MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roenxi | 2025-08-31 05:59:52+00:00
That is one of those questions where if you're asking it, I do question how serous you are in seeking out answers. It is mathematically guaranteed that an optimal rate exists, the topic has been an ongoing research question for several centuries and it is hard to avoid if you spend time arguing economics. Wikipedia points out [0] that scholars dating back to Ibn Khaldun have been working on the topic of pinpointing an optimal tax rate for maximising income.

So while I admit to not providing you with a study in this comment [1], it is pretty obvious they have been done and I don't see what there is to challenge on the topic. Obviously there is an optimal tax rate for maximising revenue, this is an area where there has been a huge amount of research done and if a municipality pushes their rates beyond that point (which will happen with some regularity) it'll see its tax take go down. There isn't much to document, anywhere with taxing authority would be feeling out limits experimentally all the time.

> Sure some notable persons have changed their addresses, but overall, they are they hurting?

They moved states for tax reasons, so yes. Otherwise they wouldn't have moved. If notable people are starting to move then the system sounds like it is very close to the critical point.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve (not that it'd be total tax burden that needs is the limit, not just the slice imposed by one area).

[1] Wikipedia has a lot of sources though if you actually want to look it up.
by gglanzani | 2025-08-31 06:00:41+00:00
I have not read the paper, but how did they differentiate between people eating non-breakfast food in the morning and people skipping breakfast?

From the quote below, it seems their method all but precise

> To understand their eating habits, participants were asked on two separate days - about two weeks apart - to recall everything they ate and drank. From these "dietary recalls", scientists estimated each person's average eating window and treated it as representative of their long-term routine.
by ehnto | 2025-08-31 06:01:30+00:00
I am wondering why "very wealthy" would be so stressed by increased taxes. Don't they have ludicrous wealth, shouldn't it have almost no material impact for them?

Are there money games I am unaware of that means they are running brittle houses of cards and marginal percentage increases in taxes would topple their empires?

I just don't understand the fear or concern, but I am not ludicrously wealthy so I suppose I wouldn't.

If someone is truly strong then they have strength to spare for others. I guess I assume the same would be true of wealth, but perhaps you don't get ludicrously wealthy by being proportionally generous.
by awesome_dude | 2025-08-31 06:02:09+00:00
Well, I found it weird - the else keyword has been a stalwart of programming for... several decades now.

Maybe one day we will abstract it away like the goto keyword (goto is a keyword in Go, and other languages still, but I have only seen it used in the wild once or twice in my 7 or 8 years of writing Go)

Goto is still used in almost every language, but it's abstracted away, hidden in loops, and conditionals (which Djikstra said was a perfectly acceptable use of goto), presumably to discourage its direct use to jump to arbitrary points in the code
by s_ting765 | 2025-08-31 06:02:24+00:00
Your example scenario avoided doing an end to end test for the data processing involving the parser instead opting for a unit test just for the parser.

We have developer sandboxes for this purpose so you don't have to guess the structure of the data you will receive from the actual server.

Also if all else was equal between multiple types of test, there wouldn't be need for comparison ala cheaper.
by echelon | 2025-08-31 06:03:27+00:00
Business leaders were bamboozled into thinking they were going to get innovators dilemma'd if they didn't adopt AI. It was either that, or being told that they could go lean and fire their workforce.

That's all probably going to happen at the next phase of AI, but it's just not where the current slate of LLMs are. We've hit a wall in terms of utility. LLMs kind of suck for everything but search and code tab auto-suggest.

Generative images and video, on the other hand, are 100% going to disrupt incumbents. Everyone from Adobe to Disney and Netflix are scrambling and trying to figure out how this tech changes the economics of production. I'm talking to production studios that are already underbidding each other by an order of magnitude. It's a bloodbath.
by Animats | 2025-08-31 06:04:44+00:00
I think of this as belonging to the same class as electric cars with software-simulated clutches and transmissions.[1] BYD makes a driver training car which is an EV with a totally simulated stick shift and clutch.)[2] The trainee can try grinding the gears and stalling the engine, but it's all a software-generated illusion.

