MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TrackerFF | 2025-08-03 11:45:57+00:00
I think sports is even more susceptible to the influence of capital.

Athletes need the following:

- talent/potential - ability (talent that has been realized) - work ethic - luck (could be something as simple as avoiding injuries, supportive family / friends / guardians, etc.)

That will usually get you on the radar. You'll be identified by your coach, talent agents, etc.

Once you cross a certain threshold, usually by the time you've been picked out by talent agents / joined a youth academy, and signed for a sports club with the financial means, you get access to a whole infrastructure that has one goal, and one goal only: To unlock your full potential, and make you the best athlete you can be.

And it is not that unsimilar to how AI researchers are brought up. If you look at pretty much any of the top AI talent, they have the following pedigree:

Very gifted HS students that went to feeder schools / academies, and / or participated in some STEM Olympiad -> Prestigious universities or some top ranking schools in their field -> Well-funded and prestigious research group -> top internships and post-grad employment (or they dropped out to join/found a startup)

You could be the smartest researcher in the world, but if you're stuck at some dinky school with zero budget, and can't (or don't get the change to) relocate, you're going to be stuck at the B/C/D-league.
by scotty79 | 2025-08-03 11:45:58+00:00
I think desire for "real" is just a form of masochism. This real that people talk about is just suffering in sufficient amount to silence their restless brains. Most people aren't like that. Most prefer to use pleasure instead of pain to calm their brains. They don't care if a thing is "real" as long as it does its job. For the 'real' afficiandos pleasure doesn't work. That's why they disparage things that bring joy and peace to other people. Because those things simply don't work for them. The only thing that works is appropriate amount of suffering to make their brain accept the stuff they are doing, that's not any more real or interesting for the average person.

Have you noticed how a huge variety of things can be "real"? And the only unifying factor is the suffering? I think it's because it's all about the suffering, not the narrations and the details.
by bryant | 2025-08-03 11:46:50+00:00
If there's an argument to be made that the damages are too high (I'm not making this argument, to be clear), it might be with the compensatory damages prescribed by the jury at $129 million, but then that begs the question of what the cost of a human life is. Money won't bring someone back, but if you're in a courtroom and forced to calculate this figure, it's better to just overestimate IMO.

But the punitive damages at $200 million are appropriate — it's what the jury thought would be appropriate to discourage Tesla's behaviors.
by blackbear_ | 2025-08-03 11:46:52+00:00
Statistical significance is not connected to real-world relevance.

With enough resources one could know the exact number without any margin of error. This number could however be the result of random fluctuations rather than systematic effects such as policies or natural phenomena. Only the latter are interesting, because you do not want to take decisions based on random noise. While some sources of noise can be eliminated, for example by polling more people, other types of noise are just there and are inherent of the process you are measuring. Wide confidence intervals also convey this kind of information, and more advanced statistical analyses can separate these two fundamental sources of noise. Those who care no doubt are informed.

Speaking of real-world relevance, there are about 159M people employed, so a confidence interval of 270k means that you can statistically detect changes larger than 0.17% within a month, and a CI of 70k after three months reveals changes of 0.04% or more. Since policy changes need time to propagate around the economy, at least one and perhaps two quarters, I would imagine that data for the immediately preceding month is not critical. Given the budget challenges in the last years, one could speculate that decision makers in the government were generally satisfied with this level of accuracy. And if they are not, sacking people does not change how statistics works.

Speaking of Trump: actions speak louder than words, and history remains a good teacher. I won't go any further since I am not American, I can only hope you guys get your shit together.
by orta | 2025-08-03 11:47:02+00:00
With Claude Code at least, all of the chats you've had are stored in jsonl files on your computer in ~/.claude - I made a little TUI for exploring these in https://github.com/orta/claude-code-to-adium

Personally, I'm less sold on tracking prompts as being valuable both for production cases (imo if a human should read it, a human should have wrote/fully edited it applies to commits/PRs/docs etc) and for vibe cases where the prompts are more transitory
by lproven | 2025-08-03 11:48:32+00:00
Sometimes, I travel with my nearly-15-year-old Thinkpad T420 in preference to my MacBook Air M1.

The Macbook has a horrible keyboard with no travel. The buttonless trackpad is a pain to use; it's very hard to right-click and even with a 3rd party FOSS app to give me 3-finger middle-click, it's almost impossible to do it precisely. I use middle-click hundreds of times a day, but I have no use for trackpad gestures. It has a wretched 2 USB-C ports, one for power. I can't connect a mouse, keyboard, screen and power without carrying a dock. I can't upgrade the RAM. I recently had to remove Asahi Linux because it no longer had enough space to install the latest macOS 15 update -- the SSD can't be upgraded either.

It feels like a laptop designed by and for a tablet user. I am not a tablet user. I don't like them much.

