MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jleyank | 2025-08-30 01:32:27+00:00
Make it all senior government personnel (SES or higher, including things the Prez and Cabinet people). Blind trust that's really, really out of their control, or divest. Or, to be extra careful, allow them to muck about within retirement vehicles like IRA and 401K as they're really quite small compared to what's sloshing about today in DC.

Military too, field grade or higher. Also contractors filling any similar-grade positions. And all procurement officers/staff.
by jnaina | 2025-08-30 01:33:14+00:00
Might be a controversial take, but the Trump administration needs to take a bold stance and banned WITCH (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and HCL) from the H1B Visa Program. The number of anecdotal accounts I have heard of these companies gaming the system, is rather concerning. That this is not in cards despite mounting evidence suggests that there is active lobbying by a number of US SV giants who benefit from this.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-30 01:33:30+00:00
> various distribution lists (which I read in full). Add in server notifications, automated reports from data processing scripts,

And all of those can just as easily be sent to a Slack channel without everyone bothering to create email rules since they are automatically sent to the correct Slack channel where if it’s an actionable alert, a responsible party can add an “ack” reaction that kicks off a workflow that says this person is handling it.

This can also be integrated into your CRM or wherever you call something like ServiceNow. We have all sorts of workflows and integrations with Slack.

> You have plausible deniability when a single message in a group chat is missed. When an email is sent to the team with a change in procedure you can have some expectations that it will be seen and it also provides a one-one or one-many channel for clarification

How are you any less likely to miss an email than miss a channel set aside for leadership announcements that only certain people can send a message too? Then you also have the “reply all” issue that I’ve seen blow up email servers. Messages allow threading etc in Slack and it’s a lot easier to ignore a thread that doesn’t pertain to you and follow those that do.

Everyone at our 1000 person company communicates through Slack up to an including our CEO for announcements and updates.

I don’t think I’ve emailed someone internally in over 8 years except to forward an external email and during that time, I’ve worked for startups and the second largest employer in the US.
by codingdave | 2025-08-30 01:34:36+00:00
You'll find that when they teach kids in the schools, they start with the fundamentals. Logic, branching, loops, problem decomposition, debugging. Doing so has even been shown to improve their overall academics because they approach all their classes with an eye to logic and troubleshooting when they get things wrong and it builds resilience and self-correction into their world views.

Even aside from that, it puts them in the same boat as experienced coders, in making their own decisions -- If they know the logic, they can choose for themselves whether they prefer the syntax of Python vs. JavaScript, or any other environment.
by soraminazuki | 2025-08-30 01:35:54+00:00
> By default, you are opted in. Perfectly clear.

That's called opt-out. You're doing exactly what I described: gaslighting people into believing that opt-in and opt-out are synonymous, rendering the entire concept meaningless. The audacity of you labeling people as "political" while resorting to such Orwellian manipulation is astounding. How can you lecture others about the purpose of languages with a straight face when you're redefining terms to make it impossible for people to express a concept?

These are examples of what "opt-in by default" actually means. It means having the user manually consent to something every time, the polar opposite your definition.

- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/report-new-apple-int...

- https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset/issues/293

It's also just pure laziness to label me as "hysterical" when PR departments of companies like Google have, like you, misused the terms opt-out and opt-in in deceptive ways.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314981
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-30 01:36:26+00:00
I admit to getting quite pissed off, but I eventually decided that it wasn't worth it, and just retired.

I'm grateful that I had the means. Because of that, I would have been happy to take a lot less than many, if the work interested me, but it never got that far.

NBD. I've found that learning on my own is better, anyway. LLMs have been a Godsend, there.

These days, I get quite a bit done, but I do it on my own terms, and that makes all the difference.

This is what I’m working on, now[0]. Still has a ways to go, though. I should publish it next week.

My heroes are guys like Stu Nicholls and Howard Oakley. I've learned so much, since I decided to retire, and it's accelerating.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/passkeys/
by arthurofbabylon | 2025-08-30 01:37:05+00:00
Useful principle. But… (sorry to make a simple phrase more complex) the notion just scratches the surface of complexity management.

I appreciate “Philosophy of Software Design” by Ousterhout. I recently read that while rebuilding a text editor. Mind blowing experience. There is a lot of opportunity to more tightly encapsulate logic, to more clearly abstract a system, to keep a system simple yet powerful and extensible. I believe I became twice as good of a developer just by reading a chapter a day and sticking with the workflow.
by pollofire23 | 2025-08-30 01:37:11+00:00
This is exactly why I'm against Google's new sideloading restrictions:

Broken promises: Android was supposed to be about open software and user choice False security narrative: They claim it's "for our safety" when it's clearly about control and revenue One-size-fits-all approach: Why force restrictions on users who understand the risks?

