MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stavros | 2025-08-10 22:04:51+00:00
Hello, it's not working for me, "send emails" fails with:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'selectedMeps') at Object.showSelectionFeedback (takeAction.js:546:41) at Object.selectAllRepresentatives (takeAction.js:542:14) at HTMLButtonElement.onclick ((index):1:13)
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-08-10 22:06:43+00:00
In the book The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the ways the eponymous Count flaunts his unfathomable wealth is by posting many horses to wait for him in advance all along the highways, allowing his carriage to travel all across France in a single night by continually changing to fresh horses. Even his wealthy rivals are astonished by this feat. So while it may have been technologically possible it would have been very expensive.
by jjmarr | 2025-08-10 22:06:49+00:00
> I have no idea what mechanism a faculty member would use to charge a highschool student. But I think that's rather unethical and useless. Finances of labs are such that this money is worthless.

The faculty member is keeping the money for themselves. Some might call it a bribe.

It's unethical (and possibly worse) but it is happening. The students themselves aren't doing actual research, they're given busywork because it's understood to be resume padding.

> But guess how you get in? With connections.

Over time, "connections" degrade into kickbacks and corruption. My point is that these lab positions are going to be meaningless in a decade due to bribery.

It will be similar to how every student at top high schools is an executive in a club because those schools have fake clubs that don't meet or do anything.
by driggs | 2025-08-10 22:08:02+00:00
> If functions don't have a return signature, does that mean everything must be satisfied in the compilation step?

Functions do have a return signature.

It looks like the author chose to show off the feature of return type inference in the short example README code, rather than the explicit case.

https://github.com/Beariish/bolt/blob/main/doc/Bolt%20Progra...
by mockingloris | 2025-08-10 22:08:28+00:00
Someone might use this in a Ted Talk!

My younger bro makes music, my older bro (a dev like me) critiqued his new vocal track just this evening. I said it’s fire; he called it cliché. We exchanged looks, and my younger bro quipped, “Perspective is all it’s about.” We laughed.

As they say, One man’s trash…

Dey well
by eszed | 2025-08-10 22:09:24+00:00
That book - first published in 1998 - was one of my favorites for a while. An overt theme was the the astounding parallels between early-internet culture and the social practices of telegraph operators. At night (particularly) they'd stay "online", shooting the breeze with each other, forming long distance friendships - even romances! - and semi-anonymously socializing in ways that felt immediately and intimately familiar to those of us were on the internet around that time. I think that 'net is nearly as dead as the telegraph, so I wonder how the book lands for readers who didn't experience that milieu.
by whatwrongwyou | 2025-08-10 22:09:48+00:00
This seems based on outdated science to me. The world isn't just "getting hotter", the overall climate is changing due solely to human influence. The article makes it sound like insurers believe houses will start spontaneously combusting. What they should really worry about is desertification in populated areas and flooding along the coasts, and the inevitable humanitarian crisis and necessary social restructuring that those will require. We can't leave this to insurers - we need strong cooperation between governments and academia to plot a better course into our brave new world.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-10 22:09:55+00:00
The Mediterranean was a tightly connected civilizational region, so if a certain invention was in use anywhere, it would spread at the speed of a sailing ship to the rest of the coast.

Already prior to the rise of the Roman Empire, there was a massive network of Phoenician and Greek colonies that would trade with one another constantly, from Cadiz to the Levant. The sea was a highway to them.

Amazon did not exist, but cunning merchants absolutely did, and they knew how to make money by selling attractive goods.
by userbinator | 2025-08-10 22:10:01+00:00
From what I've seen, the US also has a more "rebellious" culture than the EU, for lack of a better term; laws are viewed less as an absolute and the population is far more willing to break them if the consequences are perceived as minor. This is bipartisan; examples that come to mind include: electing a convicted felon, helping illegal immigrants stay in the country, and going 10 over the speed limit.
by immibis | 2025-08-10 22:10:48+00:00
Well, the customer has to choose to give your competitor the whole share or give you the whole share, and these companies are betting on being important enough the customer chooses the latter.

