MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by prox | 2025-08-14 15:35:20+00:00
Banning should be an extreme measure only applied in some extremely limited form for the shortest duration possible, if ever. For instance when the book is directly being used to institute violence or hate. While porn should be restricted, it should be in the hands of parents, not the state. Same with abortion, a deeply personal matter, not in the hands of the state or whatever some church things, just because they think they are right. Justice should be blind, not carry a bible or creed.

It should appear evident, and a pretty apolitical stance, but here we are.
by notfromhere | 2025-08-14 15:35:22+00:00
US has highly automated manufacturing but only in a few industries where they're still competitive or have trade protections.

Though I feel like generally the narrative being spun for folks is that factory jobs largely got automated, which is true only in the fact that the remaining factory jobs got automated. The vast majority of them went overseas because it was cheaper. Otherwise the country wouldn't be filled with rusting factory towns and you'd still be able to find lots of household goods made in the US.
by graemep | 2025-08-14 15:35:27+00:00
They are related. They are both individual learning.

One thing I have observed in my own experience (my own, and my, mostly home educated, kids) is that both one to one teaching AND learning on one's own (the amount of it being practice varying with subject) are better than classroom/lecture learning. This is not a statistical sample or a study, but it is three people across multiple subjects, at a pretty full range of levels (from primary school level to postgrad).

Maybe much learning is an individual activity and learning in groups is just ineffective?
by FredPret | 2025-08-14 15:35:44+00:00
Argue for higher tax rates and more enforcement all you want, but the fact is that the current setup results in a situation where the bulk of actual taxes collected come from the rich.

This situation has persisted for as many decades as I've been able to find data for.

Here's a quote from my source: "The top 1 percent earned 22.4 percent of total AGI and paid 40.4 percent of all federal income taxes.

In all, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined."

And we haven't even talked about the avalanche of payroll and sales taxes generated by the businesses they run.
by elephanlemon | 2025-08-14 15:35:48+00:00
I’ve been thinking about this recently… maybe a more workable solution at the moment is to run a hierarchy of agents, with the top level one maintaining the general mental model (and not filling its context with anything much more than “next agent down said this task was complete”). Definitely seems like anytime you try to have one Code agent run everything it just goes off the rails sooner or later, ignoring important details from your original instructions, failing to make sure it’s adhering to CLAUDE.md, etc. I think you can do this now with Code’s agent feature? Anyone have strategies to share?
by throwanem | 2025-08-14 15:35:53+00:00
No, it isn't. The modern standard of obscenity in US federal law, the "Miller test," derives from a 1973 Supreme Court ruling in the eponymous Miller v. California.

I realize you're referring to some universal abstract theoretical concept of obscenity that doesn't apply or exist. The one I describe does, and I think that makes it more useful here.
by rprend | 2025-08-14 15:36:13+00:00
I appreciate you looking out for my well being, but really there was nothing shady here. We weren’t forced out by a Visa mob or something like that. I actually wish that were the case, because that would mean that we were growing! We just aren’t well connected enough to convince established merchants to switch over to a startup’s payment network, especially since the value to them is dubious.

But it’s not like there was some shadowy Visa conspiracy. We received pre seed investment from institutional investors and built a pay-by-bank network entirely fine without anybody stopping us
by browningstreet | 2025-08-14 15:36:26+00:00
Yeah.. my first instinct was to be more skeptical about the story I was reading, because I hate Meta and people can get in trouble all on their own. But I finished the whole story and between the blue check mark, the insistence that it's real, and the romantic/flirty escalations, I'm less enthusiastic that Meta is in the clear.

Safety and guard rails may be an ongoing development in AI, but at the least, AI needs to more hard-coded w/r/t honesty & clarity about what it is.
by rmah | 2025-08-14 15:36:40+00:00
To me, it's disheartening to see this sort of knee-jerk reaction to the grandparent posting (and to see that post be down-voted). What btilly wrote is not a defense, it's reasonable and, more importantly, practical advice in combating tyranny. Moreover, IMO, if you actually want to reduce or put an end to tyranny, you need to understand the root causes for the desires of your opponents. That's empathy. Empathy is not agreement, it's not sympathy, it is understanding. Screaming at others that they're bad people will not change anything. If anything, IMO, it causes them to dig their heels and makes change harder.
by jayd16 | 2025-08-14 15:36:43+00:00
By this definition a bag of answers is causal reasoning because we previously filled the bag, which caused what we pulled. State causing a result is not causal reasoning.

You need to actually have something that deduces a result from a set of principles that form a logical conclusion or the understanding that more data is needed to make a conclusion. That is clearly different than finding a likely next token on statics alone, despite the fact the statical answer can be correct.
by jrajav | 2025-08-14 15:36:48+00:00
"hey, speeding down the highway 35mph over the limit could kill you, especially if you are fat and old. you SHOULD drive under the speed limit, but you don't have to."

