MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by absurdwebsite | 2025-08-29 21:24:05+00:00
I made a small experiment as part of absurd.website , where I publish one absurd project each month.

This one is a timer that doesn’t tell the truth:

One runs 10% faster → your workout ends sooner, meetings feel shorter.

The other runs 10% slower → breaks feel longer, naps stretch out.

It plays with the idea that we often live by the clock, but time isn’t always fair — sometimes it drags, sometimes it flies. So what happens if the clock itself lies?

Would love to hear your thoughts, and whether you think "tricking the clock" changes how you feel about time :)
by nnutter | 2025-08-29 21:24:12+00:00
This is disappointing. I thought Anthropic was a more privacy and safety focused company and so I had chosen to use Claude Code over their competition. Now they are less privacy focused than Gemini Code, which only does this for the free tier. My work was already providing GitHub Copilot but I was rooting for and supporting Anthropic. Now I'll either just use GitHub Copilot or Gemini Code both of which are still private for paid tiers.
by floydnoel | 2025-08-29 21:24:47+00:00
that's a great observation. previously to (finally) trying Tailwind for the first time, I would write utility CSS classes to handle those cases like a stack or grid and it worked great building alone. Unfortunately, CSS is really hard to do with others, especially in a big team. Classes always added instead of using the existing one, nothing ever cleaned up. Tailwind is nice in that you get all the power of CSS, just a bit more ergonomic of an API. Plus using it really is just using CSS, just with all the possible utility classes already made for you!

that said i do like to still use classes like "btn" to consolidate a bunch of styles. I think it was a mistake for TW devs to discourage that pattern for so long.
by OptionOfT | 2025-08-29 21:25:06+00:00
They also have this weird full disk encryption that doesn't validate that the boot partition is compromised, allowing exploits like this: https://forums.spacerex.co/t/bounty-first-person-to-share-ho...

This breaks both the 'store key locally' and the KMIP setup.

And for their file-based encryption you cannot change the password. You need to create a new folder with a new password and copy all files over.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-08-29 21:25:23+00:00
And I'd reinforce that to say that you can do the same thing with software, and small IT build-outs.

Monolith platforms right now are more unpopular than perhaps they've ever been. Businesses in your area would LOVE to not be saddled to the monstrous site-builders and corporate-focused clouds that don't fit their businesses. If you want to make a good living, get out there and network with folks who run businesses in your community. I make a solid side-income doing IT for businesses in my area, just easy stuff like setting up WiFi services that they can rely on, managing on-site POS systems, printer ink, that sort of shit. I did the same thing at a previous job and now I do it for a handful of businesses near me. I don't make a ton of money but I think I could scale this up if I really wanted to, I'm just happy with it where it is and want the reliable salary of my WFH programming job too, and a lot of this stuff I also manage with automation.

There's a lot of money to be made in small IT/Software/Games. It takes more legwork but it's far more rewarding IMHO.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-29 21:25:27+00:00
> many philosophers

If only this was the stuff humans wasted their energy on not shooting explosives to improve their ego. :-)

> If humans never even developed, many philosophers would say the concepts of "number" and "7" and "star" would not exist.

Yes, I'm in the camp that thinks this is just plain wrong.

> abstract mathematical concepts are more privileged than physical categories like stars.

I agree to that.

> I can't even tell if you're arguing one side or the other

Sorry, if I was unclear. You wrote:

> Do or can concepts and categories exist without the beings that create them?

This takes it a priori, that the categories are created by the beings. If this is true, then I think by definition this categories can't precede the beings. That's why I wrote "of course not". When things are created by beings, they don't precede them, when they are not, they do.

What I already disagree with is what you already implied as a given. Honestly I don't even know how to argue for that, because this is what I think is part of the definition of the concepts and categories. When I coin some term it always happens in reaction to things I perceived with my senses. So given my senses don't lie to me, of course this is outside of me.

There are also things that are in fact invented by humans, for example color names. This doesn't mean that colors don't exist independently, but the exact boundary is arbitrary.

There are also concepts where I think they can be both. For example beauty. When applied to skin or shape, these are just invented, but the beauty of complexity or completeness exists outside of us. And beauty in general only exists as it points as to a thing that exists independently of us.
by spectraldrift | 2025-08-29 21:25:49+00:00
I agree with your sentiment, but what you're referring to is "I'm not good at this task yet" which is different from "I am inherently incapable/inferior". The first can motivate, the second does not- this is supported by a large body of pedagogical research.

https://opentext.wsu.edu/theoreticalmodelsforteachingandrese...
by JimmyBuckets | 2025-08-29 21:26:11+00:00
This makes me sad. Please don't speak to people like this. The small pieces of humanity that people sincerely share are about the only thing that it is worth living for. What a dark world we would live in when our public sphere is filled with insincerity. I can't infer anything about you from a single comment but it must be incredibly isolating and lonely to talk to you when you are in this mindset. I can see your good intentions but you have communicated a sadness and defensiveness that presents cynicism as truth.
by surprisetalk | 2025-08-29 21:26:50+00:00
Thanks!