Don't forget a lot of their appeal is about (real or perceived) liability. If you use Postgres and you fuck up, you fuck up. If you use Oracle and you fucked up, you can blame Oracle and save face.
by hermitcrab | 2025-08-10 22:11:26+00:00
The victorious allies imposed a punitive peace on German at the end of WWI. This caused huge resentment, that was at least partly responsible for the rise of Nazism and WWII. The Marshall plan was, I believe, an attempt to the stop the same cycle from happening again. Similarly for Japan. It was an act of incredible generosity by the USA, but I think history shows that it was also a very smart investment. I can't imagine such generosity and foresight being employed again any time soon.
by hollerith | 2025-08-10 22:11:40+00:00
You are utterly dependent on complex supply chains and would find it extremely difficult to continue to survive if something ever happened to most or all of those chains.

It is rich of you to support a law that interfered with one kind of supply chain and then to lecture someone who gave a detailed description of harms that probably are effects of the interference.

Although it is true that a person is "not obligated [you meant entitled] to the output of other peoples' work," that does not mean that enough interference by ham-handed governmental policies won't make everyone significantly worse off -- because we all make extensive use of complex chains of economic transfer.
by yyyk | 2025-08-10 22:12:02+00:00
>For any complex application, users will have different levels of access, which usually requires the application to do AuthZ.

Any application when AuthZ isn't simply yes/no, which rather quickly is just about all of them (even simple blogs have an admin tier), except for a very heavily microservice based architecture - where one would still want to have a much more convenient interface than Entra to see/manage the access permissions centrally... Entra AuthZ is at best a temporary development aid, but it's so easy to roll AuthZ yourself one might as well do it.
by markild | 2025-08-10 22:12:07+00:00
Very well put.

I've just recently set off time to have a few extended coding sessions, and the results are all over the place.

Guided in a good way for well defined tasks, it has saved me days if not weeks. Given more vague, or perhaps unreasonable tasks, it will quickly devolve into just delivering something, anything, no matter how "obviously" wrong it is.
by immibis | 2025-08-10 22:12:34+00:00
By the exact same reasoning, no system can give you a fair society. All systems rely on seizing things by force.

Now that's out of the way, perhaps some systems give you better unfair society that seizes things by force, compared to others. Perhaps we could calmly deliberate about which system that creates an unfair society by seizing things by force is the best, and then implement that system, creating the best possible unfair society that seizes things by force.
by villedespommes | 2025-08-10 22:12:44+00:00
Because it was in many ways, the same as a generation before that and one before that.

40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then.

All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
by visarga | 2025-08-10 22:12:47+00:00
Yes, for information and reference we already had Wikipedia and billions of web pages indexed in Google, searchable by keyword. For questions we had reddit, StackOverflow and forums. For chatting we had social networks, chatting with real humans. For image we had only search, but within billions of images. Faster than gen AI, and made by humans. For code we had hundreds of thousands of repos.

We already had the genAI goodies for 2 decades. It's not going to be such a shocking change.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-10 22:13:13+00:00
Oh here prices haven't really gone up that much. A 3 course menu would now cost 12-14€ where it was 10-12. An entree from takeaway would be €5 or so.

The only exception is Uber eats. I notice that most takeaways charge more than on the local takeaway app (Glovo). Probably because most tourists don't know Glovo they are used to spending more.

I'd normally never use Uber (we also have a local alternative for the ride service called Cabify) but I got a free Uber one promo so I tried it out. But with the higher pricing the free delivery is so not worth it.
by overfeed | 2025-08-10 22:13:19+00:00
I can't help but notice the contrast in the tone (and content) of this HN discussion, compared to the one on the ruling that ended affirmative action[0] for university admissions. Then, the majority of commenters were on the side of meritocracy. HN is consistently pro-elite, perhaps because a good chunk of folk here see themselves as intellectual elites.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36520658
by elevation | 2025-08-10 22:14:57+00:00
> Don't spend your time hunched over servers. Spend it doing things you love with people that matter to you.

