MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by like_any_other | 2025-08-29 01:43:00+00:00
What would make the most important point of that slide stand out any more in a "real document" than in a slideshow? If anything, I would expect it to be buried even more - a slide and limited-time presentation forces you to be concise, while in a document there tend to be few limits on length.

I would say the disaster occurred despite PowerPoint, not because of it. It's not clear to me at all why the slide author thought all that text was needed, when it seems to communicate almost nothing. If anything I would blame it on the culture around "real documents", where having more information is treated as better (probably because they serve multiple functions - to educate, but also as a record of activities), even if it makes it bloated and hard to read.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-08-29 01:43:41+00:00
regarding "supervised", it is a bit of a small nuance.

Traditional "supervised" training, required the dataset to be annotated with labels (good/bad, such-and-such a bounding box in an image, ...) which cost a lot of human labor to produce.

When people speak of "unsupervised" training, I actually consider it a misnomer: its historically grown, and the term will not go away quickly, but a more apt name would have been "label-free" training.

For example consider a corpus of human written text (books, blogs, ...) without additional labels (verb annotations, subject annotations, ...).

Now consider someone proposing to use next-token prediction, clearly it doesn't require additional labeling. Is it supervised? Nobody calls it supervised under the current convention, but actually one may view next-token prediction on a bare text corpus as a trick to turn an unlabeled dataset into trillions of supervised prediction tasks. Given this N-gram of preceding tokens, what does the model predict as the next token? And what does the corpus actually say as next token? Lets use this actual next token as if it were a "supervised" (labeled) exercise.
by rossdavidh | 2025-08-29 01:43:51+00:00
One thing they _didn't_ mention here, that could also impact this. The birth rate dropped dramatically in 2008, not unusually for a time of economic contraction. Unusually, it stayed low ever since. 2008+18=2026, so starting next year we should expect to see fewer than normal people aging into the workforce, while 1960(the end of the baby boom in the US)+65=2025. So, while the number of people coming of age will be lower, the number of people aging out will also be lower than it has been for the last 20 years. I'm not sure how this balances out, and there is also an impact from changes in how many people go to college, but we could be seeing a demographically-driven labor shortage starting soon.
by ayhanfuat | 2025-08-29 01:45:34+00:00
The Zen of Python part was quite fun. I wish Tim Peters was in it though. He wrote yesterday:

> I do show up, but not “live”. For various reasons (mostly related to declining health), I didn’t actively participate. I gave the director (Ida Bechtle) a pile of source material at the start, and that was the last of my involvement. She spliced in some recycled video of an interview I did with the PyPy folks at a PyCon some years ago, but I’m there mostly so people could recite my so-called “Zen of Python”, which an actual historian (Joseph Dragovich) assured me is “the most famous values statement for any programming language community”. https://discuss.python.org/t/python-documentary-going-live-t...
by selinkocalar | 2025-08-29 01:46:52+00:00
Supply chain attacks on developer tools are getting more sophisticated. This hits every project using these plugins. The scary part is how long malicious packages can sit undetected. Your CI/CD pipeline could be compromised for months before anyone notices. This is why I always say to scan all dependencies in your compliance checks - not just for known vulnerabilities, but for unexpected changes in package behavior. When a routine update starts making network calls it never made before, that's a red flag.
by eru | 2025-08-29 01:46:55+00:00
I agree that different application strictly speaking need different models of uncertainty.

