MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonzzzies | 2025-08-03 12:07:34+00:00
From the Netherlands and not having had to work since I sold my first company at 25 (over 25 years ago), I cannot do more than a week vacation before getting annoyed and bored. I like building stuff: programming, welding, soldering, guitar playing, cooking. But I have no patience for doing one thing: normally I code myself and vibe with multiple claude codes on the boil, my electric guitar is on my lap, there is either YouTube presentations from meetups/events or science podcasts on in the background and then there is cooking and soldering when I happen to get up from the desk. Or I go for a run or meet up with friends. When my friends tell me about their vacation, I fall asleep listening to it, let alone having to live through it. It is a Me thing and nothing wrong with them or me and luckily my wife is even worse, so we work almost nonstop generally. Never makes us exhausted though; quite the opposite.
by dfawcus | 2025-08-03 12:08:18+00:00
Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing?

My first experience of the idea was in US films and TV programs. I never came across it at school in England.

FWIW, my reading lessons (both at school in the early '70s), and at home at the same time used a form of phonics.

Although I never knew that term until over 30 years later. We simply knew it as breaking the word apart in to pronounceable pieces.

As mentioned in the article, I still occasionally use the technique if and when I come across an unknown word.
by jcgrillo | 2025-08-03 12:08:37+00:00
I'm shopping for a truck atm because I need one. I am pretty routinely overloading the towing capacity of my Land Cruiser, and a decent flatbed pickup would obviate the need to hook up the trailer most of the time. Being able to tow/haul 3-4cord of firewood logs in one go would be super convenient, I'll use that capability at least once per year.

And if you're thinking "why not just rent?" I'll ask when was the last time you saw an equipment trailer rental with a winch capable of hauling logs up onto it?

Paradoxically, at least in the context of this thread, my motivation to own a truck is safety and efficiency. A 12 valve Cummins pulling the GCVWR of a 1994-1998.5 3/4 ton Dodge will get right around 10mpg and do it safely.
by markdown | 2025-08-03 12:08:40+00:00
> Not everything needs to be

Not everything, sure. But this one more than most, needs to be democratic. If you don't see the wealth inequality today in which the 1% own 50% of the worlds wealth, and you don't see where this is inevitably going to lead, then I don't know what to say.

Stay woke at r/latestagecapitalism
by sipofwater | 2025-08-03 12:08:45+00:00
"Motorola moto g play 2024 smartphone, Termux application, and QEMU running under Termux: Booting "Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)" with debian-12-nocloud-amd64.qcow2": https://old.reddit.com/r/androidterminal/comments/1mc3pnz/go... (old.reddit.com/r/androidterminal/comments/1mc3pnz/googles_linux_terminal_plays_a_big_part_in/n5tjgu8/)
by janeway | 2025-08-03 12:09:38+00:00
Yes, I spend a majority of my professional life on similar systems writing code in vim and running massive jobs via slurm. Required for processing TBs of data on secured environments with seamless command line access. I hate web-based connections or vscode type system. Although open to any improvements, this works best to me. It’s like a world inside one’s head with a text-based interface.

Graphical data exploration and stats with R, python, etc is a beautiful challenge at that scale.
by echo42null | 2025-08-03 12:11:03+00:00
Good point. You do need to create an environment where people feel safe to talk about anything, But it shouldn’t just become an endless complaint loop about the company.

I’ve seen this dynamic too: once people start venting, the channel can spiral. I sometimes wonder how to steer that energy into something constructive. Maybe it helps to let people express uncertainty or frustration before decisions are final, and to respond with context before things snowball.

It’s tricky, because most coworkers only overlap on the job itself, they might not share much else in common. so their “bonding” can easily turn into shared complaining.

Curious if anyone has found ways to keep that from going south without shutting people down completely.
by timbit42 | 2025-08-03 12:12:46+00:00
Another great option is rebounding. Every time you land, every muscle in your body is exercised. It's also easy on the joints and you can do it inside if the weather is bad.