No, the point is that it could kill other people. Speed all you want when you're on your own private roads.

Laws are generally meant to ensure public safety and the ability for us to live and cooperate together with mutual trust. They usually do end up restricting your personal freedoms to that end. Deal with it.
by z3ugma | 2025-08-14 15:37:02+00:00
Is there someone you trust who has been a mentor to you at one of your past jobs? Send them a note and ask them to mock interview you. People love being asked favors and for their opinion.

You sound unsure and defeated in your post. Were you feeling confident the day of the interview, or do you think you seemed desperate for the job?

I will say that all the best technical interviews I have had are ones where I spoke in short sentences, was able to end on a point rather than rambling, and left plenty of time in my answers to ask questions of the reviewer and demonstrate curiosity.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-08-14 15:37:07+00:00
> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win.

Being from Europe, I wish. But for now, it doesn't seem to be the case. Your military power basically allows you to bully Europe and many others, tell us what to buy and whom to buy it from, which is an enormous economic advantage. You just made our puny European leaders promise an enormous investment in the US defense industry in the moment where we would need to propel our own industry the most (it probably won't materialize, but still, we'll spend at least some of it because most of our leaders don't want to be in a bad standing with the US). You are also bullying us into signing contracts with inferior American suppliers rather than Huawei, among many other things. All of this happens mainly due to the US's disproportionate military power. Meanwhile, you can afford having a president who is borderline illiterate (and actually makes binding decisions) without the economy even meaningfully sinking (stocks at historical maximums).

So spending in the military seems to actually be a good choice, unfortunately.
by xscott | 2025-08-14 15:37:11+00:00
> Your argument is like saying we shouldn't pay nurses a fair wage because it get's in the way of great care for everyone.

This argument strategy, where you make a strained analogy/metaphor, and then apply it back to the original topic - it's fragile and depends on how comparable the two ideas are. If you're just interested in winning discussions, it's a bad tactic because it opens up a whole new avenue for your opponent to attack.

Can I COPY nurses into equally valuable robots? Because if I can, then yeah - the world would be a MUCH better place with abundant and affordable nurse robots, and the human nurses can go find other jobs. I have some friends who are nurses, and after watching them fight with the medical system for their own health issues, I'm pretty sure they'd agree.
by dpoloncsak | 2025-08-14 15:37:13+00:00
Assuming you don't account for reflections, rotations, and 'unreachable' gamestates where a player wins and you continue to mark boxes.

It's just 3^9, right? 9 boxes, either X,O, or blank? We're only at 19,683 game states and would trim down from here if we account for the cases above.
by btilly | 2025-08-14 15:37:15+00:00
There are quite a few ex-nazi types who stand as a testament to this statement being false. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_white_supremac... for some relatively well-known ones.

I do grant that it is very hard. Just as it is hard to have a rational conversation with a cult member. But the fact that it is hard doesn't mean that it isn't worth trying.
by 9rx | 2025-08-14 15:37:33+00:00
> when I sell it very little of what I charge will be for my labor.

That's debatable. Without the labor input the product doesn't exist as far as the market knows. However, if you want to discount the labor portion, which is an equally valid take, it remains that what was said was “salaries and compensation”. Any compensation you receive for giving up the gold in your possession was already recognized. As said earlier, the exchanged value doesn't go to God, it goes to people.

> since the thing in question is whether defense spending is mostly a jobs program.

You can certainly play a game of semantics here, but generally "job" in this type of context refers to any kind of economic role, not necessarily direct labor. "It is my job to provide gold to the world" doesn't imply that you are the one doing the actual extraction. The significance of "job programs" is in offering opportunity to derive an income, not to give opportunity to strain muscles.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-08-14 15:37:49+00:00
The difference is that the weaknesses of cars were problems of engineering, and some of infrastructure. Both aren't very hard to solve, though they take time. The fundamental way cars operated worked and just needed revision, sanding off rough edges.

LLMs are not like this. The fundamental way they operate, the core of their design is faulty. They don't understand rules or knowledge. They can't, despite marketing, really reason. They can't learn with each interaction. They don't understand what they write.

All they do is spit out the most likely text to follow some other text based on probability. For casual discussion about well-written topics, that's more than good enough. But for unique problems in a non-English language, it struggles. It always will. It doesn't matter how big you make the model.

They're great for writing boilerplate that has been written a million times with different variations - which can save programmers a LOT of time. The moment you hand them anything more complex it's asking for disaster.
Show HN: I tried to build an Awwwards-level CSS to Nested CSS converter
by timchinye | 2025-08-14 15:38:05+00:00
Hey HN,

About a year ago, I found out about native CSS Nesting but was surprised to find no simple, pure CSS converters online. The closest were CSS-to-SCSS tools that often produced invalid (pure CSS) code that required manual refactoring.

