MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by orwin | 2025-08-17 23:18:38+00:00
But it's for life right? You just can't bankrupt out of repayment, and since its in the US, missing a payment kill your credit score and prevent you from borrowing for anything.

In the 80s-90s in my country, we imported us-style loans, 'revolving credit', that were later called 'credits revolvers' because once you've taken one, a revolver was the only way out (not a joke, I know of 3 people who died in my village from this). We had to allow personal bankruptcy, and once the law was implemented and used, interest rates on those kind of loans doubled, and now they don't exist (although klarna and co are trying).
by ranahanocka | 2025-08-17 23:18:46+00:00
The agents communicate through different paths. First, there's a "big boss" orchestrator that decides who speaks next. The outputs from all agents (including the code from the coding agent) is put into a shared context that each agent can draw from. Practically speaking, to make this happen we use AutoGen framework.

We slowly started building more and more agents. Everything we tried just worked (kinda amazing). We first started by trying to incorporate visual understanding via VLMs. Then we slowly added more and more agents, and the BlenderRAG gave a huge boost.
by churchofturing | 2025-08-17 23:18:46+00:00
> Does "career development" just mean "more money"? If so, why not just say "there are opportunities to make more money"? If not, what is "career development" that is not just becoming more deeply buried in an organization with the various dysfunctions described in the rest of the post?

In life, everyone that thinks a lot is eventually confronted with the reality that we're all just minor players within much bigger systems. When you follow this thread, pretty deep questions start to fall out like "how can I be just in an unjust society?". Or "what's the best way that I, as an individual, can have a positive impact on my community?". Or "Is there any point in trying to change systems given my small role within them?".

To these types of questions there's various different responses and consequences. Some people dive in feet first and engage heavily with the mechanisms they have to enact change (such as local politics, grass roots political movements, activism etc). Some people, overwhelmed by the weight of the system, disengage entirely.

Now to answer your question, I believe in the work that we're doing (or else I probably wouldn't have joined). Career development at the company isn't just more money (though that's obviously a component), it's being given more responsibilities alongside the capacity to enact more and more change.

Faced with a dysfunctional organisation that you're a part of, what do you do? The options as I see it are roughly:

- Change companies, and acknowledge that the dysfunction is insurmountable.

- Do your job and stay at the position you're in.

- Embed deeper into the dysfunctional organisation, with the view that you can be an agent for positive change.

>Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?

To some people, yes. There are people out there that take satisfaction in doing harm. Not me, nor do I believe the work I do is harmful. I didn't think I had to be so granular as to say "It's satisfying to write software I believe is a net positive to society used by millions".
by throwup238 | 2025-08-17 23:19:06+00:00
This might not actually be the oldest mask. There are 16 known Neolithic masks in the world and only two have secure archaeological context (the stuff found in the same strata as the mask that we can actually radiocarbon date, like bones or wood). Most of them were found long ago and sold to collections without archaeologists excavating them, losing a lot of the scientific value. AFAIK more than ten of them are still in private collections.

This mask is not one of the two, as it was discovered by a Palestinian farmer and without a controlled excavation all that context was lost (although they’ve done surveys of the discovery site and found evidence of similarly aged artifacts). It was dated with patina analysis, which is a bit controversial to say the least. Which is to say, the scientific consensus about its age is fragile.
by UncleMeat | 2025-08-17 23:19:23+00:00
Maybe. That'd require significant additional international coordination.

Is running an inefficient charity so bad that the government needs to step in and stop it?

There could be an entirely different conversation about whether this particular group is effective. I really don't care about that. What I care about is that an organization is trying to do something nice to suffering people and then decision makers within the Trump administration decided that this was unacceptable and used an extreme legal hammer to put a stop to it where their only possible motivation is simply rage at Gazans.
by rezonant | 2025-08-17 23:19:23+00:00
> increasing corporate taxes(say after the 2028 elections if Democrats are elected) means there is less money leftover to spend on R&D.

You misunderstand how tax exemptions work.

When you make money, you need to pay taxes on that money. However, if you spend that money in certain ways, the tax code lets you take that amount of money and _deduct_ it from your overall taxable income. Thus, you pay taxes on _less_ of the money you earned. Imagine the tax rate was 100%, but you could deduct 100% of R&E expenses, and you spent 100% of your income on R&E. You would pay zero dollars in taxes.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-17 23:19:39+00:00
> I had a snippet about how 他 was made up of 也 and 人, "also a person", but ended up editing it out, as I wasn't sure it was actually connected w/ Japanese using it to mean "other".

Well, I don't think it's true, either. As I understand it, the form 他 is just a graphical simplification of 佗, with no connection to the character 也. (You can think of this as similar to how the left-hand component in 脸 is 肉, not 月.) It isn't clear to me either that the character 也 would have held any sense of "also" when the form 他 appeared, though this is a question I'm agnostic on.

