MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-04 18:37:21+00:00
> sufficiently advanced technology might make the construction of probes trivial, so that it has no great significance to its creators

The point is they bothered constructing probes.

My cat isn't constructing space probes. If he up and began doing so this evening, I would be able to conclude certain things about him.

> would be like asking America to account for a discarded Coke can

You're saying you can't conclude anything useful about American culture and civilisation from a discarded Coke can? (As well as the act of casually discarding it.)

> Aliens are completely unknowable, that's the thing most fiction trips up on

Aliens, yes. Aliens who make contact with us, no. The latter is a subset that requires certain attributes and heavily implies others.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-04 18:37:31+00:00
I like self-checkout on balance. The stores have a lot more self-checkout stations than they had cashiers. Most of the time I'm buying less than a dozen or so items. The work of having to scan and bag them myself is hardly more than taking them out of the cart. It's way faster than waiting in a queue behind someone who's apparently buying groceries for two weeks for a family of 8 and then has several dozen coupons and finally is writing a check. Or waiting behind several such people.

I guess if I were buying two weeks of groceries for a family of 8 I might prefer the cashier to scan them and the bag boy to bag them for me.
by watwut | 2025-08-04 18:37:33+00:00
In that system, demanding bachelor is the opportunity cost. Because basically there should be a trade school for that.

Like a nurse - before you would go to nursing high school and become qualified nurse there. The new demand to have bachelor made studies longer and did not brought higher quality nor was needed. Same with kindergarten teachers. Same with basic administration etc.

What actually happened was whole bunch of positions that did not required university suddenly formally requiring it. And half baked school programs to get you diploma. And 40-50 years old people going to diploma mills so that they can be formally better competitive apply to positions that required only high school before.
by danaris | 2025-08-04 18:37:37+00:00
But Tesla has sufficient power that they do not have the luxury of pleading incompetence when things like this happen.

This is both because such incompetence costs people's lives, and because they have enough money that they could definitely hire more or better people to re-check and add redundant safety features into their products.

The problem is, they do not want any accountability for claiming that their cars are "self-driving", or for any of their other errors or willful endangerment of the public.
by grafmax | 2025-08-04 18:38:15+00:00
According to UNHCR, 22% of the world’s refugees are in refugee camps. Camps vary in their quality. And some are more or less closed than others.

Some refugees do live in inhuman conditions. Even if these conditions affected a majority of refugees, that doesn’t justify treating human beings this way.

All people have a right to due process. It’s a human right. Whether this or that government honors this right is a separate question.

We should be trying to emulate governments that honor human rights, not take our example from those that don’t.
by programmertote | 2025-08-04 18:38:39+00:00
It's okay to lose touch with former friends (that is, to not feel guilty). This is part of life and I'm always convinced that my friends, whom I lost contact with, will understand as well.

Plus, although we were friends at one point due to common interests, shared environment, etc., we grow up and apart. If chances collide, we will cross paths with some of them.

During my thirties, I felt a bit guilty about not keeping in touch with most of my friends from high school and college. As I reached mid-forties, I have learned to live with the above realization. I think I'd have a good chat with some of my old friends when I meet them by happenstance again.
by Einenlum | 2025-08-04 18:38:50+00:00
I'm quite surprised that the article doesn't mention Laravel.

PHP as a language? Definitely getting better but still not great. Doesn't support async, the stdlib is awful, data structures are quite rudimentary (no tuple, no list, no map, just a weird array type mixing maps and lists), the old extension system sucks.

But the ecosystem? Damn. I see many people here saying that Typescript is definitely the mature choice for the backend. Honestly, I wanted to believe it, but I disagree. The level of productivity with Laravel is absolutely insane. You have everything you need out of the box and you can launch something so fast it's almost unreal.

Typescript doesn't have that. Maybe it's because of a different mentality in this ecosystem (you should build your blocks yourself), but nothing comes close. The closest would be Adonisjs but it doesn't seem to gain traction.