But I'm not so sure in your conclusion: a good enough model could be universally useful. See how everyone uses IEEE 754 floats, despite them giving effectively one very specific model of uncertainty. Most of the time this just works, and sometimes people have to explicitly work around floats' weirdnesses (whether that's because they carefully planned ahead because they know what they are doing, or whether they got a nasty surprise first). But overall they are still useful enough to be used almost universally.
by selinkocalar | 2025-08-29 01:47:11+00:00
This is exactly why compliance frameworks exist. When your security controls fail, it doesn't just affect you - it ripples through every organization that trusts you. German banks are right to be concerned. PayPal processes massive amounts of financial data, and if their security posture is compromised, everyone downstream is at risk. The real test of any security program isn't whether incidents happen - it's how quickly you detect them, contain them, and communicate with affected parties.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-29 01:47:37+00:00
From what I found in a quick search, it seems like Seattle public school teachers effectively get more than a 5% raise each year when you average it. That’s a lot higher than the typical worker’s situation, so it doesn’t seem like they’re getting something meager. Articles also seemed to imply that these raises they demanded would make the city’s budget not work.

Regardless - how do you feel about what you’re getting in return? What’s your opinion on the quality of Seattle teachers and the schools there overall?
by hinkley | 2025-08-29 01:47:45+00:00
One of the dynamics is that if there is too much text they’ll read instead of listening to you. Another is that if the conclusion is on the deck, they’ll get bored waiting for you to get to the punchline they’ve already read, and that can lose your audience as well.

So you’re better off either opening with the conclusion or putting it on the next slide, but accidentally jumping two slides forward can still ruin your audience’s attention span. So sometimes it’s better for it not to be in the deck at all.
by skydhash | 2025-08-29 01:47:59+00:00
> How can that be extralopated with LLMs? How does a system independently know that it's arrived at a correct answer within a timeout or not?

That's the catch 22 with LLM. You're supposed to be both the asker and the verifier. Which in practice, it's not that great. LLMs will just find the snippets of code that matches somehow and just act on it (It's the "I'm feeling Lucky" button with extra steps)

In traditional programming, coding is a notation too more than anything. You supposed to have a solution before coding, but because of how the human brain works, it's more like a blackboard, aka an helper for thinking. You write what you think is correct, verify your assumptions, then store and forget about all of it when that's true. Once in a while, you revisit the design and make it more elegant (at least you hope you're allowed to).

LLM programming, when first started, was more about a direct english to finished code translation. Now, hope has scaled down and it's more about precise specs to diff proposal. Which frankly does not improve productivity as you can either have a generator that's faster and more precise (less costly too) or you will need to read the same amount of docs to verify everything as you would need to do to code the stuff in the first place (80% of the time spent coding).

So no determinism with LLMs. The input does not have any formal aspects, and the output is randomly determined. And the domain is very large. It is like trying to find a specific grain of sand on a beach while not fully sure it's there. I suspect most people are doing the equivalent of taking a handful of sand and saying that's what they wanted all along.
by selinkocalar | 2025-08-29 01:48:02+00:00
Interesting to see Google flattening their org structure. Management overhead is real, especially in engineering organizations. At early-stage companies, every manager hire needs to be justified. Can this person actually multiply the productivity of their team, or are they just adding coordination overhead? The best managers I've worked with were former ICs who understood the technical work deeply. Generic "people managers" rarely add value in technical organizations.
by geor9e | 2025-08-29 01:48:15+00:00
Yes! I've been using RSS (feedbro reader) to de-algorithm social media for a long time now. Twitter (via nitter), Facebook (public posts only), HN, etc. It's all in a chronological RSS feed. No algorithms choosing what I see, no infinite scroll. If it's not a public post from a user I added, I don't see it. Luckily all my close friends are public-only type posters so it works.

My pet conspiracy is that big tech has wanted RSS dead ever since Google Reader briefly took off, because they can't suck you into a walled garden of infinite ads when it exists. Obviously they can't kill it entirely, but they can pressure browsers to drop support, acquire and softly kill off the readers, paywall them so they suck to use, discontinue others, make scraping to RSS against the TOS of their site, etc, etc.
by selinkocalar | 2025-08-29 01:48:53+00:00
This is the inevitable result of inconsistent privacy laws across jurisdictions. Instead of one clear federal standard, we get a patchwork of conflicting requirements. Small companies can't afford legal teams to navigate 50 different state privacy laws. So they just block entire states rather than risk compliance violations. This helps no one - not consumers who lose access to services, not businesses who lose customers, not states that wanted to protect their residents.
by ajross | 2025-08-29 01:49:02+00:00
> fwiw, i've been using the internet with noscript and i find it perfectly usable

Genuine question though: you just run a ton of apps instead, right? Windows apps, iOS apps, whatever. Right? Because you still want to use (and not just "look at") Facebook or WhatsApp or BSky or Drive or CoD:BO6 or... everything. And all that stuff runs in an environment with the same privacy-compromising power (generally much more dangerous, frankly).

