MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-08-15 20:39:13+00:00
In Pakistan, the military dictatorship in ~2002 decided they wanted to jump start academic research. The scientist who led this effort had the "brilliant" idea that the government pays professors per published paper, but decided there was no need to restrict this to publishing in high quality journals. Simultaneously, promotions were dependent on number of published papers.

The end result was natural. People first started published in really low quality journals, then started plagiarizing high papers from others and submitting in lower quality journals. Then got smart, and created their own "fake" journals to publish their "fake" papers in. At the forefront of this corruption was the scientist himself [1]. Things have become dire. Recently, a famous university in Pakistan offered a candidate professor, a contract stating that they would hire him if the published ~10 papers a month. And the government money from that would be his salary.

The point of the story is that fraudulent science is not often not just because people are "evil". It can emerge from bad incentives set up by governments or larger institutions.

[1] https://loksujag.com/story/bentham-science-publishers-scam
by dkarl | 2025-08-15 20:39:43+00:00
Oh, yeah, if you don't specifically train to be a teacher, you won't qualify. I'm just saying that (AFAIK, and from a specifically Texas perspective) most people who intend to be art or music teachers get a BFA. Many of my high school teachers earned degrees specific to their subject, like B.S. in Chemistry, B.A. in History, B.A. in Literature, while concurrently completing the coursework that qualified them for teaching. You don't have to be an education major. Most state universities also have programs for people who have a bachelors degree to complete the requirements for teaching, too, and I think those programs qualify for financial aid even if they don't lead to an additional degree.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-08-15 20:39:58+00:00
> It should always be with people doing real positive-sum work, not those with money

I don't like the conclusion, but I've convinced myself that curating and selecting what is worth doing is actually the real work. Picking where the bridge is to go is more important than building it. So allocating money is the important work. It feels icky to me... but also inescapable.
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-08-15 20:40:47+00:00
> I didn't even mention that it's free

It depends. If you're fine browsing torrent sites, choosing a download, loading in into your client, waiting for it to download, then plugging your laptop into your TV. Sure it's free.

If you're out to recreate a better streaming experience then it's certainly not free. Software licenses, server hardware, electricity costs, Usenet access, etc. Not to mention the time/effort to getting everything running so smoothly to the point that it is effortless to request and then watch.

I mention this because for a certain crowd (myself and likely many people on HN) it's not about being free. It's about not having to fight crappy software. Or not paying for the privilege to have ads shoved down your throat and being tracked. Not needing to remember which app Mr. Robot is currently on or having it suddenly vanish due to some licensing expiration. The list goes on.

Do I still pay for content instead of the tools to circumvent it? Sure! My city has a huge video rental store. It's super fun to go browse, find weird stuff, and help out a local business. The owner(s) are clearly huge movie nerds and seem to have spent a good amount of their earnings on some very cool movie props they put in the store. I love it.
by kstrauser | 2025-08-15 20:41:07+00:00
I agree completely. And besides, I like looking at pretty websites and their colors and static images and fonts. I appreciate the visual design. I do not want to be assaulted with blinky animations siphoning off my concentration.

(Nor do I want to have to run malware in my browser, but I think that's a separate argument from the accessibility one.)
by sillystuff | 2025-08-15 20:41:18+00:00
I think you meant to say /dev/random, not /dev/urandom.

/dev/random, on linux used to stall waiting for entropy from sources of randomness like network jitter, mouse movement, keyboard typing. /dev/urandom has always been fast on Linux.

Today, linux /dev/random mainly uses an RNG after initial seeding. The BSDs always did this. On my laptop, I get over 500MB/s (kernel 6.12) .

IIRC, on modern linux kernels, /dev/urandom is now just an alias to /dev/random for backward compatibility.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-08-15 20:41:30+00:00
Many of those games mysteriously fail to work for me, almost like Proton has a problem on my system in general and I am unable to figure it out. However, in the past I got games that are made for Windows to work better on WINE than on Windows. One of those games is Starcraft 2 when it came out. On Windows it would always freeze in one movie/sequence of the single player campaign, which made it actually unplayable on Windows, while after some trial and error, I managed to get a fully working game on GNU/Linux, and was able to finish the campaign.

