MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Ponet1945 | 2025-08-06 08:35:23+00:00
Jesus I can't tell if this comment is a joke or peak techbro arrogance.

I think your mind would break if you tried to learn what goes into modern drug design, like quantum chemistry.

Statistical analysis was basically invented to solve problems in psychology and biology, like measuring intelligence and understanding genetic inheritance.

Pretty much all the advancement in the computer industry is on the hardware side. Software engineering is the most immature field of them all.
by blensor | 2025-08-06 08:35:49+00:00
I'd say prices of products come down due to competition, not due to the companies getting more money outside of the regular supply/demand relationship.

Let's assume you have a monopoly on something with a guarantee that no one else can sell the same product in your market. Then there is no direct incentive to make the product cheaper, even if you can produce it for cheaper. Adding more money on top of it that is supposed to trickle down in some way will not make that product cheaper, unless there is an incentive for that company to do so.

The real world is of course more complicated, let's say you have two companies that get the incentives and one of them is using it to make the product cheaper, then that will "trickle down" as a price decrease because the other company need to follow suit to stay competitive. But this again is driven by the market and not the incentives and would have happened without them just as well.
by atoav | 2025-08-06 08:36:07+00:00
I was part of the selection committee for a position once, where we selected the more junior engineer.

The probably most simple explaination would be that for some roles you like to have someone that can be easier "shaped" into a certain role. Someone who is already successful may bring their own system of doing things. This is great if it is a good fit, but can produce frictions if it isn't.

The next thing is that if you apply to a mediocre position with overly amazing credentials, it can raise suspicions. Something must be wrong with you, maybe you got amazing credentials, but you are complicated to work with. Maybe you're looking for the mediocre job just because you think it will be a walk in the park, etc. There are legit reasons for this (e.g. "my partner moved to $TOWN for her career and I am looking for something to do here, and you seem like the best fit. I know I am technically overqualified, but I wanted to go back to coding for years now and this offers me a geeat chance to give it a go").

Of all the senior canidates we have rejected the most common issue was that they didn't offer a convincing explanation to why they chose that specific position. The worst one was talking about how it would be a relaxing position for them.
by masfoobar | 2025-08-06 08:36:10+00:00
I agree.

I remember the older days (2005-8) when we would dump a load of HTML from the server-side and kept javascript (for the most part) managing the layout and, not to mention, coding the painful differences between browsers.. even IE6 to IE7.

As Javascript (likely thanks to jQuery for starters) got better with AJAX and supporting different browsers with less code, it seems Javascript transitioned to be a owner of data with events and triggers. As for the serverside, transitioned away from returning HTML but XML or the common Json data.

Away from jQuery (or alongside it) we ended up with Javascript frameworks leading to bindings or automated refresh of data with template views, etc. Things like mustache.js to knockoutjs to angularjs.

Now - its React, with node package managers, even grunt... to name a few... appear to be needed tools for web development these days. Its like we are just HIDING web development to an application. Underneath it all still remains the basics of HTML, CSS, Javascript -- and its relationship with the serverside language.

I will admit. In the early days of HTML development.. I hated it! Its not the HTML side of things, but the tools I had to use like Classic ASP or supporting different browsers. If we do web development today like its 2005... with modern programming languages and web browsers, "old school" web development is a joy.

In the last few years, I jumped back to the serverside generating the HTML again. I can still do "simple page" applications with AJAX returning a portion of HTML, etc.

When I explain this reasoning with other developers, I get a confused look on their face. I try to explain to them that the backend code has not changed. Its just an extra layer of returning the data back as HTML, rather than Json. It sounds like more but all it does it organise your HTML templates on the serverside, rather than just having it all done on the clientside.