I normally don't publish sappy essays like this, but I wanted to try sharing a common experience of rejection with a loud call for optimism and self-growth. I'm still learning how to be an authentic/vulnerable person, and I may have missed the mark

I like myself now. I really do. But sometimes that old self-doubt comes roaring back and I have to beat it down with a stick. You're totally right -- internet strangers cannot beat those feelings down for me.

By the time I published this, I was already back in a great headspace and moving on to the next thing :)

My hope is that somebody reads the essay and grows 1% more motivated to grab a stick and beat down their own self-doubts. I'll be sure to put that front-and-center in future essays
by mierz00 | 2025-08-29 21:26:55+00:00
I wouldn’t call 2020 that long ago. But you’re right my main mistake was not going with an online bank at the time.

That being said, French administration sucks overall. The amount of paperwork required is insane.

Like the time my wife and I got married. Her paperwork was straightforward however I was born in a different country to my nationalities. This just did not compute for them. 10 months later including travelling overseas to get the documents, they call my wife to tell her they lost our file and we need to start again!

Haha the thought of bulldozing the town hall came to mind. Luckily they found them not long after.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-29 21:26:55+00:00
Yes - my data, not your data. You stay away from my data. I stay away from your data. I don't care about your data. But I do want them to train on my data. And to serve me better. Was disappointed that they didn't do that already.

But now you gave me ideas. ;-) Yeah - I think ideally we should go further, much further. Internet was not built by po-faced, lemon-sucking prudes, tut-tut-ing about everything and anything. It was built by happy-go-lucky, live-and-let live, altruistic mildly autistic nerds. It was permission-less, one didn't need to ask anyone in order to do anything, and that's why it lived. Whereas many other networks and protocols, technically more sophisticated, but with a fatal flaw that a gatekeeper with the power to say "NO" was built into them - just died off. Wish people went back to the original permission-less Net. That people tore down all manner of laws making moving bits around illegal, used to jail humans for crimes of reading, copying and writing data.
by randall | 2025-08-29 21:27:07+00:00
meta was a weird place for a while. because of psc (the performance rating stuff) being so important… a public post could totally demoralize a team because if a legend like carmack thinks that your project is a waste of resources, how is that going to look on your performance review?

impact is facebook for “how useful is this to the company” and its an explicit axis of judgement.
by jameshart | 2025-08-29 21:27:07+00:00
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258953702...

Estimated impacts, to be sure, will take time for actual studies. But the activities USAID was responsible for were far more than just ‘the bare minimum’ to provide cover.
by wrp | 2025-08-29 21:27:16+00:00
I read once that the general attitude of the group was that their publications were not meant to be widely read, but just to provide the foundation for better expository work.

I also heard that part of the bad reputation that Bourbaki got was due to their being used in graduate education, despite warnings that they weren't suitable. In the 1950s/60s, there was a lack of good graduate texts. Of course, then Serge Lang came along...
by roadside_picnic | 2025-08-29 21:27:50+00:00
> the coding assistant interview focused on writing (what I felt was) an insane volume of code in a short period of time.

I had a bunch of these my last round of interviews, and am not convinced most companies even know what they want from these or how to assess. In the majority of cases it was clear to me the interviewers never even read the code I had submitted.

As an example, one company wanted a full AI Question/Answer system for large code projects using RAG to work on an arbitrarily large code base with an eval suite to go with it and also an API endpoint that could be called to automate asking of questions. You only had 24 hours to complete the assignment from receipt.

It was clear even before this that the company was likely not a good match, but I wanted to implement it for fun anyway. I'd already built all of this in production at a previous job (though it took weeks, which still felt pretty fast) so I knew how to approach it. Got it all done in time, met all acceptance criteria, had it so the entire thing could be run with one line of code (including building the RAG system, running evaluations, starting the webserver for the running API endpoint)... and rejected with no feedback a week later.

The trouble with asking people to write massive amounts of code in short periods of time is that you actually have to review it. I also have to say, despite the competitiveness, I was pretty unimpressed with the technical skills of the people on these teams (mostly smaller AI startups for me). It takes a pretty skilled engineer to assess the quality of a code base in such a short period of time and these teams did not seem like that had a lot of extra time on their hands.
by thefourthchime | 2025-08-29 21:27:55+00:00
I think most commentators here are missing the point that doing the "simplest" thing doesn't mean doing the hackiest, quickest thing.