Agreed, but it doesn't have to take time from your family. I'm on a small team that self-hosts internal services to lower costs/risks. It takes very little time to maintain, and maintenance windows happen on our terms. Our uptime this year is better than "Github Actions", the latency is incredible, and we've had no known security issues.

There are two keys to doing this successfully: (1) don't deploy anything you don't understand (so it won't take you long to fix), and (2) even then, aggressively avoid complexity (so it doesn't break in the first place.)

For example, despite significant network expertise, we stuck to a basic COTS router and a simple IPv4 subnet for our servers. And the services we run are typically self-contained golang binaries that we can deploy with bash onto baremetal. No docker, kvm, ansible, or k8s.

This DIY setup saves us considerably more than it costs. Not for everyone, but with proper scoping, many readers of hacker news could pull this off without losing time with their loved ones.
by sdenton4 | 2025-08-10 22:15:45+00:00
Yeah, I wrote this in a bit too short a hand to meet the critics where they sit...

There's an immense history of humans studying animal intelligence, which has tended pretty uniformly to find that animals are more intelligent than we previously thought at any given point in time. There's a very long history of badly designed experiments which surface 'false negative' results, and are eventually overturned. A common favor in these experiments is that the design assumes that animals have the same prescriptions and/or interests as humans. (For example, trying to do operant conditioning using a color cue with animals who can't perceive the colors. Or tasks that are easy of you happen to have approachable thumbs... That kind of thing.) Experiments eventually come along which better meet the animals where they are, and find true positive results, and our estimation of the intelligence of animals creeps slightly higher.

In other words, humans, in testing intelligence, have a decided bias towards only acknowledging intelligence which is distinctly human, and failing to take into account umwelt.

LLMs have a very different umwelt than we do. If they fail a test which doesn't take that umwelt into account, it doesn't indicate non-intelligence. It is, in fact, very hard to prove non-intelligence, because intelligence is poorly defined. And we have tended consistently to make the definition loftier whenever we're threatened with not being special anymore.
by ajross | 2025-08-10 22:16:00+00:00
First: it's not five years. It's five years if you posit that macs are magic and use no energy[1]. In practice they're 40-70% the consumption of a competing desktop (depends on usage and specific model, yada yada yada). So figure a few decades or thereabouts.

But even so: I'm not sure I know a single new-device Apple customer who has a single unit older than five years. The comment about power implied that you'd make up the big Mac price tag on power savings, and no, you won't, not nearly, before you hawk it on eBay to buy another.

[1] And also that you posit that the device is in a compute farm or something and pumped at full load 24/7. Average consumption for real development hardware (that spends 60% of its life in suspend and 90% of the remainder in idle) is much, much, much closer to zero than it is to 300W!
by baobun | 2025-08-10 22:16:40+00:00
It depends.

Say you're participating in a lending protocol utilizing some form of on-chain price oracles (ie smart contracts exposing updating data), such that gaming of some particular third decentralized exchange would manipulate the pricing data and could thereby affect your position (triggering liquidation or whatnot).

Say you're holding some on-chain stablecoin backed by other tokens. Issues with contracts of those tokens could tank their value and thereby affecting your stablecoin value.

It all comes down to introduction of points of trust in interconnected systems. Tale as old as time.
by mockingloris | 2025-08-10 22:17:07+00:00
I screenshot all new sites I visit. A UI interaction catches my attention, I screenshot. My files system is 60% images. It's an habit.

As a self-taught software dev; it helped me hone good design skills and also off topic - I poke around a lot when I visit certain websites to see which technologies they are built with. Maybe it was me testing js scripts or verifying the API/Object properties of certain functions - the habit stuck haha.