Since then I have added htmx to the mix, which IMO compliments this original approach. I have made successful projects with it though I dont think I have won the co-workers. I dont think its because its the old school way or htmx -- its just they are so accustomed to the modern approach of web development.
by eqvinox | 2025-08-06 08:36:24+00:00
Putting the protection circuit* on the battery's negative pole is standard best practice (due to NMOS efficiency, and it not being a problem in the slightest), and the 50mΩ actually improves balancing. Please avoid making comments like this based on half knowledge.

[*] I do wish it were an actual full protection circuit. It isn't. Then again a run of the mill protection circuit commonly doesn't cover reversed polarity [between protector and cell], which is rather important for this specific appliation.
by karteum | 2025-08-06 08:36:51+00:00
I was thinking exactly the same : I also don't get it (even though I totally get that someone may lose motivation to work on a project, and certainly has no obligation to continue. But this justification sounds a bit weird to me).

Could this mean that he has been approached by some "men in black" asking to insert some backdoor in the code or to stop working on it, together with a gag order ? (actually I also wondered the same a long time ago with Truecrypt, even though to my knowledge no backdoor has ever been found in further audits...)
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-06 08:37:00+00:00
That's all true but I think what you meant to say is that successfully detecting fabricated data is rare. I've been in the weeds on this and after a while it's tempting to believe you can always spot scientific fraud by reading papers, but of course it's not so. A paper is just a bag of words and pictures, it can say anything it wants. As long as a data fabricator doesn't make basic errors you won't detect fraud.

Unfortunately, when people do find ways to automatically detect inconsistent numbers in a paper, like SPRITE or GRIM, they find maybe 50% of all checkable papers fail the audit and the authors almost invariably refuse to share their raw data for further checks despite having previously agreed to do so. So it seems likely that fake data is actually not rare at all but very widespread.

Caveat: like I say in every comment on scientific fraud on HN, all this varies dramatically by field. Some fields are much more corrupt than others. That 50% number is from psychology. Computer science isn't that bad relative to others. But for example, in climatology it's taken as axiomatic that it's OK to fabricate data and then present it as "observations". Anyone who tries to call them out on this behavior gets attacked, censored or even sued, yet if you did the exact same thing in physics nobody would hesitate to call it fraud. There isn't even a consistent definition in academia of what data fabrication means.

So no, sadly we don't really know how prevalent data fabrication is. The only way to detect scientific fraud to the level of robustness we'd accept for any other kind of fraud is regular, randomized lab audits with jail time or ruinous damages for perpetrators, backed by rigorous field-independent written standards for what evidence must be provided, all checked by outside organizations. Think financial audits but for scientists.

Obviously not only is academia not doing this, it's culturally nowhere close to considering the possibility of even thinking about starting. Academia has spent so many years engaging in such deep ideological purges that everyone who remains is at minimum sympathetic to ideas like "defund the police". The concept of policing themselves to the level accountancy does will never come up, not even during discussions of reform.
by ubutler | 2025-08-06 08:37:02+00:00
In my experience, maintaining a very popular software library, supporting open source, and blogging have absolutely all contributed to my success, and, additionally, as someone who is now a founder seeking like-minded, highly skilled engineers, those are key signals for an attractive hire.

I can understand though, perhaps in a work environment where management is unlikely to be able to retain high skilled talent, you may want 'low-profile' workers that aren't going to have as many competitors chasing after them...
by IncreasePosts | 2025-08-06 08:37:27+00:00
Building popular software doesn't mean you're a good programmer, especially since at that point Google was looking heavily at CS concepts and he admittedly wasn't good at that.

It's also possible he would have been hired if he applied for L-1. A lot of people get an ego check applying to Google where they're a senior staff engineer or a CTO at a small company and get an L5 offer.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-08-06 08:38:27+00:00
It is clear that we need both apps and documents in web browsers. Yes yes "web", "hateoas" and all that, but it didn't materalise in practice and is therefore irrelevant.

So maybe we can have <!DOCTYPE app>, which lets you use a new set of APIs focussed on applications, but is otherwise in the same "shape". JSX type syntax.