You don't choose a language to build your web project. You choose a stack. A framework. I definitely prefer python but Django has way less features than Laravel and I don't really enjoy using it. Typescript on the backend was a thing I wanted to believe in (because sharing types between the front and back is a great idea), but I feel like I have to reinvent the wheel, or at least choose 20 different wheels to do something quite simple.

Is Ruby such a great language, or do people just love being productive with Rails? It seems to me that the usage of Ruby without Rails is quite low (I could be wrong).

People choose and stick with stacks, not just languages. And I couldn't find something equivalent to Laravel elsewhere. Give me an equally productive stack and I'll happily drop PHP.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-04 18:38:54+00:00
Linux desktop share is up 20-35% in the past year, depending on sourcing. Still only 5-6% total for US at least, but definitely a shift. MS is almost definitely making more money for o365 and Azure than Windows (though I don't follow shareholder releases).

From google's ai result Windows ($25b) is 1/2 the size of Office (54.9b) and 1/3 the size of Azure ($75b) in terms of revenue.

Windows is definitely not the cash cow for Microsoft it once was.
by godelski | 2025-08-04 18:38:59+00:00
So many people miss the point of tmux.

The only reason to still use tmux (or screen) is because you use remote sessions. All modern terminal emulators are already capable of doing tabs and panes (okay, maybe not sessions, but some can locally). If you're using tmux for this reason, stop. Go pick up a modern terminal like ghostty, Alacritty, or WezTerm.

But why tmux still exists today is because people are working on computers they aren't sitting in front of. Because I don't want to have to be running nohup or detaching, moving to the background, and resetting the session so error messages don't appear in my active instance. Hell, technically I can do this with vim and get something pretty similar to tmux by using the terminal. But that's a pain.

Tmux is for *terminals*
by recursivecaveat | 2025-08-04 18:39:53+00:00
More excels and more improvements to debugging excel please (:

The real super power to excel is you can see the data as it flows through the cells. Whenever I see a visual programming tool that is just a way to write a regular script by linking up a DAG I can't help but feel like they missed the point. Motivated non-programmers have been using COUNTIF, VLOOKUP and such since forever. They're not incapable of writing a textual program 1 statement at a time, it's just that most programming environments don't facilitate it.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-08-04 18:40:25+00:00
They obviously care about losing $300M.

Like, if they have a chance, they are going to keep $300M.

That is obvious.

OP's point is - it is not having any impact on Tesla's reckless decisions.

Stock price is #1 on the list of their concerns. FCF is somewhere much lower in the list.
by KomoD | 2025-08-04 18:40:25+00:00
> No, he (Matthew) opted everyone in by default

Now you're just lying.

I checked several of my Cloudflare sites and none have it enabled by default:

"No robots.txt file found. Consider enabling Cloudflare managed robots.txt or generate one for your website"

"A robots.txt was found and is not managed by Cloudflare"

"Instruct AI bot traffic with robots.txt" disabled
by munificent | 2025-08-04 18:40:51+00:00
I don't think this analogy holds. Corollas are popular because they are good cars. People make individual choices to buy them and are generally satisfied with that choice long term. Corollas are not a regretful product choice.

PHP is more like a Lime scooter. Trivially easy to start with, gets going quickly, significant chance of causing brain damage.
by junto | 2025-08-04 18:40:54+00:00
This is very true. I have confidence in a car driver that has many years of experience, acts consistently and rationally, does not overly hesitate and is confident in their capabilities. I do not trust a driver that appears drunk at the wheel. I would argue that the Fed is the last bastion of sanity in the madhouse. When that goes and no longer acts impartially, the drunk driver is the default.
by TZubiri | 2025-08-04 18:41:09+00:00
"I'm not sure, honestly. It depends on whether you want the fix being done by a resource you consider to be a cost center or a value center. The former will do the cleanup job for bottom dollar. The latter would team up with Karen to amplify the project's impact while cleaning it up."