[1] https://driving.ca/column/motor-mouth/toyota-stickshift-ev-m...

[2] https://blog.tmgps.org/2021/05/
by some_furry | 2025-08-31 06:04:52+00:00
> Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation.

People outside tech very much do care about the effects of centralization, though. They complain about it constantly, in oblique terms.

All the waxing poetic about "social media"? They aren't mad that people talk to each other. They're mad at platforms.

They just don't recognize the root cause of their pain points until they're sufficiently technical.
by bambax | 2025-08-31 06:06:16+00:00
Cognitive load is an important concept in aviation. It is linked to the number of tasks to run and the number of parameters to monitor, but it can be greatly reduced by training. Things you know inside and out don't seem to consume as much working memory.

So in software development there may be an argument to always structure projects the same way. Standards are good — even when they're bad! because one of their main benefit is familiarity.
by benjismith | 2025-08-31 06:06:38+00:00
I read it. I also searched the page for the word "Opus" and it didn't appear anywhere. The word "Sonnet" appears, but only once.

There's also "GPT-4.1 or GPT-5", but that's not what my question implied, which was that it's weird to offer Sonnet but not Opus.
by vineyardmike | 2025-08-31 06:08:21+00:00
> Is there any documented case of a rich-popular municipality increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy and seeing the tax levy go down?

Sort of but AFAIK nothing similar to this. There is some evidence of this occurring in Europe, notably France, but it was structural pretty different. Connecticut, NY, and Jersey often trade a small amount of residents depending on taxes year to year, but none of those individuals are really leaving the NYC economy.

NYC is also pretty unique in the availability of certain high-income jobs and amenities catering to the ultra wealthy. Like high-tax California (and America generally), the extra income and benefits from living there outweigh the costs for many. Massachusetts implemented a millionaire tax and saw a net increase in ultra wealthy individuals.

NYC is already one of the most expensive places in the country. People either live there because it’s worth the cost, or it’s the best place for them to make more millions. There is little evidence to support a minor wealth tax would change that meaningfully.
by 9dev | 2025-08-31 06:09:05+00:00
You can take my IntelliJ IDE out of my cold, dead hands. I don’t understand why anyone would want to miss out on all the automatic inference and interlinked code base, the integrated tooling… Every time I try something like Zed or VS Code, I end up disappointed or install a no longer supported plugin only to learn it falls way short.

Yes, Zed's startup time is way better, and it definitely feels snappier. But when I work on code, I need to jump around the code. I want the debugger to show me the current line in the file, annotating the value of every variable right in the source. I want to jump to property usages. I want to automatically rename a function everywhere intelligently, not using search-replace. I want to get completion for my database tables, and browse them from the IDE. And lots more.
by graycat | 2025-08-31 06:09:24+00:00
(1) Didn't see anything on the math of probability or stochastic processes, e.g., nothing from Dynkin, Neveu, Breiman, etc.

(2) That it's important to study carefully that computing is about "switches" is something like knowing the details of the amazing work in the chemistry of rubber tires is crucial for truck driving or we should all early in our education achieve good mastery of each of the proteins in our DNA.

(3) After working through all those books, cancelling nearly everything else in life for some years, just what is the result, the payoff, the reason? Academic research or something in the mainstream economy, technology, etc.?
by grimblee | 2025-08-31 06:11:04+00:00
The problem isn't that he's right wing, it's that he's allowed to corrupt politcians.

You know, democracy, the thing we're supposed to live in but seems more and more like a plutocracy in disguise as we learn about the links between politicians and billionaires.

Just because one was born at the right place doesn't give them the right to rule over us, that's what we've been fighting and dying against for generations. And we'll fight again if it comes to it, we are the 99%, they are nothing but wealth and inflated egos.
by AndrewOMartin | 2025-08-31 06:11:57+00:00
Funnily enough, I think this is because in Medieval times the most common state for traders and merchants was to be mobile and traveling. It was only the guys selling stuff to universities (like the medieval equivalents of ink, pens, paper, envelopes) who had such a valuable and regular customer that they could afford to set up a station[ae]ry shop!