This goes to show, that the experience with Proton and different hardware and whatever it is in system configuration is highly individual, but also, that games can indeed run better using WINE or Proton than on the system they were made for.
by dvdkon | 2025-08-15 20:42:07+00:00
It's nice to have a (niche) community around open source HW, but I'd argue it's even better when that community's ideals and ethics can spread to more people through OSHW business, not to mention the benefits flowing back to the community like e.g. cheaper parts.

No one's taking away the community right now, but if the business around it is disappearing, that's also a shame.
by sa46 | 2025-08-15 20:42:16+00:00
Isn't gettimeofday implemented with vDSO to avoid kernel context switching (and therefore, most of the overhead)?

My understanding is that using tsc directly is tricky. The rate might not be constant, and the rate differs across cores. [1]

[1]: https://www.pingcap.com/blog/how-we-trace-a-kv-database-with...
by const_cast | 2025-08-15 20:42:43+00:00
Not before doing anything with it, just before processing it for specific business use cases like targeting.

Running a forumn is fine, and I don't care if someone inputs a fake SSN on a forumn post.

I DO care if someone inputs a fake SSN on a financial form I provided, and it is actually my responsibility to prevent that. That's what KYC is and more.
by NoGravitas | 2025-08-15 20:43:14+00:00
Arthur Waite's "The Book of Ceremonial Magic" is an interesting look at what magic qualifies as white and black magic. For Waite, white magic is that aimed at mystical union with God, so essentially synonymous with Christian mysticism. None of the ceremonial magic he discusses qualifies, and he considered anything practical other than "The Cloud of Unknowing" to be unnecessary and probably useless in that direction. Most of the Renaissance and early modern books he discusses are mostly or all black magic, though some of them include information on contacting angels, which he considers neutral.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-15 20:44:08+00:00
[P.S.] I realize I left off an important part: If the regular version did not already "reason"... Why would we ever expect this kind of tweak to change that, and bright forth real reasoning?

The core algorithm hasn't really changed, we're just changing the (hidden) document so that it's a different style with a greater density of clues, so that it can more-effectively bullshit [0] output humans won't notice and dislike.

[0] Creating something that "sounds good" without any particular awareness or care about truth or falsehood.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-08-15 20:44:13+00:00
Where I am it's kind of in between the two I think. People are not normally shoplifting nutritional staples, which are fairly cheap as far as it goes. It is more like "treats," often for their children, things like name brand cereal, pop tarts, cake mix. And then things that are excluded from SNAP like rotisserie chicken, alcohol, pet food, vitamins, dish & laundry detergent. And of course baby formula when possible. But that has been locked up for decades now.
by kazinator | 2025-08-15 20:44:19+00:00
The intuition behind it is that when we take batches of samples from some arbitrarily shaped distribution, and we summarize the information by looking at the mean values of the batches of samples, we find that those mean values are moving away from the arbitrarily shaped distribution. The larger are the batches, the more those means approach a normal distribution.

In other words, the means of large batches of samples from some funny shaped distribution themselves constitute a sequence of numbers, and that sequence follow a normal distribution. Or closer and closer to one the larger the batches are.

This observation legitimizes our uses of statistical inference tools derived from the normal distribution, like confidence intervals, provided we are working with large enough batches of samples.
by kelnos | 2025-08-15 20:44:30+00:00
That's true, but absent psychological manipulation or something truly devious and nefarious, a short text message is low risk, and is unlikely to open up a painful can of worms.

And I don't think the point of that statement was that you should be contacting anyone and everyone, just because they entered your mind. It's not saying you should get in touch to say hello to that abusive ex just because you thought about them. But firing off a quick text to someone you found interesting but lost touch with is pretty much always going to be harmless.
by mithametacs | 2025-08-15 20:45:26+00:00
I literally did the thing you’re not supposed to do.

my psych kept giving me everything by Adderall. So I went to one of those online doctors and got Adderall through her.

Then I just told my psychiatrist that I have Adderall prescription and she took it over.