Back in the 1970's, NASA studied rebounding as a way to help astronauts recover after being in space. They found 10 minutes of rebounding to be equivalent to 30 minutes of jogging[1].

It's also good for the elderly and disabled because you can sit to do it or even someone else can bounce you and you will still benefit from it.

My dad is 81 and is still rebounding. His core is strong and he can move around like when he was in his 60's.

Older rebounders used metal springs and were harder on the joints. Newer rebounders use bungees for a softer, gentler and silent landing. Some people rebound while their partner sleeps a few feet away.

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/wellness/fitness/forget-running-na...
by IshKebab | 2025-08-03 12:15:34+00:00
> So yes, slower is safer - not in some reductio ad absurdum sense that implies '0mph', but in a public health sense where a fair and practical compromise should be sought.

> To my mind, 15 - 20mph in urban areas is that compromise.

This is precisely my point. None of the "slower is safer" people even acknowledge that it is a compromise. Their entire argument is "slower is safer" which does lead to 0mph.

It's impossible to have a proper debate if some people are saying "I know slower is safer but I don't want to go at 20mph everywhere" and others are saying "but... it's safer!"
by tim333 | 2025-08-03 12:16:18+00:00
It's actually kind of refreshing to use free market lightly regulated medicine. I live in the UK where it's NHS government funded or related but travelling in Asia without insurance you can actually shop around and buy stuff - how much for a doc, how much for an xray etc. It's mostly quite cheap too. If you remove most of the regulatory barriers things work quite well. Obviously doctors and the like should pass exams for competence but I'm not sure you need to restrict it to only x people through y colleges in z country to restrict the supply. If the US said that to practice medicine and all you needed was a medical qualification from any respectable country it could drop costs like 10x I'd guess.
by qdaxb | 2025-08-03 12:17:41+00:00
Hi, I built this plugin to help JetBrains users run Roo Code Agents natively, without needing to switch to VS Code.

It supports most features out of the box and works with IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and other JetBrains IDEs. Feedback or contributions welcome!

GitHub:https://github.com/wecode-ai/RunVSAgent
by camgunz | 2025-08-03 12:17:54+00:00
It's definitely not innate. While phonics test scores are pretty high, PISA and KS 2 reading scores are down. The DfA on reading in 2021 is like, _solely_ about phonics. The 2023 update adds tons more guidance beyond phonics. Comparable countries Canada and Ireland are doing better, they didn't go all in on phonics. So, depends on what you mean by disaster, but IMO in the policy world, this counts.
by itsalotoffun | 2025-08-03 12:18:04+00:00
People really aren't going to like this, but OP is directionally correct.

At 100 dev shop size you're likely to have plenty of junior and middling devs, for whom tools like CC will act as a net negative in the short-mid term (mostly by slowing down your top devs who have to shovel the shit that CC pushes out at pace and that junior/mids can't or don't catch). Your top devs (likely somewhere around 1/5 of your workforce) will deliver 80% of the benefit of something like CC.

We're not hiring junior or even early-mid devs since around Mar/Apr. These days they cost $200/mo + $X in API spend. There's a shift in the mind-work of how "dev" is being approached. It's.. alarming, but it's happening.
by timbit42 | 2025-08-03 12:18:22+00:00
A safer option is rebounding. Every time you land, every muscle in your body is exercised. It's also easy on the joints and you can do it inside if the weather is bad.

Back in the 1970's, NASA studied rebounding as a way to help astronauts recover after being in space. They found 10 minutes of rebounding to be equivalent to 30 minutes of jogging[1].

It's also good for the elderly and disabled because you can sit to do it or even someone else can bounce you and you will still benefit from it.

My dad is 81 and is still rebounding. His core is strong and he can move around like when he was in his 60's.

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/wellness/fitness/forget-running-na...
by pfdietz | 2025-08-03 12:20:10+00:00
They have been doing compression and reexpansion on plasmas for a long time. They are claiming high efficiency on energy recovery in these (non-fusion) plasmas. They can also do energy injection and recovery just by pulsing the coils around an empty vacuum chamber (or one filled with nonconductive gas).