I've watched several videos on youtube in which someone presents Japanese people with uncommon kanji and asks them to read them, or failing that to speculate on what they might say. The Japanese unfailingly speculate that both halves of a compound character are relevant to the meaning, which surprises me - it's very rare for a character to be constructed from two meaningful parts. Far more common are the characters in which one part gestures at the meaning and the other part tells you the pronunciation, and 佗 is one of those. 从人它聲。
Show HN: Promptproof – GitHub Action to test LLM prompts, catch bad JSON schemas
by geminimir | 2025-08-17 23:20:59+00:00
We kept breaking production with small prompt edits — suddenly outputs weren’t valid JSON, fields disappeared, or formats changed silently.

So we built Promptproof, a GitHub Action that runs in CI and blocks PRs when prompts produce invalid outputs.

Features:

- Validates JSON output

- Enforces required keys & schemas

- Runs fast in CI (no external infra)

- Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, and local models

- Adds PR comments so reviewers see failures immediately

We’d love feedback: which rules or integrations would make this most useful for you?

Repo: https://github.com/geminimir/promptproof-action
by UncleMeat | 2025-08-17 23:21:15+00:00
I give at lot of money annually to a local food bank. This is less efficient in terms of fighting hunger than giving to an international organization by virtue of the higher cost of food here.

Should the government stop me? Am I a bad person for doing this?

Frankly, it is absolutely fucking insane to me that people somehow think that this decision is somehow based in the Trump administration's desire for maximally efficient charitable giving.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-08-17 23:21:41+00:00
Here is the EU safety opinion. https://health.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2022-08/sccs_o_246....

IDK how to tell what brand uses what type without independent testing or taking their word for it. Several makers have come out and said needle-shaped is cheaper to buy so if a brand has 10% formulation as opposed to 1 or 3 or 5%, it is more likely to be using needle-shaped. (And there is a separate conversation to be had whether 10% is needed/ideal concentration anyway)
by westurner | 2025-08-17 23:21:46+00:00
Shell: GNU parallel, pdftotext

Python: PyPdf2, PdfMiner.six, Grobid, PyMuPdf; pytesseract (C++)

paperetl is built on grobid: https://github.com/neuml/paperetl

annotateai: https://github.com/neuml/annotateai :

> annotateai automatically annotates papers using Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs can summarize papers, search papers and build generative text about papers, this project focuses on providing human readers with context as they read.

pdf.js-hypothes.is: https://github.com/hypothesis/pdf.js-hypothes.is:

> This is a copy of Mozilla's PDF.js viewer with Hypothesis annotation tools added

Hypothesis is built on the W3C Web Annotations spec.

dokieli implements W3C Web Annotations and many other Linked Data Specs: https://github.com/dokieli/dokieli :

> Implements versioning and has the notion of immutable resources.

> Embedding data blocks, e.g., Turtle, N-Triples, JSON-LD, TriG (Nanopublications).

A dokieli document interface to LLMs would be basically the anti-PDF.

Rust crates: rayon handles parallel processing, pdf-rs, tesseract (C++)

pdf-rs examples/src/bin/extract_page.rs: https://github.com/pdf-rs/pdf/blob/master/examples/src/bin/e...
by mberning | 2025-08-17 23:21:48+00:00
If you work at a real enterprise that actually takes security seriously I can assure you a large portion of it is not theater. You will find this out when they come knocking and point out something boneheaded that happened on your watch. I once had an intern that mistakenly committed a non-prod credential into source control. They realized their mistake and replaced it with a token. But not before it had triggered some infosec alert and they blasted me with a stern “ACTION REQUIRED” email. I also had people on my team get snagged by simulated phishing emails and other such things which are run constantly.
by saurik | 2025-08-17 23:22:38+00:00
That isn't what it ever seemed, on early iOS at least? They would have every single app on the device using a private API -- like UIScroller, or UIWebDocumentView -- and then they would let all of their end developers screw around with the new UIScrollView, or UIWebView, and it would take a few years for their screams to result in the good design aspects from the private APIs to be begrudgingly given to the masses. At some point, a couple apps -- often starting with the Calculator app, which always seemed to be written by an intern -- would get ported to use the APIs the end developers had been trying to use for years, and if that worked out, Apple would start actually porting their apps off the internal APIs to the "finally good enough" public ones. It was honestly ridiculous... you'd see people talking about some extremely limited API, such as UINavigationController, as if it was somehow amazing... but you'd then have to point out "so why isn't Apple using it anywhere?" and the zealots somehow wouldn't even understand that that was possible :/.
by WanderPanda | 2025-08-17 23:22:57+00:00
For me it all made sense when I heard that IQ/g-factor basically vanishes in the absence of time pressure (heard if from Richard Haier on Lex).