Give us the option to enable sideloading with proper warnings. Don't treat informed users like children. If this goes through, rooting becomes the only way to maintain actual ownership of our devices.
by cookiengineer | 2025-08-30 01:37:29+00:00
Imagine an AI impersonating your friends and relatives and trying to tell you that you are not trans/gay/green/vegan or whatever the president doesn't like that very morning.

They're building the Ministry of Truth.

If you need an AI and propaganda to convince someone instead of neutral, rational, and educational means - then guess what, you are in the wrong.
by xpe | 2025-08-30 01:39:03+00:00
> Unless they did something truly bizarre there wasn't room for being subjective

Without having been there, I have a sense of what you mean, but I do want to add:

1. Statistically speaking, there will misinterpretation and even outright errors on the part of interviewers.

2. As feedback gets passed up the chain, most processes I know about are not formulaic. People make judgment calls. They might be more or less consistent w.r.t. following some ideal, sure. A company might pride itself on consistency and that might be good. Another company might pride itself on adaptability -- changing a process to suit the current need, because maybe the old process wasn't that great.

3. There _will_ be differential treatment, as perceived by the interviewer, even if you behave _identically_!. Cultures are different, comfort levels are different, styles are different! Saying the same thing, with the same tone of voice, with the same timing might have different effects on different people.
by sublinear | 2025-08-30 01:39:16+00:00
> some of the best engineers I know have insane setups with nvim or emacs. They invest in their tool chain, and are now bringing AI into.

I find this likely, but totally irrelevant to their success now and in the future. AI tools are as much of a trivial choice as any other text editor features. The resulting time spent and code quality are the same regardless of personal preferences.
by cowboylowrez | 2025-08-30 01:39:23+00:00
>What keeps America alive and together is the virtue of the average American

if we take the results of 2016 and 2024, then our "virtue" is on life support lol, still this is an inspiring speech and I'm honored to quote it and I thank you for writing it, hacker news thrives on good content like this.

>counter-democratic "institutions."

the US is very big, and a government is going to have a civil service, hopefully that span administrations as is often the norm, institutional knowledge is a thing. Obviously yes, some folks hate that shit.

>America was a stable democracy from the beginning long before we had any of these institutions.

history has entered the chat

> I'd trade every Ivy-league grad in the world in all the most august institutions for a million ordinary Iowans.

oh man, reminds me of my IT days, like database consistency was always some "ivory tower thinking", I hated 3 am troubleshooting sessions, especially since I was locked out of the bugfest that caused them. gives me flashbacks! you could literally be my boss lol

>Why does it feature so prominently in your mental model of Trump?

yeah, racism features prominently in my mental model of trump too. I think its part of the "reputation" part of reputation, resume and rapsheet.
by ByThyGrace | 2025-08-30 01:41:13+00:00
If the market is spread so thin that, say, fairly original games released today would have been sure hits 15 years ago, where is the failure? Lack of six figure investment in marketing campaigns? Is creating success simply already having the capital to make a successful game? Is it being in the influencer "meta" (see right now e.g. PEAK)?

I don't think success/failure should be framed in any other way than "did the game break even for the dev/publisher" and that's beyond what any player perceives. Because crossing that line will send devs into despair, as you mentioned, it's just not sane.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-30 01:41:50+00:00
From a personal use standpoint, I’m looking at all of my credit card companies, hotel apps, flight apps etc and they all either have in app messaging or integrate with iMessage.

Now I’m seeing more companies that want to integrate with messaging platforms for customer support - one of my specialties is implementing call centers with Amazon Connect. I’ve never been asked in 5 years to integrate customer support with inbound email.
by hollerith | 2025-08-30 01:41:55+00:00
Here is what Gemini says:

>On August 24, 2021, then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a memorandum requiring all U.S. armed forces members to get the COVID-19 vaccine. This policy, which was supported by then-President Joe Biden, led to the discharge of thousands of service members who refused the vaccine.

>It's important to note that a dishonorable discharge is a specific type of punishment that can only be issued after a court-martial for serious offenses. While some sources claimed that the Biden administration ordered dishonorable discharges for those who refused the vaccine, this was not the case. The President does not have the authority to issue such an order, and the military services themselves handled disciplinary actions.

>The military's COVID-19 vaccine mandate was rescinded in January 2023 after Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which directed the Department of Defense to end the mandate.
by const_cast | 2025-08-30 01:43:07+00:00
> Many users chose Anthropic exactly because they were not like the others.

Companies are less like people and more like bacteria. They are programmatic, like algorithms.

What they will do has already been decided for them, programmed into them, by the rules of capitalism. It is inevitable. There are no good guys, and there are no bad guys, there's just... microbes.

