MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GCA10 | 2025-08-14 20:41:10+00:00
Wall Street and the big corporate law firms of NYC/DC have been championing extreme hours since the 1980s. Maybe earlier. So it's interesting to see the short- and long-term effects of this on people's lives.

Informal assessment here, re: how these versions of "hustle culture" have played out. First, people who can last a long time do make a lot of money. Second, the wipe-out rate is pronounced but not catastrophic. Yes, there's sometimes a price to pay in terms of bad marriages, early heart attacks, etc. but it's not so pervasive that everyone who chases all-out success comes up short. You can win at this game.

Third -- and this perhaps OPs best area for questioning: When you work 90-hour weeks, your judgment about picking the right projects goes to hell. You're the greyhound going round the track as fast as you can, chasing the rabbit that you'll never catch. Your rabbit-value assessment system doesn't exist. You just keep running toward whatever someone else points you toward. On Wall Street, a lot of marathon hours are spent trying to close deals that won't close. Or that turn out to have been identifiable mistakes/misguided obsessions.

I was chatting earlier this year with a former Big Law attorney who spent a frenzied year after Hurricane Katrina drafting blizzards of legal filings so that big insurers could dodge claims. Her work was valued enough that she (and her firm) got paid a lot and maybe even did landmark work. Nearly 20 years later, is that the career badge that you'll always feel good about?
by jraph | 2025-08-14 20:41:13+00:00
> Sure I can. I just did.

Of course you did and were able to. But I think you're wrong :-) you know I meant this.

I get your point but I think it is a bit naive.

> Because you clearly edited yours.

Yep, sorry, I can see how this impacted your answer. I notably removed the part were I said I think it's important that engineers and salespeople should take responsibility in what they do. I do think so.

> I fully believe that Facebook et al should be treated exactly as bigTobacco. They have/are deliberately tweaking their product to make it as addictive as possible. This is a knowingly and deliberate act. It is known that they have done studies to see if they have the ability to mess with people's mood/well being. They know the effect their product has on people, and they continue to modify it to be even more effective.

But I do 100% agree. That's my point.

Facebook is not innocent in the design of its apps.

The same way Apple is responsible for the design of the iPhone.
by callc | 2025-08-14 20:41:49+00:00
I don’t know about the FBI MLK files. But if I were to meet MLK or Ghandi or <insert widely recognized figure> and they were an asshole, I wouldn’t excuse or overlook their behavior.

The underlying ideas here are greatness and individuals ascribed to doing great things.

Without any evidence I suspect an extremely large majority of progress is done by normal individuals whose names we’ll never know.
by stephc_int13 | 2025-08-14 20:42:04+00:00
Aside from the gossips about Sam Altman hubris, the failed launch of GPT5 is likely a significant event and potentially a turning point regarding the hype and expectations around LLMs based tech.

The limitations of what was believed to be by many as a path to AGI/ASI are becoming more clearly apparent.

Difficult to say how much room for improvement there is, or to have a definite answer regarding the usefulness and economic impact of those models, but what we're seeing now is not exponential improvement.

This is not going to rewrite and improve itself, or to cure cancer, unify physics or any kind of scientific or technological breakthrough.

For coders is is merely a dispensable QoL improvement.
by psavnani | 2025-08-14 20:42:18+00:00
Hi Everyone! I built an open-source video conferencing platform that actually remembers your meetings. Think Zoom + Granola!

Core features: - AI assistant that is present in every call and answers questions about meetings. - Real-time transcription and AI-generated summaries + tasks. - High quality video conferencing with LiveKit.

Why? Zoom's AI copilot doesn't work. Google Meet has zero memory. I wanted something intelligent, hackable, and truly open.

Demo: https://www.auranow.co/ GitHub: https://github.com/savnani5/aura

Feedback and contributions welcome!
by soganess | 2025-08-14 20:42:24+00:00
I see your point.

Speaking only for myself, when I call someone a "bad" person (I am wary of calling anyone "bad," but that is the language used in this conversation), I mean that they treat others poorly. They may contribute immensely to the world (as Steve Jobs did), but that is orthogonal to whether they are a good or bad person.