There's nothing that should be unbelievable about this claim, and to dispute it would be to assert that they are outright lying. For short timescales where do you expect the energy to be going, if not back to the capacitors? Inductive energy storage on short time scales should be very efficient. Both the coils used and the plasma itself have sufficiently low resistivity. I think the gating technology for this was the switches.

The 1% figure you give there isn't for anything resembling this process, so I don't know why you brought it up except for reasons of obfuscation or your own confusion.
by buran77 | 2025-08-03 12:20:13+00:00
> compare deaths caused to others by cars vs deaths caused to others by bicycles (could even add in motorised bikes)

Not the commenter you were answering to, but this is exactly the kind of thinking I was highlighting earlier myself. People constantly put themselves in dangerous situations that they rationalize to be fine just because the law doesn't explicitly incriminate that behavior. So being the ones who planted the seeds of that dangerous situation just doesn't register. Not trying to generalize but there are many, many situations where disaster could have been avoided if either side bothered to do better.

Too many people live as if the epitaph "but I was technically correct" will keep someone warm. Let me put it another way, if one of these "above average" people chooses to always floor it on the Autobahn at 300+km/h because it's technically legal, when they eventually crash and die even because someone else made a mistake you know you'll think "well, he had it coming". Same if a cyclist crashes due to someone else's mistake while riding a barely road-worthy bike or because they banged their head and weren't wearing a helmet. Sure, it wasn't legally their fault but welcome to the statistic. It's like dying from the perfectly legal smoking.

Everybody should try to do their best in potentially dangerous situations. But too many people on the road expect only others have to do it because [insert rationalization here]. And people without an airbag filled metal cage around them are the ones least able to justify the relaxed "it's their responsibility" attitude. Nobody else on the road will care about your life more than you. If even you keep putting yourself in situations where any minor mistake from anyone has no chance to be corrected, you're writing your place in a statistic. But of course, if you know what you're doing that will never happen...
by bsenftner | 2025-08-03 12:21:43+00:00
I was never "taught to read", one of my earliest memories was being gifted a old trunk filled with comic books from a cousin's return from Vietnam. Several hundred comics, many of them dating back to the early 60's, the time this occurred was 1969. Everything from all the DC/Marvel, Donald Duck, European comics, the oversized and banned horror comics with nudity, and of course a shit load of underground comics like the Freak Bros, and more.

When school started, kindergarten, I knew how to read. I had a kid's novel with me I was reading, something like "Mrs Frisby & the rats of NIMN".
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-08-03 12:21:51+00:00
I suppose a more rigorous definition would be useful. We can probably make it more narrow as time goes on

To me, the essence of coding is about using formal languages and definable state machines (i.e, your toolchain) to manipulate the state of a machine in a predictable way.

C, C++, even with their litany of undefined behavior, are still formal languages, and their compilers can still be predicted and understood (no matter how difficult that is). If the compiler does something unexpected, its because you, the programmer, lacked the knowledge of either the language or the compiler's state.

Vibe coding uses natural languages, and interacts with programs whose state is not only unknown, but unknowable. The machine, for the same input, may produce wildly different output. If the machine produces unexpected code, its not because of a lack of knowledge on the part of it programmer - its because the machine is inherently unpredictable and requires more prodding in soft, fuzzy, natural language.

Telling something what outcomes you want, even if described in technical terms only a programmer would understand, is not coding. It's essentially just being a project manager.

Now you may ask - who cares about this no true Scotsman fallacy? If its coding or not coding, we are still producing a program which serves the product needs of the customer.

Personally, I did not learn to code because I give a shit about the product needs of the customer, or the financial wellbeing of the business. I enjoy coding for its own sake - because it is fun to use systems of well defined rules to solve problems. Learning and using C++ is fun, for me; it seems every day i learn something new about the language and how the compiler behaves and I've been using C++ for several years (and I started learning it when I was 12!)