The simplest thing can be very difficult to do. It require thought and understanding the system, which is what he says at the very beginning. But I think most people read the headline and just started spewing personal grievances.
by postquantumfax | 2025-08-29 21:28:20+00:00
If icann sells www as a tld domain then your use of www as a machine name you may refer to unqualified is a risk because virtually every piece of software in the world respects public issuance until you delete it all if you can.

The DNS naming confusion was largely dealt with by having a small number of TLDs and rarely referring to complex things like partially specified subdomains, but every once in a while a fool named their machine com, org, or net. (Though these as subdomains were far more toxic.)
by quectophoton | 2025-08-29 21:28:22+00:00
I agree with you, generally you can expect good faith to be returned with good faith (but here I want to make heavy emphasis that I only agree on the judge part iff good faith can be assumed and the judge is informed enough to actually be able to make an informed decision).

But not everyone thinks that's the purpose of robots.txt. Example, quoting Wikipedia[1] (emphasis mine):

> indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the website they are allowed to visit.

Quoting the linked `web robots` page[2]:

> An Internet bot, web robot, robot, or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) on the Internet, usually with the intent to imitate human activity, such as messaging, on a large scale. [...] The most extensive use of bots is for web crawling, [...]

("usually" implying that's not always the case; "most extensive use" implying it's not the only use.)

Also a quick HN search for "automated robots.txt"[3] shows that a few people disagree that it's only for crawlers. It seems to be only a minority, but the search results are obviously biased towards HN users, so it could be different outside HN.

Besides all this, there's also the question of whether web scraping (not crawling) should also be subject to robots.txt or not; where "web scraping" includes any project like "this site has useful info but it's so unusable that I made a script so I can search it from my terminal, and I cache the results locally to avoid unnecessary requests".

The behavior of alternative viewers like Nitter could also be considered web scraping if they don't get their info from an API[4], and I don't know if I'd consider Nitter the bad actor here.

But yeah, like I said I agree with your comment and your interpretation, but it's not the only interpretation of what robots.txt is meant for.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot

[3]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=automated%20robo...

[4]: I don't know how Nitter actually works or where does it get its data from, I just mention it so it's easier to explain what I mean by "alternative viewer".
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-29 21:28:40+00:00
Well, your post escalated to the broad claim that I responded to.

You didn't just disagree with AI crawler attestation: you're saying that nobody should distinguish earnest users from everything else because they should bear the cost of serving both, which necessarily entails bad traffic and incidental DoS.

Once again, services like CloudFlare exist because a cache isn't sufficient to deal with arbitrary traffic, and the scale of modern abuse is so large that only a few megacorps can provide the service that people want.
by hinkley | 2025-08-29 21:29:00+00:00
I often write those sorts of tools iteratively.

By the time you’ve done something five times, it’s probably part of your actual process, and you should start treating it as normal instead of exceptional. Even if admitting so feels like a failure.

So I staple something together that works for the exact situation, then start removing the footguns I’m likely to hit, then I start shopping it to other people I see eye to eye with, fix the footguns they run into. Then we start trying to make it into an actual project, and end game is for it to be a mandatory part of our process once the late adopters start to get onboard.
by muppetman | 2025-08-29 21:29:17+00:00
I have this in my Apache conf for a site I don't want indexed/archived etc.

Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nositelinkssearchbox, nosnippet, notranslate, noimageindex"

Of course, only the beeping Internet Archive totally ignored it and scraped my site. And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it.

It seems to mostly work, I also have Anubis in front of it now to keep the scrapers at bay.

(It's a personal diary website, started in 2000 before the term "blog" existed [EDIT: Not true - see below comment]. I know it's public content, I just don't want it searchable public)
by bwy | 2025-08-29 21:29:19+00:00
From https://nshipster.com/uncertainty/ recently: "Working in software, the most annoying part of reaching Senior level is having to say “it depends” all the time. Much more fun getting to say “let’s ship it and iterate” as Staff or “that won’t scale” as a Principal."

IIUC, author is a Staff SWE, so this tracks.

See also "Worse is better" which has been debated a million times by now.
by int_19h | 2025-08-29 21:29:31+00:00
If you're asking why there's no manual safety, it's because the modern doctrine for handguns says that it is unnecessary, on the basis that the handgun should either be secure in the holster or - if drawn - ready to fire. A properly secure holster prevents trigger from being pulled even accidentally, so if the gun is impossible to fire at all without pulling the trigger (as e.g. the Glock design achieves for striker-fired guns), the holster is deemed sufficient, and manual safety is considered a misfeature that doesn't add safety but makes deploying the gun more error-prone.

FWIW this isn't even a new take. Many popular DA/SA guns cannot be put on safe at all when they're not cocked, even though they can be fired through double action - logic here being the same, between heavy trigger pull and hammer block it just cannot fire without a trigger pull.