I know others have a different calculus, and I am not trying to convince anyone. Still, being a bad parent, especially after you have asked to reconcile, is... well... a person I would be hesitant to associate with regardless of how much I loved my iPhone 2G, or how cool the Lisa looked in the early 1980s.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-14 20:42:30+00:00
> What was the party that continually lost all the important elections supposed to do?

They're supposed to write a coherent plan with specifics on what they are going to do once they are in power. The (R) side did this with Project 2025. It was detailed and specific and they are executing on it like a checklist. Where is the (D) checklist?

> You want the DNC to do stuff, to solve problems, to execute plans that grow this country, you have to put them into power first

I'm not going to help vote them into power unless I see what their plan is. Even a one-liner that says "We have a list of what Trump did and we're going to revert each commit!" is better than nothing. Their party platform from 2024 is vague and talks more about principles and what they're not going to do rather than specific things they are going to do.
by input_sh | 2025-08-14 20:42:31+00:00
I completely agree it's technologically feasible in basically every continental European country (as we all have some form of biometric IDs), but do you want to have to do that every time you open a private tab to look at porn? Do you want to not be able to clear your browser cookies without going through that process all over again for basically every website? Do you want to extend 2FA into 3FA with your national ID acting as the third factor so you can view "sensitive" content?
by asdff | 2025-08-14 20:42:37+00:00
If your new update is 95% as good and saves you overhead, why the hell would you not roll that out? Enshittification is the natural movement of entropy in business. You want to cut costs. You already have a market beholden to your product. They really can't gleam a couple % different quality of your product in some metric, but you sure can operating at your mass market scale. That can make or break financials one quarter and lead to a big promotion yourself among other incentives. And maybe you try and save big, push to the point customers do notice it, but only so much that the % lost to competitors isn't much in light of the savings at scale you've achieved enshittifiying the product. Physical and technology products or services are no different with these incentives and direction of entropy.

This is the natural progression of mass market business where cost savings is valued and quality is not. If you as a customer want a higher quality product, you are left to the edges of the market of boutique, bespoke, upscale experiences which are only able to be offered at high quality because their scale is small and more manageable in all metrics and their existence against the walmarts of their industry is dependent on being at a higher quality offering.
by immibis | 2025-08-14 20:43:28+00:00
So you do believe everyone should have the right to walk into a crowded theater and yell FIRE! and this should be constitutionally protected, because if there's any speech that isn't constitutionally protected, no speech is constitutionally protected?

What about the speech of "I will pay you $50 to stab that guy right now"? Constitutionally protected or do you believe that should be past a limit?
by tomrod | 2025-08-14 20:43:36+00:00
I'm not sure your analysis is apples to apples.

Prior to the AI boom, the quality of GPUs slightly favored NVidia but AMD was a viable alternative. Also, there are scale differences between 2025 and before the AI boom -- simply put, there was more competition in the market for a smaller bucket and favorable winds on supplier production costs. Further, they just have better software tooling through CUDA.

Since 2022 and the rise of multi-billion parameter models, NVidia's CUDA has had a lock on the business side, but face rising costs due to terrible trade policy by the US, significant rebound from COVID as well as geopolitical realignments, inflation on the workforce, and rushed/buggy power supplies as their default supply options have made their position quite untenable -- mostly CUDA is their saving grace. If AMD got their druthers about them and focused they'd potentially unseat NVidia. But until ROCm is at least _easy_ nothing will happen there.
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-14 20:44:21+00:00
Even after the DVDs, Netflix had a much bigger catalog before everyone else decided they needed to copy Netflix and launch their own service, then IP rights got restricted and redistributed.

Streaming was great when I only needed to subscribe to a single service to watch most everything I wanted. It's not so great when I need to subscribe to 5+ services and still not have everything I want to watch.