This is not the first time I see developers berating non-technical users, and I like the thesis that they will function as cost-centers that will do a cleanup job instead of teaming up with the user. It's like they will attempt to "do the work" in a binary fashion, making the "correct" choices, often focused on technical factors, like which library to use or what algorithm, instead of focusing on the business domain.

I also see this attitude when facing technical issues or bad code as if it wasn't our job to deal with bad code (and as if non-bad code existed)
by ben_w | 2025-08-04 18:41:38+00:00
> I would like to see real-world examples. Because at least in my lifetime there have been zero consequences for people in power.

Liberia (1980 coup & 1989–2003 wars): Americo-Liberian elite overthrown by indigenous-led coups; cyclical elite purges, executions, and exiles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Liberian_coup_d%27état

Argentine Military Junta (1983): generals faced prosecution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_the_Juntas

Philippines – Marcos Family (1986): Ousted by "People Power"; Ferdinand Marcos fled, family assets frozen, political exile: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1986/06/17/Judge-orders-Marcos-...

Romania – Ceaușescu Regime (1989): Ceaușescu and wife executed after rapid regime collapse; party elite purged: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_execution_of_Nicolae...

Rwanda (1994): Hutu elite responsible for genocide overthrown by Tutsi-led RPF, the attempt to seek justice overwhelmed their legal system so hard that it was itself criticised by Amnesty International: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide#Aftermath; internationally, there were also trials and convictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Tribuna...

Iraq (2003)/Libya (2011): External forces happened, Saddam Hussein got hanged, Muammar Gaddafi's death was the kind of thing people make laws to stop soldiers from doing.

And this year, that health insurance CEO who got assassinated, didn't they get their own legal strategy carved onto the bullets or something like that?
by shreezus | 2025-08-04 18:41:50+00:00
I own a Tesla, and here's my take on the biggest software issue:

Normal consumers don't understand the difference between "Autopilot" and "FSD".

FSD will stop at intersections/lights etc - Autopilot is basically just cruise control and should generally only be used on highways.

They're activated in the same manner (FSD replaces Autopilot if you pay for the upgrade or $99/month subscription), and again for "normal" consumers it's not always entirely clear.

A friend of mine rented a Tesla recently and was in for a surprise when the vehicle did not automatically stop at intersections on Autopilot. He said the previous one he rented had FSD enabled, and he didn't understand the difference.

IMO Tesla just needs to phase out 2019 AP entirely and just give everyone some version of FSD (even if it's limited), or geofence AP to highways only.
by zarzavat | 2025-08-04 18:42:05+00:00
If you allow Googlebot to crawl your website and train Gemini, but you don't allow smaller AI companies to do the same thing, then you're contributing to Google's hegemony. Given that AI is likely to be an increasingly important part of society in the future, that kind of discrimination is anti-social. I don't want a future where everything is run by Google even more than it currently is.

Crawling is legal. Training is presumably legal. Long may the little guys do both.
by shagie | 2025-08-04 18:42:09+00:00
Mastercard and Visa have rather corse information about the transactions.

They've got the credit card number, the merchant name, the time, and the total amount of the transaction.

They do not have line item level filtering of a transaction. Remember those old carbon paper credit card thingies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter - that's all that's needed and all they get. Similarly, the credit card terminals where the merchant enters the amount, swipes the card (or reads the chip) and that's it is sufficient.

Mastercard and Visa would only be able to say "that merchant" not "that product." Filtering based on products and if it's legal there needs to be done by the merchant. Mastercard cannot check to see if someone is selling liquor to an underage customer... but if a merchant is doing that, Mastercard may drop that merchant as one of their clients.