For the record, she’s actually really reasonable and I like her but very conservative about the stimulants. Which when I finally got them were a revelation. Medication that actually works.
by kgwgk | 2025-08-15 20:45:42+00:00
The following code essentially redoes what the code up to the first conf_interval block does there. Which one is more clear may be debatable but it's shorter by a factor of two and faster by a factor of ten (45 seconds vs 4 for me).

sample_size <- 60 sample_meansB <- lapply(population_dataB, function(x){ t(apply(replicate(20000, sample(x, sample_size)), 2, function(x) c(sample_mean=mean(x), sample_sd=sd(x)))) }) lapply(sample_meansB, head) ## check first rows population_data_statsB <- lapply(population_dataB, function(x) c(population_mean=mean(x), population_sd=sd(x), n=length(x))) do.call(rbind, population_data_statsB) ## stats table cltB <- mapply(function(s, p) (s[,"sample_mean"]-p["population_mean"])/(p["population_sd"]/sqrt(sample_size)), sample_meansB, population_data_statsB) head(cltB) ## check first rows small_sample_size <- 6 repeated_samplesB <- lapply(population_dataB, function(x){ t(apply(replicate(10000, sample(x, small_sample_size)), 2, function(x) c(sample_mean=mean(x), sample_sd=sd(x)))) }) conf_intervalsB <- lapply(repeated_samplesB, function(x){ sapply(c(lower=0.025, upper=0.975), function(q){ x[,"sample_mean"]+qnorm(q)*x[,"sample_sd"]/sqrt(small_sample_size) })}) within_ci <- mapply(function(ci, p) (p["population_mean"]>ci[,"lower"]&p["population_mean"]<ci[,"upper"]), conf_intervalsB, population_data_statsB) apply(within_ci, 2, mean) ## coverage

One can do simple plots similar to the ones in that page as follows:

par(mfrow=c(2,3), mex=0.8) for (d in colnames(population_dataB)) plot(density(population_dataB[,d], bw="SJ"), main=d, ylab="", xlab="", las=1, bty="n") for (d in colnames(cltB)) plot(density(cltB[,d], bw="SJ"), main=d, ylab="", xlab="", las=1, bty="n") for (d in colnames(cltB)) { qqnorm(cltB[,d], main=d, ylab="", xlab="", las=1, bty="n"); qqline(cltB[,d], col="red") }
by Applejinx | 2025-08-15 20:46:56+00:00
No, they're echoing previous examples of people planning, by framing prompts and recursively designed prompts to incorporate what, in fairness, is a large database including the text of people planning.

It still matters that there's nobody in there. You're figuring out better ways to tap into the history of language-users having represented planning in language. As such, this seems a brittle way to represent 'planning'.
by cpursley | 2025-08-15 20:47:02+00:00
Fwiw, the date range part of this is the lowest quality, I even have an issue open: https://github.com/cpursley/livefilter/issues/2

In production code I'd do a couple passes and tell it to lean into more function head and guard matching, etc.

But it does compiles, and works: https://livefilter.fly.dev/todos?filters%5Bassigned_to%5D%5B...
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-08-15 20:47:19+00:00
i wish people would stop falling for non-profits.

Show me one company that hasn’t wasted 99% of its money after being around for more than two years. Most of the employees are young and spend their time virtue signaling. Eventually, they leave and talk about how disillusioned they are, realizing all the money was just vaporized. It’s all run by Boomers and Gen Xers, and it feels like a laundering scheme.
by tsimionescu | 2025-08-15 20:47:37+00:00
This is not about regular VS irregular, there are aspects of English spelling that are highly non-phonetic. It's not uncommon to have letters in words that are entirely irrelevant to the pronunciation. For example the spellings "programme" and "program" would be read the same by any English reader, and yet both persist in certain places. The s in island is completely unnecessary.

Also, the same English word can be read in very different ways by the same speaker, but in different contexts. This is most proeminent with some of the most common words in English - a, the, there, and many other connective words can be pronounced very differently by the same speaker in the same speech, depending on stress (for example "a" can be pronounced as either ə if unstressed or eɪ if stressed). And yet, there is no version of written English that differentiates these - another sign that English is not a phonetic spelling.

