lot of ways to interpret that in this context so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader.
by musicale | 2025-08-23 21:47:18+00:00
> Imagine if our cars were like phones. When you take your Honda out for a spin, if it couldn't visit certain destinations

What web sites are you seeing that are blocked on Android (or is is just an issue in Chrome?)

Have you tried turning off "Safe Browsing"?

It's arguably a legitimate safety feature, but I believe you can turn it off and visit any web site.

I think sites presenting forged or expired SSL certificates are blocked (probably a legitimate security feature), but it may be possible to add them manually if desired.
by lithocarpus | 2025-08-23 21:47:19+00:00
Yes I did. This is the same question I'm pondering:

What is it that causes some people to not get chronic cardiovascular and metabolic disease?

Hence my comment honing in on what are the likely biggest causes of these diseases and thus how to avoid getting them.

I agree with the article actually that figuring out how to be healthy, ergo how to avoid these diseases, is a good way to live a longer healthier life. I was just saying it's not surprising or unique.
by fredoralive | 2025-08-23 21:47:32+00:00
Some Dreamcast games used Windows CE (hence the logo on the console) and DirectX, but most used Sega's own "Katana" SDK, which I don't think uses Linux either. Like most consoles prior to the HD systems, it didn't really have a resident "OS", whatever was loaded from the disc has control of the system, I assume the Katana SDK provided "OS" functions that were linked into each binary.

Dreamcast browser discs did exist, they used an Access browser (and Katana SDK?) IIRC. Unpatchable web browsers on optical discs sounds like such a bizzare thing nowadays, especially as browser exploits have been a rich vein of console hacking, although the Dreamcast had rather more obvious issues with it's "DRM" for that to be an issue.

PlayStation 2 was the system with an official Linux kit (and early on PS3 could run Linux as well, before THINGS happened).
by fidotron | 2025-08-23 21:47:38+00:00
The Nintendo Wii SoC was actually fabbed in Canada and exported, but that facility has changed into something slightly different because the whole east coast/hudson river valley fab world went sideways a while ago.

> We import tons of food and energy from them and have no alternative on time scales or 10 years

More importantly for Canadians that food or energy has no alternative competing market to sell into. Consequently the Canadians are totally dependent on the US market to even set the price of it. This applies to many other sectors as well.

Canada is currently having a huge desperate push to export to non US markets because of the levels of uncertainty that have been created. And I say this as someone not totally dismissive of the US position, but they need to do a far better job of bringing their allies into the tent with them.
by erulabs | 2025-08-23 21:47:55+00:00
Kafka's ability to ingest the firehose and present it as a throttle-able consumable to many different applications is great. If you're thinking "just use a database", it's worth noting that SQL databases are _not well suited_ to drinking from a firehose of writes, and that distributed SQL in 2012 was not a thing. Kafka was one of the first systems that fully embraced the dropping of the C from CAP theorem, which was a big step forward for web applications at scale. If you bristle at that, know that using read-replicas of your postgres database present the same correctness problems.

These days though, unless I was at Fortune 100 scale, I'd absolutely turn to Redis Cluster Streams instead. So much simpler to manage and so much cheaper to run.

Also I like Kafka because I met two pretty Russian girls in San Francisco a decade back and the group we were in played a game where we described what the company we worked for did in the abstract, and then tried to guess the startup. They said "we write distributed streaming software", I guessed "confluent" immediately. At the time confluent was quite new and small. Fun night. Fun era.
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2025-08-23 21:48:35+00:00
An interesting follow-up is using various xAI (explainable AI) techniques to then investigate what features in an image the classifier uses to make its decisions. Saliency maps work great for images. When I was playing around with it, the binary classifier I trained from scratch to distinguish cats from dogs ended up basically only looking at eyes. Enough images in the dataset featured cats with visible, open eyes, and the vertical slit is an excellent predictor. It was an interesting lesson that also emphasized how much the training data matters.
by omar-marosh | 2025-08-23 21:48:36+00:00
BD-VoteNet is an electronic voting system that uses practically the same cryptographic and blockchain technology that secures financial transactions worth trillions of dollars every day.

The idea of its functioning is straightforward, but it contains great power:

Keeping a record of every vote cast. Verification of the way the votes were counted. There is no way a single authority can reverse the outcome of the election.
by dijit | 2025-08-23 21:50:08+00:00
I don’t really care.

I’m telling you why I am skeptical of any tech that intentionally obfuscates trade-offs, I’m not making a comparison on which of these is worse; and I don’t really care if people take my anecdote seriously either: because they should make their own conclusions.

However it might help people go in to a topic about performance and reliability from a more informed position.