Yeah, monopolies are bad but the way IP is distributed right now across so many different services just ends up being worse for consumers.
by zer00eyz | 2025-08-14 20:44:47+00:00
Before it was "hustle culture" it was "dot-com culture" or "startup culture" or "IPO culture".

There are places where this sort of push is, manipulative. See the gaming industry where people are in it for "passion".

But no one in dot com or startup or IPO land worked the 60 hour weeks for no reason. They worked them to get paid, and for their lottery tickets / stock options. It was gambling with time.

And for a lot of people that worked out very well. For those that it didnt work out for they still did really well.

If you want a 40 hour a week, no hustle job, then engineering / programing / startups might not be the right choice for you. Your pay will be reflected in that choice.

It has always been this way, it will always be this way: it is a game of sharks and minnows.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-08-14 20:45:36+00:00
That's a great find, as I'm in a somewhat similar place - (re)-learning maths at a not so young age, with kids, and doing it for the same reasons as the author. There is plenty of material out there for free (including a lot of complete courses from top universities), but not a lot of that is structured and I was often finding myself 'not knowing what I don't know'. Surprisingly, I've found chatGPT quite good for helping in that.

My current method is watching a lot of videos and taking notes - it's great in the beginning when it's mostly rediscovering what I already knew, but anything that's really new - it takes orders of magnitude more time. And that's very hard without some structure in learning.

I'm definitely giving Math Academy a try - looks great for what I need.
by aforwardslash | 2025-08-14 20:45:47+00:00
"legitimate interests" are subject to interpretation on purpose; either legitimate interests on a given instance are lawful, or you're better off relying on consent, since your interpretation and the regulator's interpretation may be different. Check page 7 of https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2024-10/edpb_guideli...
by simonebrunozzi | 2025-08-14 20:45:48+00:00
The "number" is always part of a big debate. There's no right or wrong.

Usually, they say that you can maintain your wealth (adjusted for inflation) indefinitely by using the so-called "safe withdrawal rate" [0], which people put between 1% and 4%.

So, say that you have $1M in wealth, and you pick your SWR at 2%. It means that you can use 2% of that, or $20,000, every year, knowing that your wealth will keep growing at least by the inflation rate, for a long time (30 years, or 100, or whatever).

If you have $10M, you can spend $200,000/year.

Clearly, it depends on your lifestyle how much you need to have saved in order to FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early).

All of this assumes that for the next 30, 40 years, we will not see any catastrophic or monumental changes in how the financial system works.

[0]: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Safe_withdrawal_rates
by the_snooze | 2025-08-14 20:46:12+00:00
A lot of the innovations and changes in US elections are the direct result of Bush v Gore, from the (ill-conceived) rush into pure-electronic voting, to modern optical scan balloting technology. You're right that Florida 2000 was fishy and super close, but I don't think it's all that much of a relevant example today. It's famous, but we've learned a lot in the last 25 years.

A better example of close elections and recount procedures is the literal tie that happened in a Virginia state legislature race in 2017. The attorneys were able to litigate the validity and intent of individual ballots in that race because they had the physical ballots, as well as the machine scans and logs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia%27s_94th_House_of_Del...
by escapedmoose | 2025-08-14 20:46:19+00:00
You’ve captured an elusive sentiment so well! AI is (often, not always) good at generating the “Platonic ideal” of something. It falls apart ime when you’re confronting a specific problem that requires more nuance.

Character/personality in a creative work imo comes largely from an element of surprise. If there’s nothing counterintuitive about a work, it’s not very memorable/enticing. Maybe that’s why AI art/text feels so bland. The Platonic ideal is bland. But also, if you’re looking for function rather than art, AI can dish it out.
by Wonnk13 | 2025-08-14 20:46:26+00:00
This is why I'm not a consultant. It's a generalization, but there's a kind of learned helplessness almost in the culture of the big4. Client has a new requirement, and someone says "oh guess it'll be an allnighter, i'll start ordering pizzas". Nah man, this is like four extra hours of work- push the deadline, or just work smarter.
by jchw | 2025-08-14 20:47:29+00:00
Look, I'm not trying to paint the picture that the problems aren't technically solvable; the fact that it kind of is is the part that makes this discussion so durable.