This way it's easy for say newspapers to offer both an app format as well as a "lite" document format. Instead of their current offering which is a app shoehorned into a document and then a messy lite version.

Users who use noscript can, instead of blocking scripts wholesale and then whitelisting the good ones, request by default the lite document format. i.e <!DOCTYPE html>.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-06 08:38:32+00:00
That's not a problem. The world is large. Europeans are leader on key sectors too like photolitography. Buying is ok as long as there are multiple options.

Mercantilism is an idea of the past. The main issue is that American are deluded enough to vote for someone who thinks it's relevant.

When one of your trade partner decides to commit suicide by imposing tariffs on everyone and threaten to not supply you anymore, the correct solution is not to turn inward for everything, it's to turn to other partners which are not acting like buffoons.
by pjc50 | 2025-08-06 08:38:47+00:00
Hmm. Aren't the East Asian CEO class off being CEOs in East Asia? Whereas, for jurisdiction arbitrage reasons, it's a much better environment for CEOs in India to leave India and work in the US than to try to build in India.

I'm always mindful of the quote "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops" from Stephen Jay Gould. If we assume that CEO-ness, whatever that property actually is, is evenly distributed among people at birth, it becomes a question of opportunity. It seems that the business culture in Japan, Singapore, possibly Korea, post-90s China, and some other places is pretty good compared to India.
by austin-cheney | 2025-08-06 08:39:24+00:00
Uggghhh, the article states correct facts about the DOM but grossly incorrect conclusions. Most developers have always feared working with the DOM. This irrationality is not new. I have no idea why, but tree models scare the shit out of college educated developers. That’s supremely weird because computer science education spends so much energy on data structures and tree models.

It also makes the conversation about WASM even more bizarre. Most college educated developers are scared of the DOM. Yes, it’s fear the emotion and it’s completely irrational. Trust me on this as I have watched it as a prior full time JS dev for over 15 years. Developers are continuously trying to hide from the thing with layers of unnecessary abstractions and often don’t know why because they have invested so much energy in masking their irrational nonsense.

Other developers that have not embraced this nightmare of emotions just simply wish WASM would replace JS so they don’t have touch any of this. This is problematic because you don’t need anything to do with JS or the DOM to deploy WASM, but it’s a sandbox that ignores the containing web page, which is absolutely not a replacement. For WASM to become a replacement it would have to gain full DOM access to the containing page. Browser makers have refused to do that for clear security reasons.

So you get people investing their entire careers trying to hide from the DOM with unnecessary abstractions and then other developers that want bypass the nonsense by embracing that thing they don’t know they are yet afraid of it.

That is super fucking weird, but it makes for fun stories to nondevelopers that wonder why software is the way it is.
by globular-toast | 2025-08-06 08:40:10+00:00
Trains allowed us to go further than we could ever walk. Cars caused us to lose the ability to walk completely.

Looms allowed us to produce fabrics of higher quality than we ever could by hand. Fast fashion caused us to lose the ability to care for and mend clothes completely.

Computers allowed us to calculate and "think" faster than we ever could before. AI caused us to lose the ability to think completely...
by jacquesm | 2025-08-06 08:40:47+00:00
Paralleling 18650's is relatively easy. You need to match voltage to within a few mV and make sure the connection is really solid (welded) to ensure they stay paired perfectly. Flaky connections, putting cells in series, impact damage, bad chargers etc are the risky bits, a solidly connected pair of 18650's is to a close approximation just as safe as a single cell, but it does have twice the short circuit current so you are going to have to be more careful around them. But at least the casings will be at the same potential.