For a very narrow range of professions, like ATCs, time is absolutely critical but for most it does not really matter that much. Especially in many STEM fields. I think people in a broad IQ range can build abstractions and acquire intuitions about pretty complex matter. From this view-point ability to concentrate for long times, curiosity etc. seem more important than "raw-compute".

"if you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you’re gonna have a bad time" - Ilya

Timeless statement imo, even in the absence of AI
by idiotsecant | 2025-08-17 23:22:58+00:00
There is a pending energy affordability crisis. There is no appetite to tell AI data centers no, the only solution is adding increasingly expensive MW to the grid. The cost of those extremely expensive MW will not be picked up by the big tech players alone. We will all subsidize them. We've spent the last 50 years hiding our head in the sand and avoiding infrastructure spending and now that the chickens have come home to roost we will spend the declining years of empire squeezing as much blood out of our peasants as we can.
by _swfb | 2025-08-17 23:24:19+00:00
Yeah, it's horrible; I deleted my Facebook a decade ago because I hated what social media interaction was becoming and it was doing a number on my mental health. I deleted my old Twitter a few days ago, and I haven't done anything on Bluesky in months and I never used it much. The only social media I use regularly now is HN and SomethingAwful.

I would so love to just delete my LinkedIn, but you can't do that now. A lot of job applications require you give your LinkedIn. So I am stuck logging in occasionally. It's dystopian.
Show HN: I Made a Chess Game
by Drimiteros | 2025-08-17 23:25:14+00:00
# Da-Chess My attempt on a basic, in the works, chess game made in C++ and SFML 2.6.0!

--- ### Features - All pawn movements (includes even complex ones like en passant, castling & pawn promotion) - Basic evaluation system (takes into account material count, piece positioning and total available moves) - Basic timer (Automatically stops/starts based on the turn) - Piece sounds (boop, bap, pop)

--- ### Libraries used: - SFML 2.6.0
by impure-aqua | 2025-08-17 23:25:48+00:00
Of the prescription options, estradiol is probably the most common and easily available, between hormonal birth control and HRT.

It is also likely the most easy to study, as we have 60-70 years of usage that is not correlated with prevalence of other diseases that might skew life expectancy (like metformin etc.), and quite high-quality medical records by virtue of it being vended on a prescription basis.

Despite this, there is not really any clear evidence that it increases life expectancy.
by immibis | 2025-08-17 23:26:06+00:00
Is buying a stock really supporting the company?

There are four outcomes with evil companies:

1. They lose, and you don't care because you didn't buy the stock.

2. They lose, and you lose your investment.

3. They win, and society becomes a dystopia, and you're poor because you didn't buy the stock.

4. They win, and society becomes a dystopia, but at least you're rich because you bought the stock.

Not buying the stock doesn't really stop them making society a dystopia.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-17 23:26:18+00:00
There's also the new CoalescingMergeTree, that seems very useful for many classic roll-up problems, ideal for materializing a recent view of the append only log of data that is ClickHouse's natural append-only log strong point. https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickhouse-25-6-coalescingmerget... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44656436

For general mutable data, ClickHouse is trying super hard to get much better & doing amazing engineering. But it feels like it'll be a long time before the fortress of Postgres for OLTP is breached. https://about.gitlab.com/blog/two-sizes-fit-most-postgresql-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44895954

The top submission is the end of a 4 part series. Part two is really nice on the details of how ClickHouse has focused on speeding updates: recommend a read! https://clickhouse.com/blog/updates-in-clickhouse-2-sql-styl...
by rekenaut | 2025-08-17 23:26:48+00:00
> Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

This advice surprises me. With one foot in the classical music world when I was younger, there are absolutely music skills that take many years if not decades to get to 90% on. And those that have put the work in are absolutely and obviously competent.

Similarly, when I'm working with someone who started off as a machinist, then a designer, then went to school and became an engineer, I find it baffling to think that I can absorb 90% of their knowledge in 6 weeks.
by immibis | 2025-08-17 23:26:59+00:00
I meant to say that the left/right divide is built in to humans, not that each individual human is predisposed to always be left or always be right.

The rightward shift as people age is pretty easily explained by self-interest. When you start with almost nothing, you want a fair share because that's more than you have now. Once you climb the ladder, you don't want a fair share because that's less than you have now. Once you get above the average, you want to stretch the pyramid taller because that puts you at a higher absolute position, and the higher up you are, the more you want to stretch it. When you're below the middle, you want to shorten the pyramid because that puts you at a higher absolute position (the pyramid extends below the floor).

