MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by c0balt | 2025-08-30 12:51:13+00:00
Huh, I have always wondered if for these usecases log-based analytics would suffice. No need to intrude on the client when the request itself already includes lots of data.

You get visited page, time of visit and a minimal user identifier (preferred locale/user agent, source IP). That should provide enough data for those questions. If you want to make it slightly more privacy friendly and cheaper only store aggregate data (visited page counts etc).

The problem here is probably that logs are not always accessible (managed services like GitHub/GitLab pages).
by mdhb | 2025-08-30 12:51:41+00:00
There absolutely are valid reasons. Like I said, patrolling in an active war zone is an example of one.

Walking around on base for example isn’t even remotely close to one. This isn’t uniquely an American thing but it’s extremely common in the US in a way that absolutely isn’t in any kind of comparable country.

I don’t know what it is exactly, other than maybe the very weird and extremely pervasive “operator mentality” that seems to make everyone extremely horny for pretending situations are much more dangerous than they really are.

If you’re going to carry a weapon it’s really a very basic requirement that you can do some reasonable level of threat analysis and respond to the situation around you as it develops.

Again, I’m not saying those situations don’t exist where it makes sense but they are absolutely the exception and are a very weird thing to pretend are the default. I think it’s a culture problem and people are just scared.
by xpe | 2025-08-30 12:51:59+00:00
Maybe as the direct effect, maybe not. Also think about second order effects: how would various interests respond? The desire for privacy is strong and people will search for ways to get it.

Have you looked into kinds of mitigations that cryptography offers? I’m not an expert, but I would expect there are ways to balance some degree of anonymity with some degree of human identity verification.

Perhaps there are some experts out there who can comment?
by corimaith | 2025-08-30 12:53:12+00:00
The Olympics were originally founded on the principle of amateurism, on grassroots, individual passion and love of the sport, not as a career or life achievement.

To see what's its become today, especially how some suffer greatly to get the gold medal is depressing, if not disgusting when all of this are ultimately trivial activities. They were supposed to be a unifying reprieve from the real issues of the 20th century, not another stage of brutal national competition.
by mrugge | 2025-08-30 12:53:51+00:00
I inherited a django project which has mostly 'unit' tests that flex the ORM and the db, so they are really integration tests and are painfully slow. There is some important logic that happens in the ORM layer and that needs to be tested. At some point I want to find the time to mock the database so that they can be faster, but in some cases I worry about missing important interactions. Domain is highly specialized so not very easy to just know how to untangle the mess.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-30 12:54:49+00:00
Go check the stats. Sector unemployment is about 6%. Full employment rate is considered 4%. There are numerous layoffs over the past two years. It's taking people a year or more and hundreds of applications to find new jobs. The IT job market has actually shrunk this year.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/it_job_market_july/
by mft_ | 2025-08-30 12:54:56+00:00
Fair answer - I shouldn't automatically apply my own situation/lessons to others. :)

I do wonder to what extent one could view it as a pattern recognition challenge, though. To an extent, what you wrote resonates with me: growing up, I was probably relatively "weird" compared to the norm of my peer-group, and yes, often either immediate feedback, or recognition of feedback sufficiently quickly, wasn't present.

But it was possible to learn, via reflection after the event. And after n awkward or painful reflections, I was able to analyse which aspects of my behaviour were judged negatively, and over time, those reflections embedded and I was able to slowly change my behaviour. And I never saw this as an 'act' or a 'mask' - I always saw it as a continual process of self-improvement, where the goal was to be better (according to the standards or expectations of the particular slice of the world I was part of at that time) - more sociable, funnier, a more engaging conversationalist, a better kinder friend or partner, whatever.

The (surprising?) positive flip-side to this approach is that as long as you have the right goals (and maybe role models) you can actually end up far more functional and able in many domains than your peers.

--

(I've often said privately that I see life as a continual process of self-improvement, and this absolutely wasn't something I got from parents, teachers, peers or books: it was these formative learning experiences that formed that private philosophy.)
by zachperkel | 2025-08-30 12:56:44+00:00
The beauty of sharing things is the feedback you get from others, which then gives you validation that something you're interested in is something others are also interested in or derive value from.

When making a blog post, how else do you get this feedback? 99% of people click, read it, then move on. Quantifying how many people have read, how long they spent reading, and where they came from, is an essential part of interacting with the digital world. Without it you are flying blind.
by merelysounds | 2025-08-30 12:56:58+00:00
Yes, the Wikipedia article mentions that and includes links to more sources:

> Both journalists and security experts have suggested that The Intercept's handling of the leaks by whistleblower Reality Winner, which included publishing secret NSA documents unredacted and including the printer tracking dots, was used to identify Winner as the leaker, leading to her arrest in 2017 and conviction.
by dsr_ | 2025-08-30 12:57:03+00:00
When I was in big corps, I understood but really disliked the idea that people would do work in order to get a promotion. That's the only incentive structure they've set up, so that's what you do.