Those who do not engage in capitalism, perhaps they do not seek money at all, have no such hard limitations. But they are rare, because money is blood.
by chem83 | 2025-08-30 01:43:35+00:00
This is what got Lucovsky pushed out. He wanted to build OS from scratch and couldn't see past the technical argument and acknowledge the Product's team urgency to actually land something in the hands of customers. Meanwhile, he left a trail of toxicity that he doesn't even realize was there[0].

Interestingly, he was pulling the same bs at Google until reason prevailed and he got pushed out (but allowed to save face and claim he resigned willingly[1]).

[0] https://x.com/yewnyx/status/1793684535307284948 [1] https://x.com/marklucovsky/status/1678465552988381185
by akoboldfrying | 2025-08-30 01:44:57+00:00
This is a very interesting topic and the article seems quite thorough. But I have trouble interpreting the crucial "School and track sorting can bolster or bust academic achievement" plots: The y axis is labelled "Graduation score percentile", but it has negative numbers on the scale. How are these values being corrected?

The series for 1-school towns on the left plot is basically flat; am I supposed to believe that, in such towns, students entering the school with a 0.5 on the high school admission test appear at the same exit exam percentile (implying that they have the same average exit exam scores) as those who entered with a 9.5? That can't possibly be true.

ETA: I also thought the conclusion -- that other countries should adopt a similar education model -- was out of step with most of the body text, which seemed to stress the downsides for weaker students. (There's no actual contradiction here, and perhaps the claim about most of society's advances being due to the top-end achievers was intended to justify this angle, but I was nevertheless surprised that there wasn't much discussion of why this upside should overpower the concerns for weaker students.)
by namibj | 2025-08-30 01:46:25+00:00
You're conflating two things that shouldn't be:

(1) the utilization factor over the obsolescence-limited "useful" life of the hardware; (2) the short-term (sub-month) training job scheduling onto a physical cluster.

For (1) it's acceptable to, on average, not operate one month per year as long as that makes the electricity opex low enough.

For (2) yeah, large-scale pre-training jobs that spend millions of compute on what's overall "one single" job, those are often ok to wait a few days to a very few weeks as would be from just dropping HPC cluster system operation to standby power/deep sleep on the p10 worst days each year as far as renewable yield in the grid-capacity-limited surroundings of the datacenter goes. And if you can further run systems a little power-tuned rather than performance-tuned when power is less plentiful, to where you may average only 90% theoretical compute throughput during cluster operating hours (this is in addition to turning it off for about a month worth of time), you could reduce power production and storage capacity a good chunk further.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-08-30 01:47:09+00:00
> Perhaps it really did work at first, in the complete sense, when the number of users was quite small. That's where the actual content of the article kicks in: it suggests you really do use that simple solution, because maybe you'll never need to scale after all, or you'll need to rewrite everything by then anyway, or you'll have access to more engineering talent by then, etc.

This is where I am arguing nuance. These decisions are contextual; and the superficially more complicated solution may be solving inherent complexity in the problem space that only provides benefit over a time period.

As an example, some team might decide to forgo a database and read/write directly to the file system. This may enable a release in less time and that might be the right decision in certain contexts. Or it could be a terrible decision as the externalised costs begin to manifest and the business fails because of loss of customer trust.

My point is that you cannot only look at what is right in front of you, you also need to tactically plan ahead. In the big org context, you also need to strategically plan ahead.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-30 01:47:41+00:00
> That can't possibly be true

It tracks with spatial inequality.

A 1 school town is highly likely to be a small rural town with limited economic prospects. Like plenty of CEE countries, the overwhelming majority of opportunities have historically been clustered in the capital and a couple regional cities.

The kind of town or village with only a single school is going to have fewer social benefits or services compared to an urban school.

Basically, what it is saying is students in those kinds of towns are s** out of luck statistically speaking compared to their urban peers.

There's a reason Romania's HDI has remained lower than Russia's until recently thanks to EU funding to help develop Romania (which is now on track to become a major economic pole in the CEE)

Edit: can't reply

> A lot turns on this. (I suppose I could read the underlying paper, but I'm lazy.)

I recommend checking it out. It explains the methodology and some potential wonkiness. It's always good to read the docs
Show HN: Generate human-sounding tweets from current news
by canercbo | 2025-08-30 01:48:28+00:00
I’ve been working on a side project that generates short, human-sounding social posts from current news. Right now it supports tweet-style posts, but I plan to expand to other platforms.