The Thinkpad is a pleasure to use, and I can work on it all day for weeks without feeling especially cramped or anything. It has 2x the RAM and about 10x the SSD space. I've upgraded RAM, keyboard, main SSD, secondary SSD and battery, and it cost me next to nothing.

The only virtues of the Macbook are that it's easy to carry and the battery lasts a long time. It's very unpleasant to actually work on.
by stonecharioteer | 2025-08-03 11:49:02+00:00
I did this. I was laid off without severance from my company in Jan, took a 3 month break, joined a company in May, it was toxic so left after one month. I have enough runway, but I also have aging parents and dad can't get private insurance, so I'm worried about that. Parents get insurance in most companies at India, and corporate insurance works out better than private for them.

I have reached out to my old manager for a job, but I don't get any response from anyone lately. The market is really, really bad, but if you have slightly better conditions than mine (regarding parents and insurance), I'd say you get to decide yourself if it's worth the risk.

I'm worried about applying to companies that ask for DSA rounds because I can't do standard tests like those and I lose my energy from them.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-03 11:49:41+00:00
Shrinking population leads to zero population. Surely this truth is self-evident.

There is no economy without people. There is no nation without natalism.

> it doesn't have to be this way

Absolutely. If the nation can maintain a proper replacement birth rate, the population will be stable. Decline and uncontrolled exponential growth are both undesirable.
by junon | 2025-08-03 11:50:58+00:00
I have a whole private discord server with multiple channels just for this, for my personal projects. Yes yes, walled garden and all, I know. But it's incredibly useful even though I'm the only one in there.

I'd imagine this is highly team dependent. I'd personally love if my company adopted this. I think only one other team member would actually participate though. We're far too busy.
by vidarh | 2025-08-03 11:52:53+00:00
It was at least ten years ago. Hope you're right they've fixed this, because it soured me on even talking to their recruiters for years.

This was for a management position in an area where even the engineers on the team wouldn't need specialist file systems knowledge. The recruiter got incredibly frustrated when she got my feedback not just on that question but the entire set.
by johnklos | 2025-08-03 11:55:28+00:00
I was there last week and was amazed at how little traffic there is everywhere. Sure, many people are off for the summer, but even at the more touristy places and even at the airport you weren't waiting for cars.

Public transit was simple and quick, even with tram lines closed for construction. The whole experiece shows what's possible when you make public transit actually usable. I'd love to live in a city that does this.
by crinkly | 2025-08-03 11:55:48+00:00
We moved off IRC to Slack ages ago. Then they decided Slack was too expensive so we were forced to Teams which is bundled with the inescapable O365 license. We now use IRC again (UnrealIRCd) which runs on a debian VM on someone's workstation in the office.

Clients are all irssi on WSL2 or Macs.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-03 11:56:00+00:00
> immigrants already pay taxes

Immigrants function as imported children in this context. People wouldn't have the children that would grow into economically active adults, so the country had to import those adults from some other country whose people did have children.

> we already run a continuous deficit

Which is unsustainable.

> we could choose to shift existing spending priorities to more pro-family spending

Absolutely. Protecting and promoting families as a national policy is the right solution in my opinion.
by d4rkp4ttern | 2025-08-03 11:57:13+00:00
I find it very effective to use a good STT/dictation app since giving sufficient detailed context to CC is very important, and it becomes tedious to type all of that.

I’ve experimented with several dictation apps, including super whisper, etc., and I’ve settled on Wispr Flow. I’m very picky about having good keyboard shortcuts for hands-free dictation mode (meaning having a good keyboard shortcut to toggle recording on and off), and of course, accuracy and speed. Wispr Flow seems to fit all my needs for now but I’d love to switch to a local-only app and ditch the $15/mo sub :)
by djoldman | 2025-08-03 11:59:12+00:00
This is exactly the kind of obvious mistake that contributes to the complexity of explaining education outcomes. Requiring a "teacher recommendation" to allow a student to take an advanced course introduces bias and consequently is suboptimal to say the least.

That the following had to be done is sadly the state of affairs in the US:

> In 2018, North Carolina passed House Bill 986, Session Law 2018-32, which included Part II: Enrollment in Advanced Mathematics Courses. This legislation established § 115C-81.36, requiring that "any student scoring a level five on the standardized test for the mathematics course in which the student was most recently enrolled shall be enrolled in the advanced course for the next mathematics course in which the student is enrolled."

Edit to add:

This is also the kind of thing that machine learning/"algo" skeptics/detractors skip over or ignore when evaluating automation: humans are often wrong.
by chiph | 2025-08-03 11:59:14+00:00
What I miss about UI development on Windows is the commitment to help me create applications that seamless blend in, and look like something that Microsoft themselves had created. The introduction of web technologies has allowed the visual language of the Windows experience to fragment. Not just because Microsoft hasn't kept older applications up to date (like the Control Panel), but also because the modern tooling isn't providing the libraries to match their style.