Now I write it out sounds unbelievable, and I can't think of a reputable source, but I've been telling this story for years.
by bruce511 | 2025-08-31 06:12:43+00:00
I agree. Plus, as alternate markets are developed, so that leverage drops even more.

The US has made friends with a lot of countries based on the goodwill generated by strong trade ties. That goodwill is being eroded in the short term, and will linger as a reputation for "unreliability". 80 years of work is being undone in months.

And unfortunately it won't be as simple as "in 4 years we can go back to normal ". It's obvious that congress supports this, and the American people voted for it, so it's not just one man's policy.
by hakunin | 2025-08-31 06:13:04+00:00
I found this type of approach (where you try to meet subjective readability goals with objective/statistical metrics) to not produce clear code in practice. Instead, I suggest this one weird trick: if your colleagues are confused in code review, then rewrite and comment the code until they aren't confused anymore. Don't just explain it to them ad-hoc, make the code+comments become the explanation. There is no better linter than subjective reading by your colleagues. Nothing else works nearly as well. Optimize to your team's understanding, that's it. Somehow, this tends to keep working great even as the team changes.
by simianwords | 2025-08-31 06:13:27+00:00
> So thinking that unit tests are useless because they're a chore to maintain is a very shortsighted mentality. Instead, it's more beneficial to see them as guardrails that make your future work easier, by giving you the confidence that you're not inadvertently breaking an API contract whenever you make a change, even when all higher-level tests remain green across the board.

This is the kind of dogmatism I want people to understand. I’m not saying unit tests are useless but they have very narrow use, in units that encompass slightly complicated logic. Most of us write classes that just have a few for loops, if conditions, metrics and a few transformations. The overhead of writing a unit tests where, mocking all external services and continuously maintaining them when every small code change causes unit tests to break (false positives) is pretty high.
by bornfreddy | 2025-08-31 06:13:29+00:00
Agreed. If you need a comment to tell you what the function does, you should think deep about naming, and if this fails, consider if this is the correct abstraction. Comments are a way to kick the can down the road - "I was unable to make this code clear enough, so here is the hint to help you".

Edit: sometimes the comments are the best of all evils, and you should use them to explain the constraints that led to this code - they just shouldn't be mandatory.
by bababalamba | 2025-08-31 06:13:39+00:00
Many are so focused on the narrative that the media runs with so that they seem all but blind to see the more logical macro-view of the situation which is just sitting there in plain sight..

1. If you look at a world map you will quickly notice that the island of Taiwan is adjacent to the asian subcontinent and mainland China. If you had one of those physical globes with a world map on them, you would not even see the United states of America when looking at Taiwan. This fact alone should make you realize that the US has no business whatsoever interfering or warmongering about anything going on over there.

2. The reason for all this is to, by any means, try prevent any increase in "power" for other countries in an attempt to prevent their time in the sun on the global economic field from fading away.

3. The reason why this will fail is because the strategy of trying to force others to be your friends and to blackmail/strongarm them into submissive allies does not work in the long run. Anyone who has attended the social battleground of kindergarten should have seen this to be a human fact.

4. My tip to all world leaders is as follows. Try not act like hyperagressive mentally challenged warmongering pssies and everything will be fine.

/Michael Ah. Sweden
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-08-31 06:14:20+00:00
It's easy to blame person in a roundabout way. I have to do this all the time. Instead of saying "The suggestion from Bob was wrong and now we are in trouble" go with "We complied with the suggestion from email thread at this date and time and now it seems are in trouble". Whoever doesn't care, Bob is covered. Whoever does care, will find the info they need, but that's on them now.
by richardfeynman | 2025-08-31 06:15:13+00:00
Source: https://www.ochaopt.org/content/movement-and-out-gaza-2022

"In 2022, the Egyptian authorities allowed more exits of people through their border. The 144,899 exits recorded during the year are 44 per cent more than in 2021, representing the highest figure since 2014."