I've built a 17P10S pack which was a pretty interesting (and scary) effort but it has been working flawlessly for years now with just one inspection of the guts after two years to make sure that nothing was coming loose (it's on an s-pedelec e-bike). In a big pack like that it's the spaces between the alternating blocks of cells and on top where the interconnects are that the real risk lies, besides the fact that the short circuit current of that pack is just shy of a kilo ampere so you really don't want to drop a tool or a piece of interconnect strip on that.
by entropie | 2025-08-06 08:40:56+00:00
I play around with a nvidia jetson orin nano super right now and its actually pretty usuable with gemma3:4b and quite fast - even image processing is done in like 10-20 seconds but this is with GPU support. When something is not working and ollama is not using the GPU this calls take ages because the cpu is just bad.

Iam curious how fast this is with CPU only.
by eqvinox | 2025-08-06 08:41:48+00:00
Yeah, I'm just saying, you can't even buy regular protected cells and put them in, because they won't fucking fit. I do think "actual" 18650 protected cells exist, but they would be rare and expensive because you can't build them out of mass manufactured bare 18650 cells (for obvious reasons of where do you put the damn protection circuit.)
by eru | 2025-08-06 08:42:06+00:00
Now, I mean you can work in finance for a bit, and if you play your cards right, you can retire young.

Yes, you can argue that while you are working, you are a slave to the wage. Maybe.

But don't tell me that when you retire with tens of millions in your thirties (if you play your cards right!), you are a slave any more.

> [...] that people tend to get so wrapped up in them they forget to free themselves from it.

Eh, how is that different from going into business by yourself?
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-06 08:42:14+00:00
You can't rely on journals because they have bad incentives. Their customers are the universities they're supposed to monitor for fraud, and their prestige comes from the same place news/magazine prestige does - publishing incredible claims.

Catching fraud further down the chain is easy. Other professions know how to do it. Just adopt the same framework as used in financial controls. External auditors, written standards, randomized spot checks, lots and lots of paperwork to provide audit trails back to real experiments with hard-to-forge evidence. And severe punishments for those found to have engaged in intentional fraud.
Show HN: Swizz – A Fitness System
by limyishengbrian | 2025-08-06 08:42:18+00:00
I built this because I wanted workout, calories, nutritional tracking and scheduling all in one place!

My hope is that I'll be able to wrangle all these ideas together to build the perfect system that will help with your fitness levels and make workouts more fun!

It's a fun app I use daily, any feedback and requests are welcomed !
by oniony | 2025-08-06 08:42:29+00:00
Some companies want subservient, homogenous employees that come in, do work, and can be let go if they do not perform. That's a simple equation.

If you get in somebody who is a star, however minor, that changes the equation, changes the dynamic. Now that person can have more confidence, can have more sway in the decision making. If the company wants to let them go, then they might post a message to their followers, riling them up, creating bad PR for the company. It's no longer a simple equation.

So it all comes down to the insecurities of the company.
by zarzavat | 2025-08-06 08:43:11+00:00
I didn't mean it doesn't attempt to compete, I mean it doesn't actually compete. Claude code for agents, Copilot for autocomplete (depending on your editor/IDE).

For single-line autocomplete, which is how I use it, pretty much anything will do the job. I use Copilot only because it integrates well with VS Code. I find the other features to be inferior.
by pentamassiv | 2025-08-06 08:43:29+00:00
I don't know. I have no comparison but it is common for crates to be released under MIT. I took over the maintainership from the original author so the license was already there. I rewrote pretty much everything so I guess I could try changing the license now but that's not something I wanna think about.

I do the work because I see it as payback for all the great open source software I use all the time.
by booleandilemma | 2025-08-06 08:43:58+00:00
I think the whole "school" thing is just a giant filtering mechanism to sort out who gets placed where in society. The idea of learning things is just pretense for the majority of students. It's a giant, intricate sorting hat. Both teachers and students using AI to get out of doing the work just makes it obvious. The thing is, it means we're going to need a new filtering mechanism, because AI is making this one obsolete.