Dey well
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-10 22:17:09+00:00
> That satisfies the definition of "digital only" - every person who has the movie (conceptually speaking) has a digital version of it. This holds true as long as no one tried to print the movie onto paper as an analog image, or export it to VHS or something like that.

The term "digital only" says nothing about being digital versus analog in particular.

> Note that digital does not contrast with physical.

Sure it can.

> I think we can all agree that if you own some coins/tokens/NFTs on Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc., that is a very pure form of digital-only ownership. There is no intuitive physical object that corresponds to the ownership of a digital token.

> Yet, that blockchain database is publicly available and mirrored millions of times; it is not locked up behind a single company. This differs from what you were trying to say, where I interpret your notion of "digital-only" to mean that "the movie studio hosts the file on its server and streams it to you on demand, but you can never download a copy of the movie to keep for yourself".

It's not that the lockup is a fundamental part, but in the streaming case it helps enforce the idea that the movie you get is never properly embodied and only exists in an abstract data pool.

A blockchain has lots of replicas but they're all still abstract database entries. Even a "physical bitcoin" is just the keys and not the entries.

> Ultimately, "digital" just means that the information you wanted is a finite sequence of 0s and 1s, as opposed to some analog signal with infinite variation. "Digital" says nothing about who owns it, how many copies exist, how it is delivered, etc.

I think other uses make sense and fit this context.
by yodsanklai | 2025-08-10 22:17:49+00:00
I work in a big tech company and interview candidates for software engineering jobs every day jobs. I don't pay too much attention to the resume but I don't think I've ever interviewed a candidate that didn't have a college degree. A lot also have PhDs too.

I don't know if AI will reduce demands for SWEs, but it seems pretty risky not to get a degree IMHO.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-10 22:17:50+00:00
This would be an interesting debate, but it is after midnight here, so I will be going to sleep shortly.

Basically, yes, but also no. There is a huge difference between being able to mobilize a large portion of your population for a short time vs. keeping the standing army indefinitely. With the latter, various intrinsic economic limitations will bite. Rome started with the "big temporary armies" model, but slowly transitioned into "big permanent armies" model, which required a lot of support from civilians.

Professional soldiers are economically unproductive; they have to be fed, clothed and provided with weapons. Just the necessary smelting of iron in order to equip a single legion would be a lot of work for blacksmiths, miners and lumberjacks who produced the necessary wood for charcoal. If a premodern empire can field tens of thousands of iron-clad professional soldiers indefinitely, it must have a lot of civilian workers supporting that army. Literally millions.

The precipitous drop in the size of field armies in the Early Middle Ages is a good indication of the precipitous drop of the entire economy which would prop them up.
by jjmarr | 2025-08-10 22:19:14+00:00
I don't know how it was when you were applying, but when I applied in 2018 the universities knew your HS and Waterloo was doing adjustments based on your high school.

Over the past 7 years other schools have done so as well. Waterloo's adjustment factor list got FOI'd and made public if you want to find yours.
by RowanH | 2025-08-10 22:19:44+00:00
Chunks of NZ are becoming very expensive to uninsurable, and extreme impact weather events are getting more frequent.

It would be fair say a good portion of the population don't understand the maths of a weather event just how astronomically expensive a sudden flood is.

In our small town in the last 5 years, we've had 2-3 different "1 in 100 year" floods within 30km of each other (highly localised dramatic flooding and slips). To the point "1 in 100 year" is now a standing joke.
by credit_guy | 2025-08-10 22:19:56+00:00
Sure. But it happens that I have 20 years of experience, and I know quite well how to code. Everything the LLM does for me I can do myself. But the LLM does that 100 times faster than me. Most of the days nowadays I push thousands of lines of code. And it's not garbage code, the LLMs write quite high quality code. Of course, I still have to go through the code and make sure it all makes sense. So I am still the bottleneck. At some point I will probably grown to trust the LLM, but I'm not quite there yet.
by elcritch | 2025-08-10 22:20:03+00:00
Oddly that puts the old Roman social conception of children bit more into perspective. They viewed children as nuisance to adults, particularly to men, from what I gather. Not that later European or other cultures were much different.