That's 6.6% of the gaza population travelling out of gaza per year, higher than the percent of Indians who travel abroad each year. This statistic also doesn't reflect the hundreds of thousands of exits from Gaza to Israel each year.

The "open air prison" is a lie. You can impute whatever motive you want to them leaving. I'm sure escaping Hamas persecution was a part of it for many of them. Israeli prosecution wasn't really a thing and the "mowing the lawn" narrative is propaganda.
by teiferer | 2025-08-31 06:15:18+00:00
> If you can train yourself to read your own code with fresh eyes almost as soon as you write it, you’d be unlocking a powerful shortcut, a cheat code to life.

This is really a key takeaway here: Always keep your audience in mind. When programming, you have two audiences: the machine executing the code, and fellow programmers maintaining the code. Both are important, but the latter is often neglected and is what the article is about. Optimize for your human audience. What will make it easier for the next person to understand this? Do that.

Like public speaking or writing an article. A great talk or a article happen when the speaker/author knew exactly how the audience would perceive them.
by Mutjake | 2025-08-31 06:15:19+00:00
If some business is defensively buying off all the competition, that’s an easy ATM for a serial entrepreneur, especially if the large business is price gouging: found a competitor, grow it e.g. with some like-minded funding, sell it at a premium. Wait for the clauses of the contract to run out, and rinse and repeat.

The defensive acquisitions can work on domains with gravity effects to a degree, but those are domains are far from being the total market.
by schnatterer | 2025-08-31 06:15:29+00:00
> business logic and http status codes Why hold this custom mapping in our working memory? It's better to abstract away your business details from the HTTP transfer protocol, and return self-descriptive codes directly in the response body: { "code": "jwt_has_expired" }

While the logic behind it sounds reasonable, REST does the exact opposite with the same goal: simplicity, easy to learn, i.e. reduce mental load. I know there are other reasons for REST/SOAP/Graphql, etc. Still makes mental load a somewhat subjective matter to me.
by cma | 2025-08-31 06:16:05+00:00
> They found the elevated cardiovascular risk was consistent across socioeconomic groups, and strongest among smokers and people with diabetes or existing heart disease - suggesting they should be especially cautious about long-term, narrow eating windows. The link held even after adjusting for diet quality, meal and snack frequency, and other lifestyle factors, researchers found.

Smoking makes it easier to skip meals, which is part of why people gain weight when they quit. Smokers who more likely only ate in 8 hour windows may just be heavier smokers than those who ate across 14 hour windows if there is a dose response relationship to the meal skipping.

Diabetes also can make meals at certain times of day make you feel sick and more likely to be skipped (more examples beyond this, but look up dawn phenomenon with diabetes).

They say all cause mortality is not much different blbut those two subgroups had the higher mortality compare with same subgroup that ate over a longer period. But it could just be heavier smokers skipping meals and more advanced diabetes case sufferers skipping breakfast unless controlled for separately (smoking amount and dawn phenomenon)
by Der_Einzige | 2025-08-31 06:16:13+00:00
I believe if you’re in a trade and not making minimum of 100K you’re doing it wrong.

Nearly every skilled trade costs at least 100$ an hour for their labor, often far more. Yes even in West Virginia or Mississippi. Stop getting scammed by working for someone else and work for yourself.

Trades are so lucky too in that it’s hard for normies to evaluate the quality of their work - so you can make tons of money while still being really shitty at it.
by youngtaff | 2025-08-31 06:16:45+00:00
Nah… UK’s economy is broken due to the fact we’ve never recovered from the financial crisis

It’s also due to the lack of investment in heathcare, education and other public services over the last 14yrs

Britain still has very many extremely rich people - London has more billionaires than NY - Serious Money by Caroline Knowles is an interesting exploration of the subject
by psalaun | 2025-08-31 06:17:47+00:00
And it even might be a rather short (in length, not height) peak we won't ever reach again. Nowadays I don't see a single reason to believe that children won't be put back to work in western societies in 200 years, unless massive hypothetical innovations are made to replace depleting oil and keep the very high productivity per capita we've been enjoying for decades.
by sethammons | 2025-08-31 06:18:25+00:00
I quit a $400k+ job to get away from IaC. I loath yaml. More and more, my day was filled with "you have an error on line 1, good luck." It was more k8s than tf, but I get the same sneer on my face when messing with tf.