The system we have is now legacy: https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/student-flaunts-use-of-chatgpt-...
by skeezyboy | 2025-08-06 08:44:15+00:00
or maybe just stop trying to force the round peg in a square hole. an application is surely not a document. they open documents. its conceptual, but it would make your life so much easier if you stopped trying to make a fully fledged platform out of what was essentially a rich text document viewer. java has since come along and given you pretty much write once, run anywhere and close to instant deployment with its applets
by meindnoch | 2025-08-06 08:44:41+00:00
In the future, only prestigious private schools will employ human teachers.

Education in public schools is going to be 100% LLMs with text-to-speech, the only human adult in classrooms will be a security guard, but later they will also be replaced with AI-controlled autocannons that shoot non-lethal projectiles to discipline misbehaving kids.
by j-krieger | 2025-08-06 08:44:52+00:00
I just recently found an incredibly cool paper that solved a problem I was having. It was published in a tier A conference. They claimed they would make the data and code public at a later point.

Problem is, I could find nothing of it when I googled. O tried to get ahold of the authors and I even wrote to their department. The only Mail back I received concluded that neither would be available any time soon.

So there‘s that. A paper that could be completely made up, with no data to support it. It might as well be make believe. I would lie if I said this didn't make me lose faith in my own work, since it justifiably takes me ages to gather data and write code for my experiments. Great.
by Falkon1313 | 2025-08-06 08:45:35+00:00
It's more than that even. AI may have plenty of utility. But does the massive capex on GPUs that will all be obsolete in a couple years?

You can still run a train on those old tracks. And it'll be competitive. Sure you could build all new tracks, but that's a lot more expensive and difficult. So they'll need to be a whole lot better to beat the established network.

But GPUs? And with how much tech has changed in the last decade or two and might in the next?

We saw cryptocurrency mining go from CPU to GPU to FPGA to ASICs in just a few years.

We can't yet tell where this fad is going. But there's fair reason to believe that, even if AI has tons of utility, the current economics of it might be problematic.
by energy123 | 2025-08-06 08:45:39+00:00
This appears to assume a lack of intelligence such that the entire industrial base needs to be targeted. But only a relatively small subtree of the industrial base is relevant, and you don't necessarily need to degrade the whole subtree, it can be sufficient to degrade key nodes that create supply chain bottlenecks. I'm not saying it can be done, but I am unpersuaded that it can't.
by arkh | 2025-08-06 08:45:39+00:00
> I find it fascinating how much a pretty large group of people just hate semaglutides and seemingly need to believe that it's some kind of Faustian bargain.

There have been some scandals about "miracle drugs" which bad effects have been found only years after being on the market. And side effects can be crazy: I use D2 agonists which works wonder to handle a prolactinoma (like shrinking a tumor with a simple pill every 2 weeks wonder), side effects of this kind of medication can be different addictions (sex, gambling, purchasing etc.) which is always fun when you're one in a thousands to get it.
by coreyh14444 | 2025-08-06 08:45:43+00:00
American in Denmark here. There are dozens of stories like this where the Danes have a very matter of fact attitude to all sorts of topics. Life+Dealth, Sex, etc etc. One story that was relayed to me yesterday was that the Zoo in Copenhagen got in some trouble because they had to put down a baby Giraffe and decided to do a dissection for some school kids. Nobody in Denmark cared, but it made to international news. My daughter's public school had "stone age week" in 4th grade and they hunted ducks with spears, prepped and cooked them over an open fire.
by eru | 2025-08-06 08:46:04+00:00
> I wish people had this same sudden interest in protecting the free market and maximizing trade when we're taking about income tax or sales tax or property tax, etc.

But people do have these interests!

Different taxes distort markets differently. Tariffs are one of the worst ways to tax. Similarly transaction taxes, like a Tobin tax or stamp duty, are bad.

Income tax ain't great, but it's ok. (Details depend on implementation.) Property tax is one of the best taxes, only beaten out by land value taxes. VAT is ok.

And, btw, a tariff designed to raise revenue is very different from a tariff designed to change the balance of payments.