From memory, this first started during Vista, where 3rd party devs just weren't able to match the translucency of the new Aero UI. And the lack of articles being published by the MSDN group with titles like "Here's how you add this new feature to your app" with examples in C, C# and Visual Basic.
by dakiol | 2025-08-03 12:00:09+00:00
In my experience, these kind of channels end up being filled with complaints about the company/processes/managers/c-levels… (ofc, managers are not invited to these private channels)

Like, if the ceo said something very stupid in the last All Hands, well, you use the ramble channel to talk about it. Sometimes this works (you feel like you’re not the only one that thinks X), but it could easily go south.
Show HN: Utl:parallel – Work-stealing concurrency library for C++17
by GeorgeHaldane | 2025-08-03 12:00:25+00:00
Hello HN.

Despite the seeming triviality of the problem, there seems to be no stand-alone threadpools that support nested tasks, so I decided to make one and pair it with a proper API for parallel loops and reductions.

Recursive tasks are frequently needed in scatter/gather algorithms, a "standard" C++ solution for such parallelism would be std::async, but as practice shows it is horribly slow for small tasks (below 1ms) due to the overhead of constantly spawning/joining new threads.

To deal with this I implemented a work-stealing threadpool with some additional features sprinkled on top for convenience.

The idea itself is nothing new, but its existing implementations are usually buried somewhere deep inside the larger frameworks and it feels like a waste to bring in a huge dependency just to use what should be at best a single ~400 line class.

All this resulted in a rather nice library that I'd like to showcase here and, perhaps, hear some opinions on its improvement.

In a nutshell: - Work-stealing thread pool with a fully thread-safe API - Tasks, parallel loops and reductions - Support for recursive parallelism - Operates on containers, iterators and index ranges - Single-include, small, easy to use

https://github.com/DmitriBogdanov/UTL/blob/master/docs/modul...
by lproven | 2025-08-03 12:00:37+00:00
> I think optimising for thinness is a stupid goal.

«

I don't WANT my laptop to be the Thinnest Model Yet

I want a battery that will outlast the sun, a screen big enough to blind the person behind me, more USB slots than there are apple fanboys in the bay area, a fucking disc reader/writer

[...]

I will pay extra for it to be heavy enough to bludgeon someone to death.

»

https://www.tumblr.com/canadiangold/675666527469568000/i-don...

I understand that different people want different things. Lots of people like thin light laptops. Maybe they're happy with the wireless peripherals I despise.

But can't those with other choices be offered something too?
by ScoutRap | 2025-08-03 12:00:59+00:00
This seems similar idea to audio water marking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia

This stopped me from playing any movie that had this implemented via PS3 Media Server on my PS3. Most movies that are done by Sony Pictures will have this implemented. I ended up using my Xbox 360 instead because Microsoft would not pay to license the tech IIRC.
by bsenftner | 2025-08-03 12:01:01+00:00
I've been working remote for over 25 years, and one of the better options to what this post is describing is to open, and leave open a voice channel / speaker phone on in all the locations that a remote team operates. Of course, this is not every day, but is used to create a "shared virtual space" that is very useful when the team is exploring something new as a group, and ambient conversation while doing so aids one another, plus social chatter and jokes are natural then too. Furthering a sense of community.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-08-03 12:01:26+00:00
> It's just going to provide a weak substitute for actual socialization.

The author of the article calls it "artifical empathy". But it could have a profound socio-economic effect.

> Our argument was that, in certain ways, the latest crop of A.I.s might make for better company than many real people do

It is a fascinating and uncomfortable proposition. Some users of the early chatbot ELIZA [1] were convinced that it had real understanding. (Weizenbaum: "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.")

Can a society find itself unable to socialise itself, can an entire generational cohort of people become socially dysfunctional to the point where it is more "satisfying" to interact with "artificial empathy"? Given enough disinformation, failing education standards, and outright propaganda... the answer seems to be yes.

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
by alan-crowe | 2025-08-03 12:01:38+00:00
What I found most interesting in the article was the frank acknowledgement by J B Rhine that Walter Levy, director of the Institute for Parapsychology was committing fraud.

I view research into parapsychology with a background assumption that I understand the motivation. Reductionist materialism suggests that death is the end. Parapsychology may imply the existence of souls, a spiritual realm, life after death, and maybe the chance of heaven. What wonderful balm for existential angst!

Does this make me doubt research into parapsychology? No, quite the opposite. A researcher can only soothe the pain of existential angst with genuine results. If they fake the research, they know that they faked it, and it provides no consolation. My take is that I cannot dismiss positive results in parapsychology as fraud.

Grifters are real. It is possible in principle that researchers in parapsychology are faking results with an eye to making money selling pills that "boost your ESP". I think that I am able to spot and dismiss grifts without difficulty, and that it is not what is at issue here.