What I like about well-run small companies is that there is essentially no chance of a promotion: all we can do is do our work better, improve processes and make our customers (internal and external) happier. If you hook monetary rewards to title and responsibility treadmills, you lose all that. Hypergrowth is a trap.
by solatic | 2025-08-30 12:57:34+00:00
< Vulnerable members of society should be protected from scams.

There are three ways to deliver protection: build better walls, defeat attackers after successful initial attacks, defeat attackers before successful initial attacks.

The article ties itself into knots because it recognizes that the first way cannot deliver 100% security. But it refuses to recognize that there are two additional ways.

The United States military could go after scammers operating from foreign compounds. It could treat the economic targeting of American citizens as acts of economic war. It chooses not to. Freedom is not free, and when your country chooses to literally not fight for your freedom, it's hardly any wonder that your freedoms are eroded.

Remember XKCD 538: https://xkcd.com/538/ Cybersecurity and physical security are fundamentally linked.
by rayiner | 2025-08-30 12:57:53+00:00
> want to question the assumption here that "pioneer mindset" is an inherited trait

About half the variation in personality traits is biologically heritable: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-55834023. Even political ideology is moderately heritable: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521...

On top of that, there’s social transmission of values within families. Much of the country descends from 20th century immigrants, where the effect of the immigrant generation is still prominent. Much of the rest of the country descends from people who left their civilized east coast and settled the frontier.

> Rather, the vast majority emigrated because it was literally the only way to move up in a world where land ownership was the key to wealth

This isn’t any different in much of asia or africa today. Most people are content with their place in the world without abandoning all their kinship ties to “move up.”
by zdw | 2025-08-30 12:57:55+00:00
Most of this problem is solved by not hiding the trust model.

Do you want an phone where you trust Apple/Google/3rd party to make a "malware or not" decision? Or one where all that is turned off and you can do whatever? Go right ahead in either case - you control the trust, rather than it being made for you by the platform vendor.

Similarly, we have certificate infrastructure where the TLS roots are owned by a small number of people. These are generally trusted, but some people/organizations edit them down (ex: removing roots from state actors deemed untrustworthy). But it's hidden, and generally a lot of choices.

Even linux distros, you pick which package signing keys you trust.

And Docker/K8s... oh wait, there's no default keys and containers remain being developer's puke bags in most cases, and the repos are rugpulled by corporations regularly...
by myvoiceismypass | 2025-08-30 12:58:17+00:00
> I’m talking about the violent far left that does things like ambush and attempt to murder

Surely you think all the Jan 6 Insurrectionists should be punished as well, right? Did you see what violence they inflicted on the capital and the police protecting it? Or do you actually see people like Ashley Babbit as heroes too?
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-30 12:58:29+00:00
Plenty of "we need a paradigm shift in architecture" going around - and no actual architecture that would beat transformers at their strengths as far as eye can see.

I remain highly skeptical. I doubt that transformers are the best architecture possible, but they set a high bar. And it sure seems like people who keep making the suggestion that "transformers aren't the future" aren't good enough to actually clear that bar.
by mothballed | 2025-08-30 12:58:57+00:00
Everyone "on base" in the USA has had a background check. I've visited bases (never been in the military), they will not let you in without running a background check. Sometimes people on base might have a mental breakdown but they are not letting people with history of armed robbery or felony assault etc on base. You are much safer on base from a surprise pistol-range attack than you are on the street. The threat on base are people outside the base, you know, in rifle and not pistol range.

On the flipside, when I got a flat on my bicycle in the city a guy walked up to me with a gun, pointed a gun at me to take my shit, and I would not have had time to rack a weapon (and god forbid it jammed). I knocked the guy's arm and punched the guy which stunned him enough that I was able to run off without him getting a good shot off; I would have had enough time to get off a shot with a chambered weapon (didn't carry at the time) but I never would have stood a chance if I pulled out an unchambered gun.
by jasode | 2025-08-30 12:59:35+00:00
>I want to read blogs by people who are passionate about their topic [...]

I didn't downvote but want to try to explain some of the mindset of some of the authors who do care about analytics and how it affects what they work on.

The 2 different activities need to be separated:

(1) passionate about a _topic_

vs

(2) passionate about _writing_about_ a topic.

Some people need some validation from a growing audience (i.e. see visitor stats) to continue to work on (2).

An example of this I came across was a analyst who was really knowledgeable about tele-communications, cell towers, datacenters, etc. He wrote some blogs and created videos about how the industry players work. It was really good analytical work. Unfortunately, he didn't gain a big audience following from it and quit after just 10 months.