It’s free during the beta phase, and I’d really appreciate feedback on usability and what features you’d find most valuable.
by scrubs | 2025-08-30 01:49:35+00:00
I'm saying china makes better decisions; i don't think it would start a war with a snowballs chance of winning convincingly. Second, China is not motivated (apart from taiwan) to invade. Russia is because it's fragile, scared of nato, and generally more expansive. China just doesn't have those urges. If I was China I'd be sick and tired of babysitting Russia with handouts because its in over its head.

Russia as far as I know was told by its own Ukraine was 1 week doable - clearly wrong. I think but have no argument to underpin the claim China is smarter in that the decision makers are not told what they want to hear in foreign wars.
by extraisland | 2025-08-30 01:49:36+00:00
> C# does not require scaffolding any more than Python does.

They've changed so much in the last few years I honestly don't know anymore. Which is part of the entire problem.

The last time I bothered writing anything with C# / .NET was .NET 8. They definitely had scaffolding tools for popular project types. Setting stuff up from a blank project wasn't straight forward.

> It comes with a large standard library (aka .NET). Even the NodeJS standard library is quite large now too.

I find dealing with C++ and CMake/Make (I hobby program Vulkan/OpenGL) easier than dealing with Node JS and NPM. People think I am being hyperbolic when I say this, I am not. Which show you how insane the JS ecosystem is.

I am honestly fed up of both C# and JS. There are far more headaches with both (especially if you are using TypeScript).

If you use TypeScript and don't want to use babel, until recently you have to basically use tsx or tsnode . You then have to wrangle a magic set of options in the tsconfig.json to have some popular libraries work.

.NET after 5 has absolute DI madness in ASP.NET and none of it seems documented properly anywhere (or I can't find it) and it seems to change subtly every time they update .NET or ASP.NET.

I ended up resorting to pulling down the entire source code to see what the Startup was doing. C# now has total language and syntactic sugar overload.

I have almost none of these headaches with Python and Go.

> And anyway, RAD isn't about setup time, it's about iteration time.

It is both. I find Python quicker, easier and less headaches that either JS or .NET. I am well versed in C# and JS.

I know less Python than .NET and JS/TS, yet I find it easier.

> I feel you on the lack of Go jobs. It seems like they aren't very well globally distributed...

That is true. I am sure most Go jobs advertised in the UK are in London.
by loktarogar | 2025-08-30 01:50:12+00:00
As far as I can tell, this is running from their servers - which means yes, you need to be able to trust the person who ultimately controls this at a bare minimum. Some trust him, some don't - some have good reasons, some don't.

I can evaluate this as it is, but if I was not trusting of a company, I can't then entrust my data to them, and so I can't evaluate a thing as any more than a toy.
by jmspring | 2025-08-30 01:50:29+00:00
I don’t necessarily see a problem with enabling like talented groups to be mingled together, that said it depends on the metrics. A friend who had a 3.2 in HS did way better in life than several 4.0+ students.

The other end of the spectrum is the way most of the US handles high school. Long gone are gifted and talented programs before high school and in many cases, for instance those with an ability for math are stuck in classes with those that will top out before algebra.

I understand your point, but the catering to the mediocre that happens these days in US grade schools isn’t the right answer either.
by dhosek | 2025-08-30 01:50:47+00:00
Matter and energy are discrete. The continuity or discreteness of time and space are unknown. There are arguments for both cases, but nobody really knows for sure.

It’s fairly easy to go from integers to many subsets of the reals (rationals are straightforward, constructible numbers not too hard, algebraic numbers more of a challenge), but the idea that the reals are, well real, depends on a continuity of spacetime that we can’t prove exists.
by andrekandre | 2025-08-30 01:52:30+00:00
> you're never going to get there off of recycling linux's device drivers because that forces you to design your new OS as a linux clone in which cade you definitely did not need to write an entire new kernel from scratch.

thats in interesting point, and makes me wonder if some kind of open interface for drivers to write to (and os's could implement) wouldn't be worthwhile?

probably it would have to be very general in design, but something along the lines of driverkit or iokit might work?
by sethev | 2025-08-30 01:53:21+00:00
Fair! Fwiw, I enjoyed the post - hopefully my comment wasn't harsh.

I think it does come down to the definition of durable. The default in SQLite is that the data for a transaction will be written all the way to disk (with an fsync) and the rollback journal will be deleted (but without an fsync).

In this model, there is chance of losing only the last transaction and only if the whole system crashes (like a power failure) after deleting the journal but before your file system makes that durable. If your application crashes, you're still fine.

That's significantly more durable than an asynchronous commit in Postgres, though. In an asynchronous commit, the transaction will complete before any data is written to disk at all - the data is only in memory, and many transactions can queue up in memory during the wal_writer_delay. All of those will definitely be lost if Postgres stops uncleanly for any reason (for example a crash, oomkill, or power failure).