I just don't see a situation where "use noscript" doesn't really just mean "use your phone so you don't have to use your browser". I mean, why bother? You're not winning anything.

(Quite frankly most of the people I see in this argument eventually admit this straight up: "no javascript" really means "no Google" to them, and their goal isn't privacy at all except as a proxy thing; it's the destruction of the World Wide Web as a platform in favor of Apple's offerings.)
by selinkocalar | 2025-08-29 01:49:11+00:00
nd of an era. Typepad was one of the first platforms that made blogging accessible to non-technical people. There's something poignant about these early web platforms shutting down. They enabled so much creativity and community building before social media centralized everything. Makes you think about platform risk. How many businesses built their entire web presence on Typepad? Now they're scrambling to migrate years of content. This is why we prioritize data portability in everything we build. You should always be able to leave.
by selinkocalar | 2025-08-29 01:49:25+00:00
This was inevitable. AI lowers the barrier to entry for cybercrime just like it does for everything else. The concerning part isn't that someone used AI for attacks - it's how "unprecedented" the scale became. Automation lets bad actors operate at a level that would have required entire teams before. Defense needs to scale up accordingly. Manual security reviews can't keep pace with automated attacks.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-08-29 01:49:40+00:00
Everything depends on energy.

New houses massively depend on energy because you're not just supporting the shipment of wood to a build site, but supporting an entire industry of suppliers buying products from one end of the earth to the other, and ALL of the costs have risen. I don't know why the "CPI" still thinks we're 25% more expensive because a 2x4 before covid was $2 - and is now $3.50

Everything in the building industry is like this.

Now compound that with the price of groceries and everything else. It's literally impossible to afford rent let alone a mortgage.

You can't have a family if you live at mom's house.

On top of that, everything in this modern world is telling you that climate change, etc.. all that stuff has a massive affect on people wanting to have kids. There has been a large concerted effort to tell people to go gay or reject masculinity, etc.. tons of efforts to destabilize people emotionally enough to have kids. At this rate no one is ready to have them until they're outside of bearing age.
by selinkocalar | 2025-08-29 01:49:41+00:00
Another privacy browser enters the market. The challenge isn't building a privacy-focused browser - it's getting people to actually switch from Chrome. Most users say they care about privacy but aren't willing to deal with the friction of changing browsers, syncing bookmarks, re-entering passwords, etc. The browsers that succeed are the ones that make the migration process effortless. Privacy is important, but convenience usually wins.
by selinkocalar | 2025-08-29 01:50:45+00:00
This is why browser extension permissions are so important. Users see "VPN" and think privacy, but this extension was doing the exact opposite. 100k installs means this was happening at scale for months or years. Browser stores need better security screening for extensions, especially ones that claim to protect privacy. Always read extension permissions carefully. If a VPN needs access to all your browsing data, that's a red flag.
by vlark | 2025-08-29 01:51:59+00:00
Tom Junod is a natural treasure. And for those who are complaining about the writing style; this is journalistic long-form non-fiction, not a technical article where you want the TL;DR executive summary up front. You read this stuff for the journey, not for the "I need to use this information now" approach. If you don't like the style, fine, but don't denigrate it. Much long-form non-fiction is written this way. He's weaving together three different strands of biography here - the two football players and his own connection to one of them -- with a meditative discussion on the acceptance of the risk of fatal injury in youth sports. And yes, you can have that many strands -- that's what braided essays do.
by like_any_other | 2025-08-29 01:52:49+00:00
There's a near infinite quantity of technical information to choose from. The purpose is to emphasize what is important, and de-emphasize the unimportant. When I look at that slide, I see 95% utterly irrelevant information, and a teeny tiny note saying, in vague and indirect language, that the impact was 600x worse than any test.