I admit that PIN verification would make it harder to bypass the system, though to be honest with you, I think it's also not really hard to realize that some kids will still manage to figure out their parent's PIN numbers, which they will likely re-use for their bank cards and a bunch of other shit, because most people don't really want to have to come up with 10 different PIN numbers, and we all kinda get the idea that PIN numbers aren't really that secure in the first place. Adding a PIN number requirement is probably a wise idea, but it does make the system a bit more of a PITA for everyone as people will inevitably forget their PIN and need to reset it or what have you. And I reckon that's basically how each countermeasure for problems of these systems go, each one just adds a little bit more pain depending on how hell bent you are on making it work. (I think the PIN number is good enough for trying to prevent someone for stealing your identity with your ID card to an extent, but not as good against people you live with misusing your ID card.)

Of course, you could keep going. You could try to come up with counter-measures to discourage someone from re-using their ID card for other people, and probably at least limit the impact of some of these issues to make the system basically work.

Even if you really do concoct the perfect solution for one country, you then have to make sure this problem gets solved correctly in every individual federal government, and then anyone who wants to offer adult content online has to individually handle identity verification across all countries that require it.

Meanwhile, we already have a system where essentially only adults can buy devices to connect to the Internet, and Internet service plans. You can't even get a debit card in the U.S. without being at least 18 years of age.
by Kranar | 2025-08-14 20:47:33+00:00
The definitions provided appear as though they are constructive, but they are not actually constructive, they are set-theoretic existence claims that quantify over all sequences, in particular over undefinable sets. Specifically, the description that appears constructive doesn't actually define any particular real number, it only defines the universe in which the real numbers live.

Another subtle detail is that while it's true that every real number corresponds to (and can be represented by) a Cauchy sequence of rationals, the very sequence itself might be undefinable.
by vemv | 2025-08-14 20:47:35+00:00
A sizeable chunk of well-recognised founders are simply scammers - they take VC money, sell dreams to customers, and exploit engineers as a necessary step to keep the ball rolling.

Think of the operation of a pump and dump with extra steps. The mission is never about creating value, it's about pumping expectations and pulling the rug at the right time.

Maybe a few of them live in the delusion of improving society with their products, but even then, the fact that they don't give a damn about the quality delivered to customers (or are qualified to make any technical judgement) makes them de facto scammers.
by its-summertime | 2025-08-14 20:47:47+00:00
Maybe they should include any form of practical appeal process in their policies, so if you get banned from, lets say, leaving a PDS ~6 months ago, which got taken over by bots ~2 week ago, you could appeal the fact that you got swept up in the bans.

Instead the only process is to email an address that no one gets any response from for months on end. (or I guess consider taking bluesky to court, by what this seems to say. Kinda very unreasonable)
by os2warpman | 2025-08-14 20:48:19+00:00
>P25 was some extreme right wing crazies that no one really cares about.

Project 2025 is almost halfway implemented and several of its authors hold positions in government, charged with its implementation.

Everyone who thinks it is some side project or wish list that isn't "real" and actually, literally, happening right now is a fool.

https://www.project2025.observer/en
by bloomca | 2025-08-14 20:48:22+00:00
> Nearly 20 years later, is that the career badge that you'll always feel good about?

Well, if the result work has negative connotations, you wouldn't even mention it (especially after 20 years). However, as you said:

> enough that she (and her firm) got paid a lot and maybe even did landmark work

At the end of the day, that's what mostly matters. Sure, some people believe in what they are doing and put insane hours, but most just do it for money. And if they manage to get a lot, then yeah, it was all justified.

---

> Second, the wipe-out rate is pronounced but not catastrophic

I agree with this -- people who are deeply invested in their projects are often already do the second shift. So if you are motivated enough, that's kind of the same, plus people can be in a position where they have no external obligations (often when they are young).