I refuse to let such a shitty experience be what defines my day.

I was hoping pulumi would help. Haven't used it yet, but it is sad to hear it doesn't live up to the hype.
by bonzini | 2025-08-31 06:19:12+00:00
I have a similar mandate and a similar take, but slightly different use cases.

As to the search engine, my searches are often very narrow, like I want to recall a specific message from a mailing list, so I don't use that too much. On the other hand, I found Google's NotebookLM to be really good at recalling concepts from both source code and manuals (e.g. processor manuals in my case).

Code generators are incredible refactoring machines. In one case (not so easy to reproduce in general, but it did work) Claude Code did a Python to decently idiomatic Rust conversion in a matter of minutes; it added mypy annotations to 2000 lines of Python code (with 90% accuracy) in half an hour and got the entire job done with my assistance in about an hour. For the actual writing and debugging where the logic matters they're still not there even for small code bases (again 2000 lines of code ballpark). They're relatively good at writing and debugging testcases but IMO that's also where there's a risk of copyright taint. Anyhow it's something I would use maybe 2-3 times a month.

In one case I used it for natural language translation, with pretty good results, but I knew both languages because I needed to check the result. Ask it first to develop a glossary and then to translate.

For studying they're interesting too, though for now I have mostly tried that outside work. At work, Google Deep Research worked well compared to the time it takes and it's able to find a variety of sources (including HackerNews comments in one case :)) which is useful for cross-checking.
by alnewkirkcom | 2025-08-31 06:19:50+00:00
The point isn't that people in power will suddenly volunteer to be "checked." It's that CBC allows leaders to "put their money where their mouth is". Leaders who claim to want ownership cultures, meritocracy, and outcomes over optics (i.e., performance without the theater) cannot continue to hide behind vague goals once commitments are documented, falsifiable, and visible.

That's the incentive: CBC makes actual objective performance evaluation possible (i.e., performance evaluation for people and projects). And if a leader resists that? That's telling. It signals something about their leadership and the actual culture they're fostering. CBC is for leaders who claim to want meritocracy and are willing to prove it.

History gives us examples. Andy Grove at Intel famously institutionalized "constructive confrontation" and rigorous OKRs, explicitly binding executives, including himself, to objective measures of performance. It wasn't a loss of power; it was the foundation of Intel's execution culture and competitive edge.

CBC is cut from the same cloth. It doesn't magically enforce itself; it makes accountability legible, so leaders either live their stated values or reveal that they don't.
by sixtyj | 2025-08-31 06:20:18+00:00
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18714...

Survey took 15 years, and 19,831 participants. Median follow-up was 8.1 years. Further research is required.

Methods

Adult participants who reported usual intake from two valid 24-h dietary recalls were included from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 2003–2018 (n = 19,831). Mortality status as of December 2019 was obtained through linkage to the National Death Index. Average eating duration was categorized as <8, 8–<10, 10–<12, 12–14 h (mean duration), >14–16, and >16 h. Multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) were derived.

Results

During a median follow-up of 8.1 years, compared with eating duration of 12–14 h, eating duration <8 h was robustly associated with higher cardiovascular mortality (HR, 2.35 [95 % CI, 1.39–3.98]), but not with all-cause and cancer mortality. The positive association with cardiovascular mortality remained consistent across 8 subgroups stratified by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic factors, and smoking status, and survived 14 sensitivity analyses. However, the association with all-cause mortality did not survive many sensitivity analyses.

Conclusions

Although a positive association was observed between eating duration <8 h and cardiovascular mortality, further research is required to understand whether this risk is attributed to the short eating duration itself or residual confounding resulting from its contributing factors.