That said I personally don't agree with this analysis. Or, more accurately, I believe that the increased risk from not being able to use the gun when it's needed is not properly balanced against the increased risk from making the gun easier to fire, especially in applications where handgun is not the primary weapon (which is almost always the case for the military).
by like_any_other | 2025-08-29 21:29:39+00:00
More and more it seems that a country is fundamentally not allowed to say "no" to immigration. Even the ~1 million/year for the last 25 years [1] that the US has admitted legally is deemed too restrictive, so those who try to enforce immigration law are attacked. No position short of "America belongs to everyone" is permitted, no matter what voters says.

I wonder if experts will emerge to call this inciting "stochastic terrorism" [2]. I won't be holding my breath.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_immigration_stat...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
by runjake | 2025-08-29 21:29:46+00:00
If I was in the US and the state actor was not Israeli, I would contact my local FBI office and give them details.

They will be kinda rude and very short with you on the phone, but nonetheless, they will gather information from you, which will go into their systems and get paid attention to at some level. They seem especially interested in CN/NK/RU/IR actors, obviously.

If they were Israeli, I'd keep my mouth shut because I don't want to get in the middle of that, nor get on any radars.
by arjie | 2025-08-29 21:30:05+00:00
The dream is real, man. If you want open content on the Internet, it's never been a better time. My blog is open to all - machine or man. And it's hosted on my home server next to me. I don't see why anyone would bother trying to distinguish humans from AI. A human hitting your website too much is no different from an AI hitting your website too much.

I have a robots.txt that tries to help bots not get stuck in loops, but if they want to, they're welcome to. Let the web be open. Slurp up my stuff if you want to.

Amazonbot seems to love visiting my site, and it is always welcome.
by tuatoru | 2025-08-29 21:30:36+00:00
There are a lot of jobs which don't require meticulous accuracy - coming up with marketing plans, press releases, writing HR policies, reading and summarising reports, etc.

Even in accounting I am sure you could use AI at times to help write or read your emails or summarise legislation or IRS rulings. Have it drive Excel or your financial systems directly? No, not yet.
by jameshart | 2025-08-29 21:30:58+00:00
And the elected leader of the US was also supportive of Elon’s ‘gesture’ so I guess that settles it - Jewish people worldwide, as embodied through the representative voices of their elected leaders, must agree that it was not a Nazi salute. And that firmly settles it because nobody else gets to have any opinion about it because Nazis never bothered anyone else.

/s, just in case.
by Wytwwww | 2025-08-29 21:31:04+00:00
> he's a friend to the Jewish community

So? Does that means nobody else is allowed to have an opinion about the salute that he made. Sure he's pro Israel, that's not uncommon at all amongst the far right these days.

> who might have been offended by his gesture

What about the people who seem to be highly offended by people who have been offended by his gesture. What do you call them?
by int_19h | 2025-08-29 21:31:14+00:00
SIG USA didn't have much of a reputation to begin with, to be honest. Some of us still remember the SIG 556R debacle, and that wasn't the first time they shipped a broken gun either.

The only real surprise here is that they managed to sell this broken gun to the US government, despite Glock of all things being in the running. And that it took so long for the issue to even register.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-29 21:31:25+00:00
> The man is single-handedly eliminating racially polarized voting in this country.

Ok, so you're just trolling. Fine. It is not funny.

> Anything that doesn't put you in the untenable position of arguing that the non-whites in the U.S. aren't as smart as you in knowing their own interests.

I have six months of evidence and I think that is enough. I'll happily collect another 6 months and we'll see how you are going to twist to justify whatever they'll do between now and then. Prediction: it won't be good. Best of luck.
by krapp | 2025-08-29 21:32:41+00:00
>>Im against ICE going for hardworking mexican immigrants - they have done nothing wrong but working hard! Islam though- has shown itself to be incompatible with western values and democracy wherever it incarnates- everything else can stay- but that religion and its anti-progressive, culture relativists supporters have to go.

"Anti-democratic immigrants" who are, if I interpret your (now flagged, preserved here) comment correctly, all Muslims? yes?

In other words, you believe that the practice of Islam in any Western country should be a crime and the police should be empowered to arrest and deport any Muslim they encounter? And that this is in line with Western democratic ideals and values?
by botswana99 | 2025-08-29 21:32:49+00:00
Many data teams often find themselves as 'tool jockeys' instead of becoming true engineers. They primarily learn some company data, and then rely on drag-and-drop or YML configuration functionality within the constraints of the tool's environment.

Their organization often insists they must use standard tools, and their idea of a good job is that the task works fine within their personal version. No automatic testing, no automated deployment, no version control, and handcrafted environments. And then they get yelled at when things break and yelled at for taking too long. And most DEs want to quit the field after a few years.

The real question is not that DE and software engineering are converging. It's why most DEs don't have the self-respect and confidence to engineer systems so that their lives don't suck.