It is bad long-term, but for a relatively short term for many it is a decent gamble.
by jchw | 2025-08-14 20:49:08+00:00
That's not exactly what I mean though, I really mean to say that there's no federal ID that you can basically rely on people having. I totally get that there are actually federal IDs, and probably could've worded that a bit better.

What I really mean is that among IDs you might expect every citizen to actually have, state IDs are basically the most reliable and even that only gets you around 99% of the way there.
by _hark | 2025-08-14 20:49:18+00:00
I sat the All Souls exam, taking the philosophy specialist papers, though I'm a math/physics/ML guy. It was a lot of fun, I really appreciate that there's somewhere in the world where these kinds of questions are asked in a formal setting. My questions/answers are written up in brief here [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/oxforduni/comments/q0giir/my_all_so...

* Oops, they link to my post at the bottom. Sorry for the redundancy.
by meibo | 2025-08-14 20:50:01+00:00
Not to mention that one of the major issues in that debate (for the supposedly "centrist" party) was abortion rights - even though most of her views on the topic were fairly in line with other sitting judges.

It's now alleged that this was caused by a disinformation campaign targeting MPs of that party.

https://www.volksverpetzer.de/analyse/brosius-gersdorf-union...
by lordnacho | 2025-08-14 20:50:08+00:00
I went to see the last Mallard Song. Just to say I went, of course. It looked like a bunch of weirdos in a courtyard to me, but it was a literally once-in-a-century event, and I was living less than a minute away, so why not?

I don't think I've ever heard of a scheduled ritual that has a longer period. You're guaranteed to never have anyone present at more than one of these, so surely many aspects of the ritual will wander quite far from the original?

As for LLMs on the All Souls test, it's predictable that it mostly whiffs. After all it takes in a diet of Reddit+Wikipedia+etc, none of which is the kind of writing they are looking for.

Reddit is a lot of crappy comments. If you have no grounding in reality (being a thing that lives in a datacentre), how are you going to curate it? Some subs are really quite good, but most are really quite bad. It's not easy to get guidance, of the kind you would get if you sat with a professor for three or four hours a week for a few years, which is what the humanities students actually do.

Wikipedia is a great reference work, but it tends to not have any of the kinds of connections you're supposed to make in these essays. It has a lot of factual stuff, so questions about Persia will look ok, like in the article. But questions that glue together ideas across areas? Nah. Even if that's in the dataset somewhere, how is the LLM supposed to know that the sort of refined writing of a cross-subject academic is the highest level of the humanities? It doesn't, so it spits out what the average Redditor might glue together from a bit of googling.
by realityfactchex | 2025-08-14 20:50:20+00:00
Considering it says it was written with Claude AI, can you comment on the how good the security is? Of both the video calls, and also all the content it stores?

Is there a single switch to turn off the "it remembers everything" part? I imagine a lot of people might want a simple self hostable Zoom replacement that does not memorize the calls.

Also, this is amazing. Did you vibe code a Jitsi replacement? Very cool that this is possible.
by jostylr | 2025-08-14 20:51:36+00:00
I came up with a different definition that is a kind of inverse of Dedekind cuts. It is the idea that a real number is the set of all rational intervals that contain it. Since this is circular, there are properties that I came up with which say when a set of rational intervals qualifies to be called a real number in my setup. I have an unreviewed paper which creates a version that is a bridge between numerical analysis and the theoretical definition of a real number. Another unreviewed paper shows the equivalence between my definition and Dedekind cuts. You can read both at [1].

There is a long tradition of using intervals for dealing with real numbers. It is often used by constructivists and can be thought of viewing a real number as a measurement.

1: https://github.com/jostylr/Reals-as-Oracles
by okrad | 2025-08-14 20:52:22+00:00
I’ve always felt the sport loops (soft w/ velcro) provide the best contact with wrist while not being too cumbersome. Very easy to tighten just before a workout or loosen before bed. All the while it stays planted on my wrist. Unlock the rubbery band it normally comes with, which is prone to sliding around and less easy to adjust.

Out of curiosity, which band do you use?