Of course, on the other hand, you can't say that there is no correlation between spelling and pronunciation, like you can in Mandarin and other Chinese languages.
by lilyball | 2025-08-15 20:47:54+00:00
Full screen stuff isn't supposed to go behind the notch, unless they opt in to supporting it. By default, fullscreen stuff just gets the notchless 16:10 area under the menubar, and the menubar area goes black, so the notch becomes invisible and nothing is "glaring", it just looks like the top bezel of the screen is larger.
Show HN: I built my own low-cost Intercom replacement for Customer Support
by coder_con | 2025-08-15 20:48:06+00:00
Hey HN,

I built this because services like Intercom, Gleap, Freshdesk were burning a hole in my, and other peoples wallets.

So I stripped it down to the bare minimum:

Knowledge Base

Lightweight CRM

Easy embeddable widget

No AI hype, no confusing dashboards, no “contact sales” buttons.

Takes 5 minutes to install.

If you’re a small startup, solo founder, or just tired of paying enterprise prices for basic support, you might like this.

Thanks Con
by al_borland | 2025-08-15 20:48:14+00:00
How do you feel after those drives of a few hours?

I have driven up to 6 hours at a time, but I'm in hyper-focus mode the whole time and it takes everything I have to stay locked into that focus so I don't die. I think all the time about moving somewhere where I don't need a car. I hate driving and always have.

I recently found out I have ADHD. I haven't tried meds yet (but am having my first meeting with someone tomorrow to explore it as an option). I'm wondering if this will make driving more tolerable for me. It wasn't even something I thought about before this thread.
by chowells | 2025-08-15 20:48:31+00:00
Um... This conversation is about OpenBSD, making that objection incredibly funny. OpenBSD has a mostly-deserved reputation for doing the correct security thing first, in all cases.

But that's also why the rng stuff was so much faster. There was a long period of time where the Linux dev in charge of randomness believed a lot of voodoo instead of actual security practices, and chose nonsense slow systems instead of well-researched fast ones. Linux has finally moved into the modern era, but there was a long period where the randomness features were far inferior to systems built by people with a security background.
by kawfey | 2025-08-15 20:49:27+00:00
I spammed the columns from 1 to 402 (with 400 rows), and i saw some cool patterns. I can see a few nodes of clockwise rotation that converges into a single node from >200 columns that starts makes its way down the screen. Trippy.

I made a screen recording of it: https://n0ssc.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/prime-doublespe...
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-08-15 20:49:53+00:00
That doesn't really refute what they said. It didn't "actually" make things less authoritarian. From my perspective, the only thing that's worth giving Dems the benefit of the doubt is that they haven't had House/Senate/Presidency control for the entirety of my adult life. If they had that and they still managed to be entirely ineffective, then it would just be entirely undeniable that they're complicit in the rise of authoritarianism.

As is, there's this veneer of plausible deniability that, shucks, they really want to help but those other guys don't let them. The practical reality of their policy making is to increase authoritarianism under the guise of "some progress is better than no progress", disregarding that what Democratic leaders call progress their voters (and other democratic societies) call regress.

(Don't get me wrong, I hold no illusion that the red party is at all less authoritarian; my point is that the blue party demonstrates through their actual policy that they are also authoritarian.)
by weeznerps | 2025-08-15 20:50:33+00:00
>Roughly 30% of children given paternity tests or even those who use ancestry services discover their assumed fathers... aren't.

Not true in modern contexts. Misattribution of paternity is much closer to 1-2%: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34288189/, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237633127_How_Well_...

The 30% figure comes from men who already doubt paternity...obviously some strong selection effects there.

In addition, there are very strong cohort effects for divorce. For example, if you have a bachelors the divorce rate is more like 25%.
by solid_fuel | 2025-08-15 20:50:36+00:00
When I first got diagnosed and medicated I pretty quickly burned myself out, too. When you spend your whole life basically unable to work in the way you want to, it can be intoxicating to finally be productive.