If Itch and Valve are unable to enforce Australia specific laws on their own storefront, Mastercard and Visa can only enforce it at the "this merchant isn't allowed to transact with our network."
by Havoc | 2025-08-04 18:42:32+00:00
Can't really blame them:

Housing unaffordable, pay-later bs, pervasive advertising, degree useless, family unaffordable, AI replacement, gig economy, social media dopamine nonsense, talk of another great conflict, national debt issues, climate change, weaponized media, offshoring, political polarization, lack of third place etc

Prior generations faced arguably bigger ticket challenges (stormy beaches in Normandy) but there is a relentlessness and pervasiveness to the problems now that I think may be new and cumulatively more psychologically impactful.
by 9rx | 2025-08-04 18:42:42+00:00
> Promising to be with someone forever

It was historically more of a family obligation than a promise.

We have made it more about individual choice in the intervening years, so you might see that as a promise, but these days it still isn't so much a promise to stay together, rather a promise with regards to how to deal with division down the road (e.g. promising to split the assets 50/50). Not staying together is the assumption.
by rendall | 2025-08-04 18:43:35+00:00
Elderly people, particularly but not only men, suffer social isolation and loneliness. It is a social problem across the developed world.

That's because people tend not to make new friends in middle age. That trend begins in the mid 20s.

No matter your age, learn the trick of making, and keeping, new friends. Of all ages, sexes, cultures, types. It is extremely vital to your mental and physical health.
by notahacker | 2025-08-04 18:44:50+00:00
The modernized "commie block" sounds like the average London street, except with fewer nationalities represented. The extent of the class system in the UK gets exaggerated. We had some very serious people care about it a lot in the not too distant past, but as others have pointed out nominal social class isn't actually coupled that closely to incomes nowadays, and ethnic and regional identities and are also typically stronger and associated with at least as much stereotyping, and it's not like many other countries don't have similar stereotypes based on occupations/accents/tastes/incomes that map neatly to 'social class' whether they use that term or not.

Looks like the urban/rural divide in incomes and politics is actually stronger in quite a few ex-communist countries. Agree it would be interesting to see to what extent that's represented genetically, though I guess the picture is complicated by the amount of ethnolinguistic minorities eastern Europe has.
Ask HN: People who have backed Moth Fund, what has your experience been like?
by hedgehog0 | 2025-08-04 18:45:13+00:00
Hi Everyone,

Recently I have come across the Moth Fund [0], which to me seems like an interesting VC firm, since it seems to be managed by one person. The feeling or the vibe conveyed by its website is also different from that of other VC firms. So I was wondering that for people whose companies have been supported and backed by Moth Fund, may I ask what's your experience is like?

Many thanks!

[0]: https://www.mothfund.com/
by imchillyb | 2025-08-04 18:45:28+00:00
Not OP, but…

Asking Google about one watt lasers inevitably produces junk that does not address the question at all.

Sifting and sorting through that junk is tiresome.

AI provides a succinct answer with as much depth is requested and can further clarify or expound on the original findings.

What’s not to like about such interactions? And, furthermore, how is the AI interaction in this case not objectively ‘better’ than a Google search?
by rawgabbit | 2025-08-04 18:45:49+00:00
Please elaborate on this quote:

Regional religiousness shows higher genetic correlations with personality (openness and conscientiousness) and less with SES and health traits than political preferences do, which implies additional dimensions of geographic clustering beyond high versus low SES.

I interpret this is as saying while those with low social economic status vote Labour and higher SES vote Conservative, social economic status does not correlate with religiosity -- instead regliosity correlates to the BIG five personality traits. Is this correct? Can you expand on this?
by skeledrew | 2025-08-04 18:46:31+00:00
I agree that devs (and everyone else) are fundamentally lazy. I don't agree with the scared. People would rather spend time on things that bring them joy, and that thing which made them excited to work with Company X might be no more, or a whole other thing altogether, 6 months later. But they still need that paycheck, so they do what they can to offset the increasing pain and displeasure so they can continue.

The characterization of visual workflow tools is also an incidental affair: there are commercial tools, and there are open source tools. Just depends on the kind of support one wants, and many devs would love some decent support when some component breaks or something's missing, hence the more likely adoption of a commercial solution.