So, I decided to build my own. It started as a barebones MVP (quickly.nestyourcss.com), but I got carried away with a personal challenge: could I turn a simple A-to-B online converter tool into something that felt like an "Awwwards-level" website?

I'm not a designer, and I know I didn't fully hit that mark, but it was a fantastic learning experience and I'm proud of how it turned out.

Here's the result: https://nestyourcss.com/

It's free and requires no signup. You'll notice some ad spots - for now, they're just static placeholder images. Part of the challenge was to design a site with ads in mind from the start, rather than having them disrupt the UX later. The site isn't connected to any ad network.

The front-end is vanilla HTML/CSS/JS (plus Ace Editor & Lenis), no backend, the nesting logic is written from scratch, and the project is fully open-source.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/TimChinye/NestYourCSS

This spiraled into a project that massively solidified my front-end fundamentals. I learned a ton:

- The 'Why' Behind Frameworks: After experiencing the frustrations of pure HTML, CSS & JS firsthand, I have a new appreciation for why frameworks exist and understand the problems that they solve. I also now value the fine-grained control you get from the fundamentals.

- Performance as a Feature: I learned to incorporate it into my coding, from leaning towards composite-only CSS properties for animations to deep diving into the Chrome DevTools Performance and Rendering tabs.

- Deep Accessibility: Writing crawler-friendly, semantic HTML wasn't enough. I dove deep into ARIA roles and properties to make it actually usable with screen readers.

- Modern CSS is awesome: I got to implement new features like relative colour syntax, @layer, container queries, and more. It pushed me to follow W3C drafts more closely - I seriously can't wait for native mixins and functions (currently on the W3C standards track!).

- AI as a flawed co-pilot: Using AI sped up boilerplate, but also introduced subtle bugs. It was a powerful lesson in the importance of genuinely understanding every line of code you ship.

A few caveats:

The nesting logic has been heavily tested, but there are still edge cases. I wouldn't recommend converting massive files, it'll work perfectly fine, but it's best to stick to 3 or 4 levels of nesting - it's not reusable & leads to specificity issues. Ironically, my own site's CSS is an example of exactly what not to do.

This is a project I'm excited to feature in my portfolio, and I wanted to share it here first. I'd love to get any feedback. A genuine thanks for checking it out.
by dinfinity | 2025-08-14 15:38:11+00:00
I would say:

1. Spend time on the fundamentally new things through whatever tool provides it.

2. Always try to prevent 'vendor' lock-in. Think about portability and reusability.

A lot of the stuff that now "works well" when working with AI assistants and tools is stuff that was always a good idea and always worked well. Write Once, Read Many; Provide good specification; Communicate clearly; Automate repeated tasks; etc.

If you update your workflow in a fundamental manner and don't jump from investing 100% in tool X to 100% in tool Y redoing a lot of shit, you improve it efficiently.
by jmkni | 2025-08-14 15:38:11+00:00
> Meta has publicly discussed its strategy to inject anthropomorphized chatbots into the online social lives of its billions of users. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has mused that most people have far fewer real-life friendships than they’d like – creating a huge potential market for Meta’s digital companions.

I hate everything about this sentence. This is literally the opposite of what people need.
by blindriver | 2025-08-14 15:38:43+00:00
This isn't 2021 anymore. You need to recalibrate your world view.

There are probably 300 people interviewing for the job you interviewed for. So they need to not just pick someone who checks the boxes, but the BEST of all the people who checked the boxes.

Assuming you checked all the boxes, you weren't the best and someone else was chosen. That's all it is. What makes them the best? Who knows. There's likely 50 of them they had to choose from.

Job hunting has always been a numbers game but now it's worse by a factor of 100x. Don't take it personally, and keep going.
by snackbroken | 2025-08-14 15:38:53+00:00
Sure, if you want to restrict access to your service or plaster your website with annoying pop-ups just for fun, the law doesn't cover that. It only cares about this in the context of processing personal data.

Essentially: If you wish to process personal data on the basis of consent, then the consent must be freely given, and consent is not freely given if you engage in coercive or deceptive practices, which includes providing a consent form that has an "accept all" option but no "reject all" option.

Here's the relevant text of the regulation:

> 1. Where processing is based on consent, the controller shall be able to demonstrate that the data subject has consented to processing of his or her personal data.

> 2. If the data subject's consent is given in the context of a written declaration which also concerns other matters, the request for consent shall be presented in a manner which is clearly distinguishable from the other matters, in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language. Any part of such a declaration which constitutes an infringement of this Regulation shall not be binding.

> 3. The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time. The withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal. Prior to giving consent, the data subject shall be informed thereof. It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent.