Makes a cold sorta sense – why even bother getting too close to them if most won't even survive to become a useful adult. Rough world.
by thatsamejew | 2025-08-10 22:20:16+00:00
Half of Europe is nothing compared to what the US owns (de facto) now or what the British empire had. And they are (were) imperialist, expansive, and war mongering. Actually Soviet Union, compared to them, is an amateur.

As to who started the war, the basic fact is that the nazis attacked Soviet Union on 22 june 1941, that it was an immense tragedy, and that saying that the victim was the aggressor is a very unjust and evil thing to say.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-08-10 22:21:15+00:00
Ha that’s funny, considering nixos is 99% stdenv which is one of the worst bash monstrosities in existence, and drives people ever further into the swamp of bash. (Ever tried to debug stdenv setup hooks? I still have water damage from the tears.)

I have personally embraced the insanity but let’s not kid ourselves about nixos basically just being three bashes in a trench coat.

Basically https://xkcd.com/224/ , but s/lisp/nix/ s/perl/bash/
by Xylakant | 2025-08-10 22:21:16+00:00
Insurance is supposed to average out small probability high impact events across a large number of smaller payments from more people. It is entirely expected to loose money on insurance as a single customer - that's usually great. It means your house hasn't burned down, you're in good healt and you bike hasn't been stolen. If we're now moving towards a world where due to man-made climate change certain classes of risks are no longer insurable, everyone looses.
by HumblyTossed | 2025-08-10 22:21:41+00:00
Something has to come to a head soon. High paying jobs can't disappear if everything is going to continue to cost an arm and two legs. We're either going to have to pick up pitchforks or we're going to complacent ourselves into multi-generational family living. I hope the former. I'm sick of the money funnel pointing in the wrong direction.
by hermitcrab | 2025-08-10 22:22:09+00:00
I believe a lot of historians get rather upset about the use of the term 'dark ages'.

The Romans used their professional army to destroy many of the cultures unfortunate enough to be within their reach (Dacia, Carthage etc). They then wrote the history to make themselves look good and the 'barbarians' look bad. Consequently the fall of the Roman empire is seen as a disaster. But the Romans were a brutal bunch. They used to watch people being mauled by wild animals and gladiators hacking each other to death as entertainment, after all. Many of the people that the Romans conquered must have been glad to see the back of them.
by jleyank | 2025-08-10 22:22:56+00:00
Perhaps the lesson out of this is to avoid purchasing or relying on devices that require third-party involvement to work. Yeah, a fitness watch that you’d use for a few years is fine but a house thermostat or lighting system isn’t something you can easily switch. Such systems should work directly to the local network using a common protocol that would survive vendor death or disinterest.

Or just buy the boring old stuff without networking.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-10 22:22:58+00:00
PBS did a special on how TV news came to dominance with coverage of the JFK assassination called "JFK: Breaking the News".

https://www.pbs.org/video/jfk-breaking-the-news-d7borr/

Similarly, CNN essentially became the mainstay with live coverage of the start of Desert Storm in '91.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Gulf_War
by magicmicah85 | 2025-08-10 22:23:08+00:00
Congrats on making a product. I see the appeal of these products because they embrace the productive aspects of technology and prevent the intrusive attention seeking technologies from being involved.

The reason I would not get a device like this is because the device I have is already capable of doing all this. The problems that hamper my productivity are psychological and unless I’m going to completely get rid of all the devices and thoughts that are distracting me, I don’t see how another device is going to help me. In fact, I can see me being more unproductive just trying to get every little thing right with synchronization and using the product versus just doing the thing I should be productive at.

I really do like the aesthetic though. It’s a hell of a thing to build your own hardware and software and I hope it helps others and can grow.