So on the remote chance you're not just trolling: If you're doing anything safety critical, please quit your job before you kill someone. You vastly overestimate human's (including yours) ability to process information. I am being 100% sincere.
by tharkun__ | 2025-08-29 01:53:01+00:00
I don't think the "complete PR spanning multiple files" is an issue actually.

I think the issue is if you don't yourself understand what it's doing. If all you do is to tell it what the outcome should be from a user's perspective, you check that that's what it does and then you just merge. Then you have a problem.

But if you just use it to be faster at getting the code you would've liked to write yourself, or make it write the code you'd have written if you had bothered to do that boring thing you know needs to be done but never bothered to do, then it's actually a great tool.

I think in that case it's like IDE based refactorings enabled by well typed languages. Way back in the day, there were refactorings that were a royal pain in the butt to do in our Perl code base. I did a lot of them but they weren't fun. Very simple renames or function extractions that help code readability just aren't done if you have to do them manually. If you can tell an IDE to do a rename and you're guaranteed that nothing breaks, it's simply a no brainer. Anyone not doing it is simply a bad developer if you ask me.

There's a lot of copy and paste coding going on in "business software". And that's fine. I engage in that too, all the time. You have a blueprint of how to do something in your code base. You just need to do something similar "over there". So you know where to find the thing to copy and paste and then adjust. The AI can do it for you even faster especially if you already know what to tell it to copy. And in some cases all you need to know is that there's something to copy and not from where exactly and it'll be able to copy it very nicely for you.

And the resulting PR that does span multiple files is totally fine. You just came up with it faster than you ever could've. Personally I skipped all the "Copilot being a better autocomplete" days and went straight into agentic workflows - with Claude Code to be specific. Using it from within IntelliJ in a monorepo that I know a lot about already. It's really awesome actually.

The funny thing is that at least in my experience, the people that are slower than you doing any of this manually are not gonna be good at this with AI either. You're still gonna be better and faster at using this new tool than they were at using the previously available tools.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-29 01:54:16+00:00
It's a bit difficult to say, since some of those textbooks (e.g. Shirley) cover preliminary math topics as well. It sounds like you need to get a stronger understanding of calculus and linear algebra, and approach maths from a healthier viewpoint. Something like Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right often forces people to treat linear algebra with the slow care it requires, but this may be a bit too extreme.

Now that you have some applications in mind, write down all of the terms and concepts that are involved that you don't understand. Go back to a first-year textbook, something like Stewart's Calculus is probably ideal since it is designed to work up to e.g. Bezier curves. However, this time, I would not suggest relying on the exercises for understanding. Instead, place strong emphasis on the definitions and theorems, drawing them together into a diagram with the terms from earlier to really understand why each concept is required for another concept. Your objective should be to see how these ideas lead to the definition of those curves, and why it has to be that way. Be skeptical and try thinking of alternatives; you might find them to have issues, or coincide with what has already been found! Make sure you understand each concept first before you apply it; this will not be a fast process, and if you need to check something, be sure to do it. But thinking in the context of what you want to learn later is often helpful, I find.

There are other, more detailed guides out there, mostly geared toward higher level math, e.g. https://www.susanrigetti.com/math and you might find the early parts of these useful too. Also, I have found chatbots to be reasonable at giving tailored explanations for a given topic, so there is rarely harm in using them to supplement your learning. Just don't use them to solve problems for you.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-29 01:55:13+00:00
I wrestle with this by just separating this concern.

In the model I described, the trust anchor would be the govt, so basically a centralized model like domain certs. This resolves the issues you list off, but brings others: what if the trust anchor isn't trustworthy and starts forging identities?