> 4. When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.
by _swfb | 2025-08-14 15:39:03+00:00
Oh I have a bunch of anecdotes about interviewers from BigCos that knew absolutely nothing about concurrent programming but thought that they knew a lot about concurrent programming and "corrected" my answers during the interview. There's a lot of confidently incorrect people at the staff level of big corporations, and it's a little concerning.

Before someone thinks I'm being cocky about me being right and them being wrong, after every interview involving concurrency I always write a PlusCal/TLA+ spec with my answer and use the model checker to make sure that my answer actually solved the problem correctly. This is why I can be confident that my answers were correct; I'm not smarter than anyone really, it's just that I try and verify my work.
by paulpauper | 2025-08-14 15:39:12+00:00
Now we'll all be 3%-10% poorer, in a single year, yet I see no accountability. In fact, I see people pressuring the Fed to lower (!) rates, the tariffs don't seem to be going anywhere, and government spending and debt are at all-time highs.

This would only be true if you kept your money under a mattress. Stocks and real estate have posted strong real returns. Even risk-free interest exceeds 3%. Same for increased wages.

Stocks and home ownership are time-tested, effective hedges against loss of purchasing power.

the tariffs don't seem to be going anywhere, and government spending and debt are at all-time highs.

I agree the tariffs were a mistake, but the national debt at all time highs does not mean Americans become poorer. The fallacy of composition is to assume that the national debt is like a household debt. The national debt does not affect the ability of Americans to accumulate significant real-levels of wealth with investments and income.
by apples_oranges | 2025-08-14 15:39:31+00:00
But let's say you change your mathematical expression by reducing or expanding it somehow, then, unless it's trivial, there are infinite ways to do it, and the "cause" here is the answer to the question of "why did you do that and not something else"? Brute force excluded, the cause is probably some idea, some model of the problem or a gut feeling (or desperation..) ..
by qwertylicious | 2025-08-14 15:39:38+00:00
So let's consider the possibilities:

#1. Facebook did everything they could to evaluate Flo as a company and the data they were receiving, but they simply had no way to tell that the data was illegally acquired and privacy-invading.

#2. Facebook had inadequate mechanisms for evaluating their partners, and that while they could have caught this problem they failed to do so, and therefore Facebook was negligent.

#3. Facebook turned a blind eye to clear red flags that should've caused them to investigate further, and Facebook was malicious.

Personally, given Facebook's past extremely egregious behaviour, I think it's most likely to be a combination of #2 and #3: inadequate mechanisms to evaluate data partners, and conveniently ignoring signals that the data was ill-gotten, and that Facebook is in fact negligent if not malicious. In either case Facebook should be held liable.

pc86 is taking the position that the issue is #1: that Facebook did everything they could, and still, the bad data made it through because it's impossible to build a system to catch this sort of thing.

If that's true, then my argument is that the system Facebook built is too easily abused and should be torn down or significantly modified/curtailed as it cannot be operated safely, and that Facebook should still be held liable for building and operating a harmful technology that they could not adequately govern.

Does that clarify my position?
by ModernMech | 2025-08-14 15:39:45+00:00
You are both completely clear yet not understanding one another.

Let me try to break the deadlock: epistasis is getting at the fact that you can't call yourself an "absolutist" on free speech because your position is not absolute, but qualified -- all speech is free except speech you find problematic, which shall be regulated. That's pretty much everyone's definition of free speech, not an absolutist take.

An absolutist would say there should be absolutely no content-based restrictions on what is in the library regardless of the ages of the patrons. Hustler, Anarchist Cookbook, whatever. They might justify that by saying "free speech is so important we can't place any limits on it. If you as a parent find the idea your child might access speech you find distasteful, it's up to you to prevent your child from seeing it, not the library or the government".

> without fear of repercussion

Let's say you write a book about being a kid and finding it uncomfortable to grow up who you are. You're free to write it, free to talk about it, free to to sell it. But then the government adds your book to a list of books they deem "pedophilic and a danger to children."

Do you think you would be free from repercussions from the government publishing your book on the harmful to kids list? Can free speech thrive in such an environment?
by throwaway1004 | 2025-08-14 15:39:58+00:00
That reference link is a wild ride of unqualified, cartoonish passive-aggression, the cute link to the author's "swag" is the icing on the cake.

Concidentally, I encountered the author's work for the first time only a couple of days ago as a podcast guest, he vouches for the "Dirty Code" approach while straw-manning Uncle Bob's general principles of balancing terseness/efficiency with ergonomics and readability (in most, but not all, cases).

I guess this stuff sells t-shirts and mugs /rant
by ausbah | 2025-08-14 15:40:12+00:00
those are really good points, but LLMs have really started to plateau off on their capabilities haven’t they? the improvements from gpt2 class models to 3 was much bigger then 3 to 4, which was only somewhat bigger than 4 to 5

most of the vibe shift I think I’ve seen in the past few months to using LLMs in the context of coding has been improvements in dataset curation and ux, not fundamentally better tech