But now I learn that I'm wrong. Walter Levy's results are fake. I have to flip from modus ponens to modus tollens. Instead of saying "I understand the motivation, therefore Levy's results are genuine", I have to say "Levy's results are fake, therefore I don't understand the motivation".

I'm in a pickle. A central principle of how I understand the world is that fraud is motivated. No motive, no fraud. Now what? Since there is motiveless fraud, much of what I thought I knew about the world is on shaky ground.
by eliezerpujols | 2025-08-03 12:02:20+00:00
You have a valid point. Although dares or questions are AI-generated, they are also constantly monitored. As you said, we want people to have a good time, not to get hurt, and also so they can make sense (they sometimes don't) :)

Crowdsourcing on Reddit sounds great. I like the idea, thank you so much.
by echo42null | 2025-08-03 12:02:20+00:00
We used to have something very similar with our office coffee machine – spontaneous 1‑2 minute chats while grabbing a coffee. Sometimes it was just, “Sorry, can’t talk, swamped right now,” and the other person would rush off – but even that told you something.

These micro‑interactions gave valuable context: which teams were under pressure, where things might be stuck, and sometimes where a quick helping hand was needed.

When we went remote, we tried to recreate this with a single global “coffee chat” channel. It worked for a while, but quickly became noisy.

I really like your idea of having one ramblings channel per person instead. It feels like a cleaner way to keep that background awareness and human connection alive without overwhelming everyone. We’re going to try this next.
by larodi | 2025-08-03 12:03:24+00:00
Given intros (where these keygen chiptunes originate from) were the precursor for, and are also considered by many to be part thereof, the demoscene, are we to assume this is also a UNESCO cultural heritage as per these news headlines...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26522681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36597460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43533362

...?
by kitten_mittens_ | 2025-08-03 12:03:26+00:00
I agree vision zero hasn’t been particularly effective in the US. In Boston, we have roads like Jamaicaway where the speed limit was lowered to 25mph and people regularly drive 50. Speed limits are functionally unenforced.

Human behavior as a focal point of blame is skewered in a book that just came out.

https://a.co/d/21guqjp argues that traffic engineering and design is what has resulted in the much higher death rate in the US than its peer countries. If lanes are wide (3.5m or larger), people will drive as fast as is enforced.
by dogman1050 | 2025-08-03 12:04:12+00:00
Ah yes, brings to mind a new engineer we hired in the early 90's with with an excellent academic record from a fine school introducing himself to the team by emailing everyone an obfuscated one-liner C program that did something cute. Several members of the team responded to him with lists of ways in which his program violated our recently create style guide. We were a fun group.
by atoav | 2025-08-03 12:04:53+00:00
Not trying to offend anyone as this is a matter of taste, but I can't help finding the American "masculine truck" ugly and cringeworthy.

Maybe it is me being the from European Alps and having close contact with people who actually have to drive vehicles in challenging terain (for forest work and hunting). And those cars are typically the polar opposite of the pseudo-masculine big truck: You want them small, because where you go there are trees and rocks that won't move out of the way just because your car looks masculine. You want them light because you are moving across badly maintained forest roads, etc. You want them ugly because you will be scraping more things than you like. And unless you have need for moving bulk loads like water containers for alpine cows regularly a closed back is much more practical, at least in this climate (if you need to move such a thing, get a trailer).

Over here these trucks are relatively rare, and likely smaller than their American variants, and mostly driven by a certain type of man as what appears to be a fashion choice.

Maybe it is a cultural or generational thing, but to me a car is a tool and I don't connect a lot of my identity to it. That doesn't mean I don't like a specific car or don't like to be able to mainrain one myself etc. It is just that I like functional efficient machines and a big tank weighing many tons that you drive in mostly alone is the opposite of that.
by joshuanapoli | 2025-08-03 12:06:55+00:00
For the time being, AI doesn’t have good access to a lot of things: customers, information in 3rd party systems, etc. Even when we give access (with MCP, for example), current AI has trouble locating the right information to solve a problem.

So I still need an engineer to find out why the distributed system isn’t performing correctly, or to create a new component that is coherent with the rest of the existing UI. The difference is that any particular engineer will find more success tackling a wider range of goals.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-08-03 12:07:33+00:00
At the start of the pandemic I saw tools that reminded me of old social flash games I would play as a kid (habbo hotel, club penguin, Gaia online) where you had a kind of avatar you could move around a 2D cubicle farm, and the program would adjust the volume of other people as they moved closer/further from you. Thered always be voice enabled (unless you muted obviousl) but i think the idea was to lower the social cost of initializing voice communication

Neat idea, but personally I think the benefit of working remotely is asynchronous communication - I think we should encourage more forum-like communication rather than something like a ventrillo channel, though bringing back vent would be cool