It's genuinely hard to describe how good it feels. But it's important to slow down and objectively evaluate how much work and time you are putting in, because burn-out is always a risk.

---

Edit to add - memory holes are also a pretty common effect of high stress levels. If you really got into work and doubled or tripled down on your effort once you got medicated it could easily be causing some of the effects you are experiencing.
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-15 20:50:56+00:00
This thread is reminding me that I desperately want a way to way to have different font sizes for different languages. I like my English text small, but kanji/Chinese characters are obviously more visually dense. So I default to 10/12 point for latin alphabet but I need somewhere between 20-25 point to read Japanese comfortably. Where the two are mixed, like in this thread or on social media (where maybe half my feed is Japanese) it's a massive pain in the ass.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-08-15 20:51:15+00:00
> That is a discussion that inflation resembles a tax.

That's splitting hairs. Inflation is a choice, just like taxes, and, importantly, it's a regressive tax, which helps us understand why the elites love it so much. Inflation shouldn't be mentioned without pointing out that it's a regressive tax.

> And in any case, how does that refute the idea that taxation in general is not a solution?

It doesn't. Nobody claimed that either.

Taxation by itself isn't a solution, but I doubt there is a solution that doesn't involve taxation.

> You’re arguing that because inflation (which is not a tax) is kinda sorta like a tax, therefore taxation in general isn’t a solution?

I can't find anybody claiming anything of the sort.

> That’s like saying soda taxes are bad so we shouldn’t have income taxes either.

Another strawman.
by FakeFind | 2025-08-15 20:51:16+00:00
I’ve been using this little tool I made called FakeFind.ai. It’s super simple — you paste an Amazon product link and it runs an AI check on the reviews.

It looks for common signs of manipulation like repeated phrases, vague one-liners, hijacked listings, and suspicious spikes in 5-star ratings. Then it gives you:

A Trust Score from 1–10

An Adjusted Rating with only the likely genuine reviews

A short summary of why it scored that way

A few better-reviewed alternatives in the same category

No sign-up, no extension, just paste and go. Also works with Walmart, eBay, and Best Buy.
by kstrauser | 2025-08-15 20:52:19+00:00
That's interesting. I'm in the US and my doctor prescribed Adderall for me. While I'd obviously never argue that a drug can't be abused, for me personally, I can't imagine abusing Adderall more than, say, ibuprofen. It's not that it's unpleasant to take it, but that it has zero pleasant qualities, either, except that now I can pay attention to things that don't fascinate me. It doesn't feel good. It doesn't (seem to) change my mood. Maybe I feel a little more awake after I take it, but that's also the same time of day when I have my morning coffee, and I can't tell you which has more of an alertness effect on me.

It's a stimulant. I have no doubt that someone's found a way to abuse it. But for me, I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to. Other drugs like coffee or beer are much more pleasant. If I realize I forgot to take my daily Adderall, oops! Guess I might not get as much work done today as I'd planned, but not to the point where I'd go back home to get it, and I certainly wouldn't feel a craving or desire to.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-08-15 20:52:24+00:00
> (philosoraptor template:) Maybe paying professors more could help?

who is going to pay them more? institutions? do you think that institutions are acting against their own incentives somehow? institutions are acting on their incentives and it's producing suboptimal outcomes for society because spoiler alert the free market isn't the correct mechanism for absolutely everything in life.
by general1726 | 2025-08-15 20:52:54+00:00
Honestly good luck with that. I have tried DeepSeek and Claude and random pulling of registers out of LLMs butt is a thing.

What you will soon find out is that different companies are describing registers in radically different ways in their datasheets and I don't believe that LLM will be able to cope with it. If I can give you an advice, download Tasking compiler for a target processor and you will find SFD files which are essentially XML files describing registers and their bitfields. You can then add context on those SFD from the datasheet / reference manual and now you have 100% correct data with a register-first structure for LLM.

Obviously it would be better to figure where those SFD files came out to avoid IP problems. I sincerely doubt that Tasking wrote it itself, it should come from IC manufacturers because this is just distilled VHDL.

So getting these structured data instead of datasheets will more likely result in a valid answer.