But that's assuming wealth dynamics continue to work how they did for boomers. IIRC millennials were the first generation to shift leftwards with age, because they mostly didn't get to above-middle positions on the pyramid.

It's the subtle things that keep society stable.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-17 23:27:28+00:00
> Does "career development" just mean "more money"?

If you want to become a researcher in data science or developper evangelist for instance, you'll need a org that can sustain your work.

Or if you want to be a micro service architect, you'll be booed in a 3 people shop but heartfully welcomed in 3000 people companies.

Same for engineering manager paths, it only makes sense if you have the headcount.

> software is bad, or harms

What you work on doesn't need to be Enterprise software. Hopefully it isn't.
by EnPissant | 2025-08-17 23:27:32+00:00
> Heritability is always measured in the context of Environment X. If you change to Environment Y or Z then the heritability will often change greatly.

That's not a very meaningful statement. If you took two twins and severely malnourished one of them it would not be useful to say: "See! IQ is mostly environmental!".

You have to assume some kind of baseline environment that nearly everyone will share, and that can be full-filled just by the virtue of growing up in a country like America. Otherwise, you are just concerning yourself with insignificant outliers.

Here is a twin study that places the heritability at ~80%: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-hu...
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-17 23:28:32+00:00
> ... Remy's Law of Enterprise Software ... the list of good things at the end of the post.

Like the poster of the blog article, I too have worked in very large enterprise. Think 200K staff, 10K distinct servers, etc...

I had the lucky opportunity to assist the CTO in hundred-million-dollar enterprise software purchasing decisions. I got to interview vendor after vendor, grilling them to see if they're compatible with "large enterprise".

Most weren't.

This wasn't about some Kafkaesque hoops they had jump through while blindfolded and on fire, although I'm sure that's the impression most of them got.

The requirements were simple and perfectly sound architecture principles that they either met or did not meet. If they didn't meet them, then maybe their software was "good enough" for tiny clients, but would never work at scale.

I even made a list, which from memory was something like:

1. Support single-sign-on from external sources such as LDAP, OAuth, whatever. (We're not going to sync our directory and every user password to your insecure garbage software.)

2. Have some sort of audit log. Administrative or configuration changes especially. (Some places have hundreds of admins, not all of whom are fully trusted.)

3. Have an unattended installation process, even if it's just VM cloning or whatever. (I'm not clicking through your GUI wizard 500 times at 3am on Sunday morning.)

4. Allow incremental migrations/upgrades. I.e.: The "easy" process of stop-the-world; one-way-big-bang; start-the-world process is not viable in an enterprise with 10K tenants where the upgrade may or may not work for all of them on the first try.

5. Scale. This can be as simple as having indexes on "user" and "tenant" tables, which is easily overlooked when the typical dev works with a scale of 1 user and 1 tenant. Similarly, using combo boxes / drop downs is a no-go for most fields such as security groups. (We have 700K security groups. No, we can't delete 699.9K as a workaround to make your GUI not crash from an OOM error.)

6. Accessibility is mandatory. With up to 200K permanent and 1 million occasional users, every disability will be represented. Not just vision or hearing problems, but motor-neuron issues, amputees, etc... (You name it, we have someone on staff with it.)

Etc...

Seen in that light, Enterprise software starts to make sense. It's not baroque or malicious, it's just taken on a certain form to suit a purpose.

For example, I didn't understand why Active Directory uses search dialog boxes for every "picker" GUI control instead of a simpler drop-down or something similar... until I worked in an environment with 2 million objects in the directory.
by righthand | 2025-08-17 23:28:42+00:00
Egg prices are up 200% at my store and have not gone down. The point isn’t “can I buy a carton of eggs” it’s “has a carton of eggs become a luxury item I no longer buy”.

To fight the cost of something as consumers we’re told not to purchase what we can’t afford or agree with. While I can probably eat eggs every day this year, my cost for those eggs has doubled from 2 years ago.

So why would I buy eggs just because I can?

My point was about how people reason and deprioritize costs.
by alsetmusic | 2025-08-17 23:28:43+00:00
Typo / editing issue:

> Email us at fallinorg@proton.me with ith your refund request and reason. We’ll be happy to assist you.

Not to be a jerk, but if copy-editing for a pre-sale AI feature that operates on my local files includes such an oversight, it doesn’t inspire confidence. I know copy-editing and coding are different domains, but I’m still put off by it.
by mostlysimilar | 2025-08-17 23:28:55+00:00
The big tech companies are currently lobbying the US government to bring identity verification laws to us at a federal level. They stand to grow even more rich and even more powerful by being the gatekeepers of identity. Imagine if you could only log in to Hacker News by using your Google account.

It will kill whatever is left of small independent communities on the internet, and it's a disaster for free speech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAd-OOrdyMw