And in the end it's also just the next evolution of software development tools that's being sought. We moved from flipping switches, to boxes of punch cards, to Assembly, to C-like, to Python-like. We're looking for the next form, and 2-D node-like programming does seem an improvement over 1-D text, as text was an improvement over reams of punched paper. And there will always be those who continue to enjoy doing Assembly, even though the majority moved on to higher level languages, which will also be the case for the current and next level tools.
by shagie | 2025-08-04 18:46:37+00:00
... and if Valve and Itch had blocked content that was illegal in Australia before Collective Shout weaponized the Australian laws, we wouldn't have heard about it beyond it showing up in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_in_...

From the Valve rules:

6. Content that violates the laws of any jurisdiction in which it will be available
by Mayo0r | 2025-08-04 18:46:48+00:00
Location: Nigeria Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Phyton, Panda, SQL, MongoDB, MS Excel, SPSS Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R4UpZL8bNE-kgMH3OQ04f4hdkUN... Email: oluyolekmlive@gmail.com
by altairprime | 2025-08-04 18:46:59+00:00
This article is missing something important: businesses are adopting these services in order to lower the required skill level of their headcount roles. If they can outsource the work to a worse product that is barely fit for purposes while reducing the pay and tier of the headcount associated with maintaining it, then that’s a total win so long as flexibility and resilience are lower priority than increasing profits by replacing a high-skilled programmer with a low-skilled worker.
by michaelm244 | 2025-08-04 18:47:09+00:00
Comulate | Senior Engineer (3+ YoE) | ONSITE in San Francisco, CA

We're building automation software for the $7T insurance industry, accelerated by AI. Seed stage in terms of headcount (~ 20 people) but Series B in terms of business traction (+ cash-flow positive). We've intentionally stayed under the radar.

- Product has caused customers to literally cry tears of joy

- Experienced eng team from Airbnb / Brex / LiveRamp

- Stack: TS, Postgres, React, GraphQL, and Next.js

Apply here: https://comulate.com/careers
by duxup | 2025-08-04 18:47:26+00:00
The GOP in the US often would be upset by federal rules and involvement in state level issues. Their rallying cry was "states rights" arguing that given states should be able to make decisions themselves without the federal government telling them what to do.

Often those complaints involved arguing that the federal rules put forth really have / should have nothing to do with the funds in question.

Sometimes I think they were right. But the truth is the GOP has no real ideology they'd stick to these days, they're happy to do what they decry, in spades.

Here they are happy to inject support for Israel in disaster relief funds ...
by adrian_b | 2025-08-04 18:47:33+00:00
In the previous years, I did not have many problems with Cloudflare.

However, in the last few months, Cloudflare has become increasingly annoying. I suspect that they might have implemented some "AI" "threat" detection, which gives much more false positives than before.

For instance, this week I have frequently been blocked when trying to access the home page of some sites where I am a paid subscriber, with a completely cryptic message "The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.".

The only "action" that I have done was opening the home page of the site, where I would then normally login with my credentials.

Also, during the last few days I have been blocked from accessing ResearchGate. I may happen to hit a few times per day some page on the ResearchGate site, while searching for various research papers, which is the very purpose of that site. Therefore I cannot understand what stupid algorithm is used by Cloudflare, that it declares that such normal usage is a "threat".

The weird part is that this blocking happens only if I use Firefox (Linux version). With another browser, i.e. Vivaldi or Chrome, I am not blocked.

I have no idea whether Cloudflare specifically associates Firefox on Linux with "threats" or this happens because whatever flawed statistics Cloudflare has collected about my accesses have all recorded the use of Firefox.

In any case, Cloudflare is completely incapable of discriminating between normal usage of a site by a human (which may be a paying customer) and "threats" caused by bots or whatever "threatening" entities might exist according to Cloudflare.

I am really annoyed by the incompetent programmers who implement such dumb "threat detection solutions", which can create major inconveniences for countless people around the world, while the incompetents who are the cause of this are hiding behind their employer corporation and never suffer consequences proportional to the problems that they have caused to others.