He's still in the industry and I'm sure he's still "passionate" about the topic of next gen cell towers, etc. Just no longer passionate about blogging into an empty void.

One could then argue, "why does an author need to care about blogging to an empty void?!?". I don't know what to say. I guess it's just humans being humans and some want a little social proof that whatever they put a lot of time into is useful to more people than a tiny niche audience.
by enriquto | 2025-08-30 12:59:37+00:00
> Are you allowed to run whatever computer program you want on the hardware you own?

Yes. It is a basic human right.

> This is a question where freedom, practicality, and reality all collide into a mess.

No; it isn't. The answer is clear and not messy. If you are not allowed to run programs of your choice, then it is not your hardware. Practicality and "reality" (whatever that means) are irrelevant issues here.

Maybe you prefer to use hardware that is not yours, but that is a different question.
by bananapub | 2025-08-30 13:00:08+00:00
fascinating how the reporting doesn't clarify that it's not just a bunch of busy work and a tax on Americans, but that the US didn't even bother making the system exist before introducing the rules. from last week:

> “Key questions remain unresolved, particularly regarding how and by whom customs duties will be collected in the future, what additional data will be required, and how the data transmission to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection will be carried out,” DHL, the largest shipping provider in Europe, said in a statement.

https://apnews.com/article/us-tariffs-goods-services-suspens...
by Terretta | 2025-08-30 13:00:34+00:00
> any tips, guides, prayers, incantations for how to get changes in one to not clobber the other

One caveman way:

1. Start your project using Xcode, use it to commit to GitHub, GitLab, whereever. In terminal, change into the dir that has the .git in it and launch claude.

2. Teach Claude Code your own system's path and preferred simulator for build testing. From then on it will build-test every change, so teach it to only commit after build passes. (By teach, I mean, just tell it, then from time to time, tell it to propose updates to claude.md in your project.)

3. Make sure before a PR or push that the project still builds in Xcode, if it doesn't, you can eyeball the changes in Xcode's staged changes viewer and undo them. If you change files via IDE, when you're back in Claude just say: I changed [specific/file, or "a lot of files"].

No xproj or symlinks get harmed in the making of your .swifts.
by the_snooze | 2025-08-30 13:00:45+00:00
>one reason it works so well is because it is a very strong signal that the applicant has resources that a random strong applicant doesn't have.

When I was a university student, I accidentally established my own network just by getting involved in my department as a TA and undergrad researcher. My department would openly advertise those opportunities, and I was shocked at how few of my peers took them up on it. This involvement revealed opportunities that were really only disseminated within this TA/research community. While technically anyone could have applied to those internships and jobs, you'd be hard-pressed to even know about them if you weren't involved in this community to begin with. At that point, I "beat" the competition by playing somewhere where there's a lot less of it. It's not about being any "better" than the competition, but by strategically avoiding it.

This is how real networking looks like, and how someone (in my case, a lowly student) with little established experience and history can do it. The particulars can vary from one person and environment to another, but the trick is to start small and follow the unique opportunities presented to you.
by kloop | 2025-08-30 13:01:04+00:00
You're not wrong, but I'm also constantly surprised at places where devs will inject complexity.

A former project that had a codec system for serializing objects that involved scala implicits comes to mind. It involved a significant amount of internal machinery, just to avoid writing 5 toString methods. And made it so that changing imports could break significant parts of the project in crazy ways.

It's possible nobody at the beginning of the project knew they would only have 5 of these objects (if they had 5 at the beginning, how many would they have later?), but I think that comes back to the article's point. There are often significantly simpler solutions that have fewer layers of indirection, and will work better. You shouldn't reach for complexity until you need it.
by GavinAnderegg | 2025-08-30 13:02:09+00:00
I ditched Google Analytics on my blog because it more than doubled the size of any page load (the “Universal” version loaded a lot of additional JS). This was fine for a while, as I wasn’t posting much. Later, I wanted to write more. This might be shallow, but I found having numbers associated with my writing helped me keep at it. I also found it fun and useful to see what got traction. I tried Plausible for a while, but it was overkill for my needs, and I grew out of the first tier quickly. I then moved to Tinylytics [0], and have been enjoying that.

[0] - https://tinylytics.app/
by adrian_b | 2025-08-30 13:02:13+00:00
Energy is continuous, not discrete.