The alternative to that would then be web of trust stuff. But this is why I consider this to be a separate problem. If the core protocol could be laid out and standardized at least, then layering on another that makes this choice between centralized vs web of trust could be done separately.
by bcrl | 2025-08-29 01:55:52+00:00
The Amiga 500 I had made that even more awesome: there was +/- 12VDC on a couple of the pins of the serial port, and the parallel port had +5VDC. Hot plugging was very dangerous as a result. The crazy part is that the Amiga 1000 had power on different pins.

Modern systems would have PTC fuses on those power pins to reduce the likelihood of damage, but not 1980s computers!
by typpilol | 2025-08-29 01:55:59+00:00
Agreed.

Honestly the best thing I tell people to get some decent css basics is try to build a few stylus themes.

You can instantly see the results in devtools. I can't think of any other language that does that besides html, and even then you have to save and refresh.

Css is pretty easy to pick up in the chrome devtools at least because it has built in autocomplete. Showing you exactly what you can set the values too etc
by nshelly | 2025-08-29 01:56:04+00:00
When I was an American PhD student in Zurich, none of the Swiss banks would accept me—except the official post office bank. This was due to the stringent FATCA laws, which made U.S. citizens too burdensome for the traditionally privacy-centric Swiss banks.

Within the first few months, I accumulated around 40K CHF in salary that the university owed me (technically from the Swiss government, since researchers were federal employees). Eventually, the university emailed me to ask if I’d like to pick up my money in cash (Bargeld). Apparently, this wasn’t uncommon.

One day I went to the office to collect it. They asked which denomination I preferred (I assumed 20s or 100s). I asked for a mix, and they handed me several envelopes filled with 1,000 CHF notes and smaller bills. I distinctly remember carrying multiple envelopes. At one point, as I walked back to my office on top overlooking Zurich, a gust of wind blew behind me. I turned around and saw colorful 200 CHF and 1,000 CHF notes scattered along the road. I calmly walked back and picked them up.

For a few months, I paid my rent and groceries entirely in cash. The Swiss didn’t think anything of it—in fact, it was fairly common. Eventually, I was able to open an account and received a yellow two-factor authentication device that looked like an old calculator. I deposited the rest of the money and, for the remainder of my studies, used the “yellow calculator” to pay bills online by debit. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQhylNX...

I never did receive an official Swiss credit card which was fine. However, I did accumulate funds a Swiss 401K which is another story unto itself.
by tzs | 2025-08-29 01:56:07+00:00
50 kb/s x 1000 bits/kb x 3600 s/hr x 24 hr/day x 1 byte/8 bits x 1 MB / 1000000 bytes = 540 MB/day. That's enough to download VPN software and a Linux distribution to run it on in a day.

If you've already got a Linux system, the Debian openvpn package is under 1 MB and at 50 kb/s would take under 3 minutes to download. I don't know if openvpn in particular is suitable for people who are trying to evade their government, but would whatever features it is missing add substantially more size?
by konimex | 2025-08-29 01:56:15+00:00
Indonesia is a big country with over ten thousand islands and uneven coverage. What is blocked on one ISP might not be enforced on another (e.g. the state-owned ISP might block or use DNS poisoning on several "non-compliant" DNS providers but my current ISP doesn't). Also, in addition to what the sibling commenter (and another commenter regarding Cloudflare outage) said there might be a general overload on the mobile network near the affected areas since there are lots of users and limited bandwidth.
by reisse | 2025-08-29 01:57:14+00:00
Wait, but there is an asymmetry. Legitimate user spends at least a dozen seconds on a page, they don't care about 10ms overhead. For a scraper, however, 10ms overhead can easily be 10x the time it spends on a page overall - the scraper is now ten times slower.

However the exact PoW implementation (hash) chosen by Anubis might significantly reduce this asymmetry, because the calculation speed is highly dependent on hardware.