Describing the outcome or goal of a project in natural human language sounds like a nightmare, to be honest. I became a software engineer so I could minimize the amount of natural language required to succeed in life. Natural language has gotten me (and, I suspect, people like me) in trouble over and over again throughout adolescence, but I've never written a piece of code that was misunderstood or ambiguous enough for people to become threatened by or outraged by it.

I think the disconnect is that some people care about products, and some people care about code.
by idiotsecant | 2025-08-03 12:21:54+00:00
Why do you think fission plants are expensive? Do you think it's the pumps and turbines and concrete?

Pro tip: it's not. It's because there is millions of man-hours of regulatory burden attached to every decision, to every bolt, to every instrument or valve installed.

There is a reason for all that regulatory burden, of course. It's the release of long lived and deadly radiation from a meltdown. If it wasn't for that regulation building a nuke plant would actually be quite inexpensive, relative to current costs- On the scale of a hydro dam.

Fusion has none of those costs because it has none of the same dangers. It's a wildly different problem with wildly different cost basis. The expensive part is research. Once that's done that cost is gone.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-03 12:22:17+00:00
VSCode does support that. It's up to language extension authors to implement it though because obviously only they know which bit of text is in which language.

I don't think SQL queries in code is a very big use case and even there, any that are large enough to need syntax highlighting are probably better off in a separate file.

The biggest use case of multi-language files I've seen is Vue single file components, but in practice they turned out to be a terrible idea precisely because of tooling issues like this.
by julius | 2025-08-03 12:23:01+00:00
Less information loss -> Less params? Please correct me if I got this wrong. The Intro claims:

"The dot product itself is a geometrically impoverished measure, primarily capturing alignment while conflating magnitude with direction and often obscuring more complex structural and spatial relationships [10, 11, 4, 61, 17]. Furthermore, the way current activation functions achieve non-linearity can exacerbate this issue. For instance, ReLU (f (x) = max(0, x)) maps all negative pre-activations, which can signify a spectrum of relationships from weak dissimilarity to strong anti-alignment, to a single zero output. This thresholding, while promoting sparsity, means the network treats diverse inputs as uniformly orthogonal or linearly independent for onward signal propagation. Such a coarse-graining of geometric relationships leads to a tangible loss of information regarding the degree and nature of anti-alignment or other neg- ative linear dependencies. This information loss, coupled with the inherent limitations of the dot product, highlights a fundamental challenge."
by thevillagechief | 2025-08-03 12:23:40+00:00
One of the most frustrating articles I've read in a while. Is everything in the US just well-off people colluding to keep everyone else down? Most countries don't have this advanced classes thing. Everyone just takes the same classes. It does not make sense to have admins and other parents with vested interests block kids from whatever classes they want to take!
by stingraycharles | 2025-08-03 12:23:56+00:00
We tried that but it ended up being just a few people talking and most people just listening and/or continuing their work.

As a team lead within a small, fully remote company I’m struggling to find the right dynamics as I can see people really like to socialize (I have 3 1on1’s with each of them every week, and a lot of times we just talk about personal hobbies, what they did last weekend, etc), but it seems like in groups people end up being too shy to socialize.
by Mawr | 2025-08-03 12:24:52+00:00
> cars that require a fraction of stopping distance of a truck at given speed

You may want to update your knowledge on the stopping distances of modern trucks.

> are fined for going 3-4 km over limit

Obviously. Is there anything confusing about the word "limit" in particular that you don't understand?

> Essentially, fined for driving at a speed where they can stop many meters before a truck going the sign posted limit.

It is not your job as a driver to decide whether to stick to a particular traffic rule or not. The limit is there, so follow it.
by jhbadger | 2025-08-03 12:26:22+00:00
> I mean, just imagine trying to run something like the Museum of Science and Industry, Museum of Natural History, or the Field Museum for free.

While it is possible they'll get gutted and/or forced to charge admission in the current craze to cut government funding, by far the best museums in the country -- the Smithsonian ones in DC -- are absolutely free to visit.
by jpc0 | 2025-08-03 12:27:32+00:00
I don’t speak dutch but a language descendant from it and I completely understand how it would be broken down that way.