Because energy is action per time, it inherits the continuity of time. Action is also continuous, though its nature is much less well understood. (Many people make confusions between action and angular momentum, speaking about a "quantum of action". There is no such thing as a quantum of action, because action is a quantity that increases monotonically in time for any physical system, so it cannot have constant values, much less quantized values. Angular momentum, which is the ratio of action per phase in a rotation motion, is frequently a constant quantity and a quantized quantity. In more than 99% of the cases when people write Planck's constant, they mean an angular momentum, but there are also a few cases when people write Planck's constant meaning an action, typically in relation with some magnetic fluxes, e.g. in the formula of the magnetic flux quantum.)

Perhaps when you said that energy is discrete you thought about light being discrete, but light is not energy. Energy is a property of light, like also momentum, frequency, wavenumber and others.

Moreover, the nature of the photon is still debated. Some people are not convinced yet that light travels in discrete packets, instead of the alternative where only the exchange of energy and momentum between light and electrons or other leptons and quarks is quantized.

There are certain stationary systems, like isolated atoms or molecules, which may have a discrete set of states, where each state has a certain energy.

Unlike for a discrete quantity like the electric charge, such sets of energy values can contain arbitrary values of energy and between the sets of different systems there are no rational relationships between the energy values. Moreover, all such systems have not only discrete energy values but also continuous intervals of possible energies, usually towards higher energies, e.g. corresponding to high temperatures or to the ionization of atoms or molecules.
by miven | 2025-08-30 13:02:15+00:00
The ARC Prize Foundation ran extensive ablations on HRM for their slew of reasoning tasks and noted that the "hierarchical" part of their architecture is not much more impactful than a vanilla transformer of the same size with no extra hyperparameter tuning:

https://arcprize.org/blog/hrm-analysis#analyzing-hrms-contri...
by Mallowram | 2025-08-30 13:02:24+00:00
Words don't represent thoughts in any way shape or form. They externalize bias as a pretext to communication, which is arbitary. Every word is a metaphor, every word is mythological. These are empirical facts developed from Aristotle, Cassirer, Halliday into Fedorenko, yet CS takes not note of it. Language has no form that refers or represents anything in reality in any sense of concatenation. They are gibberish. This is where humanity is off the rails. Word statements are only 'about' status, dominance, control. Statements in arbitrary words do not exist as references or representations. A statement like which person makes more accurate predictions is basically nonsense, it's applying arbitrary values to events subjectively. Once we understand prediction has nothing to do with how brains work, it's basically an animal that has no relationship to others or itself except as to extract value and control. The argument is simply over your head unless you grasp the fundamentals: words do not work. Please don't pretend others don't grasp these ideas, brilliant minds have been dissecting the illusions of words since Aristotle. "Marshall McLuhan's idea of the "schizophrenic alphabet" is a provocative metaphor for his theory that the phonetic alphabet fundamentally altered human consciousness, leading to a fragmented, detached, and individualistic psychology."
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-08-30 13:02:40+00:00
My understanding: CEO is the one who is held accountable if anything happens. They also get the final say on any major decisions.

Personally, I wouldn't entrust control of a company in the hands of a tool that struggles to beat a 25 year old children's video game. Navigating reality is a lot more complicated than a children's video games.
by Bender | 2025-08-30 13:02:54+00:00
Just my own anecdotal experience, I bricked an AMD mini-pc playing the game Starfield as have many others by using one of the fancy guns. One pull of the trigger and instant-brick. People on Steam said this was impossible, that is until it started happening to a lot of people. Instantly fried the integrated graphics. Now I just play on a SteamDeck.

On a more related note I also cool the AMD mini-PC's using a small HEPA filter unit as their built in cooling is awful. As a bonus it stays dust-free. Another massive improvement came from disabling the CPU vulnerability mitigations. It is very noticeable on mini-PC's. 80% GPU down to 13% in a couple games which reduced heat a lot...
by a2128 | 2025-08-30 13:03:12+00:00
Maybe in 2030, everyone will have several AI agents constantly looking for their dream job. One job listing will receive 3 million applications. Companies will start requiring payment to submit a job application to show you're serious and not a spammer. Any hiring manager hoping to get reached out to by an actual human applicant via a job listing will be hopeless, and any individual applicant hoping to reach a human hiring manager will also be hopeless
by frumiousirc | 2025-08-30 13:03:16+00:00
> If you have -> → and <- ← you’re fine, but when you add <-> ↔, I can’t find any way of using the <- sequence any more.

X11 is likely walking a tree of .XCompose entries with each keypress. Once it gets to '<' and '-' it finds '←' and does not continue to consider your next '>'. So, you need to provide a way to walk a different path.

This works for me.

<Multi_key> <less> <period> <greater> : "↔"

It is like how EN DASH is "--." to be distinct from EM DASH's "---".

In general we must consider the entirety of .XCompose when choosing new compose key bindings. Maybe there is some utility to help with that. For me, I removed 98% of the default Compose file entries which makes manual checking feasible.