Effectively I would pronounce honderdduizend as 4 quick syllables.

Again do not speak dutch and translate the same work into my languages pronunciation which I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t almost identical. “Honderd duisend” if you are interested.
by lucianbr | 2025-08-03 12:28:08+00:00
If there is no regulator, the company with the most money will use its money to prevent any deals that are inconvenient for it from taking place. Often those would be beneficial to the other parties or to the consumers.

Maybe it's not a great choice of words to say here "the large company regulates the space" but it's definitely a problem worth pointing out.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-08-03 12:28:33+00:00
> Semantic HTML helps here too. Proper structural boundaries allow for more effective use of modern CSS containment strategies:

> contain: layout; tells the browser it doesn’t need to recalculate layout outside the element.

> will-change: transform; hints that a compositing layer is needed.

> isolation: isolate; and contain: paint; can help prevent visual spillover and force GPU layers.

That sounds like some powerful optimization strategies! I'll need to research these. Favoriting this article for later reference...
by pards | 2025-08-03 12:28:49+00:00
Summary: The current system of 3 cues (pictures, context, syntax) is ineffective because kids don't actually read the words. SIPPS is a better way.

> Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. The program is called "Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words," or SIPPS.24 It's a phonics program that teaches children how to sound out words and uses what are known as "decodable books." Most words in the books have spelling patterns that kids have been taught in their phonics lessons.
by nabla9 | 2025-08-03 12:29:29+00:00
> Neither Cloudflare, nor any other service, will ever be able to block all scrapers. They can make their operations more expensive,

Cloudflare presents like single platform for crawlers. The get the same amount of data as platforms to bock crawlers they don't want. Other big platforms can prevent scrapers effectively when they don't want them Google, Facebook. etc. Nifty new scraper might crawl few million url's before it's detected.
by bsenftner | 2025-08-03 12:30:01+00:00
I remember just looking at the pictures, and for some reason I really liked Spiderman. (There was a Spiderman cartoon in the late 60's.) I noticed that Spiderman's comics when they showed him in his ghetto apartment, it was always filled with books, with the titles readable. I could not read the titles, but figured if the people making the comics were putting all these books in Peter Parker's apartment, the books are probably useful for superheros. That idiot logic is what got me to start wanting to read, to know what Peter Parker was reading. I started, slowly, and taught myself with a goal.
by lvl155 | 2025-08-03 12:30:07+00:00
Big is bad? She went up against Amazon which is literally one company that delivered on lowering costs to consumers. She doesn’t understand the fact that there are NATURAL monopolies outside of utilities. You would know this if your training is more than a couple of intro level courses in economics.

And why is it that no one is talking about the biggest vertical and horizontal roll ups in all of corporate America in healthcare? Interesting.
by benreesman | 2025-08-03 12:30:09+00:00
Blowing away the junior -> senior pipeline would, on average, hit every country the same.

Though it raises an interesting point: if a country like India or China did make the investment in hiring, paying, and mentoring junior people but e.g. the US didn't, then you could see a massive shift in the global center of gravity around software expertise in 10 years (plus or minus).

Someone is going to be the best at planning for and investing in the future on this, and someone is going to maximally wishful thinking / short-term thinking this, and seductive-but-not-really-there vibe coding is probably going to be a major pivot point there.
by iainmerrick | 2025-08-03 12:31:41+00:00
I think a roughly comparable procedure in Chinese might be to take in only a few radicals, and guess the likely meaning of a character based on the surrounding context, rather than fully recognising each character individually.

The theory is that skilled readers do this unconsciously, blending various factors and using shortcuts rather than fully comprehending each character / word. It sounds very plausible - how else would skilled readers get so fast?

But in experimental tests, apparently skilled readers are very good at fully comprehending individual characters / words, without any context available. So it seems that if you don’t learn to do that, you won’t become a skilled reader.