MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by firstofmany | 2025-08-03 17:12:12+00:00
The problem wasn't some drunk idiot walking into a crane at night, it was that the contractors had blocked the footpath, forcing pedestrians - including the disabled, small children and people with babies in strollers - to walk into the road unprotected. I mean, would you think it was over-reavhing paternalism if the police intervened because some contractors set up a crane in a lane of the freeway without setting up cones, etc.? It's the same basic issue.
by topato | 2025-08-03 17:12:44+00:00
I think that was the first R rated movie I saw as a child (and probably the first movie I pirated, on pre-P2P networks). The grand wisdom of the Geto Boys (sic) has stuck with me ever since. "The type of chicks that'd double up on a dude like me do [care about money]" I've gotten way off topic
by clort | 2025-08-03 17:13:22+00:00
tbh this is to be expected? I don't read UN reports, I expect reporters to read them and distill the information. I don't read research papers, I expect journalists to read them and present something reasonable to a layman. I don't read the minutae of the laws being passed, I expect lawyers and politicians to debate the finer points.

So perhaps my expectations are not being met? Unfortunately I don't have time to pay attention to everything.
by msdrigg | 2025-08-03 17:13:45+00:00
Seems like the regulation works well when it is applied. Why is there a need for a simpler solution? Why try to replace it with a 'simpler' tax with none of the human consideration about how the m/a could lead to less competition.

Like if this regulation was replaced in favor of this tax, a big company merging with another big company would be considered fine when obviously big company mergers can be just as concerning as larger companies buying smaller ones
by benoau | 2025-08-03 17:13:48+00:00
Yes it should have changed, but I disagree with your metric on measuring how change is required.

By very-rarely revisiting these ~17 year old policies they avoided naturally-increasing their specs to foster and keep-up with more demanding software, and subsequently in the last two generations had to play catch-up and rush to upgrade their entire product line to a higher baseline of memory to support AI and increase their thermal capacities to support their foray into AAA games, leaving billions of active iOS devices as unsupported.
by bbqfog | 2025-08-03 17:14:09+00:00
I worry that the people/organizations that have access to the raw underlying models give us the "non-evil" versions yet can explicitly tune their models to achieve any goal without restriction. Examples may include: "How do I get the most work out of my employees for the least amount of pay", "Who in the government is most susceptible to bribes and how should I approach them?" or even "Give me a strategy to ethnically cleanse a region while navigating international relations". It could be anything and those in power (without naming names, I would consider many of them evil for sure) can use them to achieve their goals while leaving the rest of us unable to defend ourselves. To some degree it feels like the right to bear arms has intersecting goals.
by kmill | 2025-08-03 17:15:26+00:00
I see people on Zulip using Copilot to write Lean proofs, and they have some success, but the quality is really bad right now, creating long, unmaintainable proofs. New users get stuck, thinking they're 90% of the way to the end, but really the whole thing probably should be scrapped and they should start over.

It's a bit frustrating because, before Copilot, new users would come with proofs and you could spend some time helping them write better proofs and they'd learn things and gain skills, but now it's not clear that this is time well spent on my part. Copilot is not going to learn from my feedback.
by j45 | 2025-08-03 17:15:30+00:00
Where rambling might not have a positive connotation, imagining them as "musing" channels seemed to resonate.

Having a way to share what's on your mind that might not get shared is usually what can happen in person during the early days of a startup.

It can also allow the initial startup group to have a better connected sense of what's going on in each person's world compared to what they take the time to type.
by bluGill | 2025-08-03 17:16:20+00:00
Most enterprise locations are no towing. Most uhaul trucks are the same despite that webpage. When hou find otn that can tow the costs are so high that it is almost always cheaper to own a truck you drive empty 95% of the time. You have to run your own numbers but everytime I run them for me I can't justify a car and renting a truck when I need one. (I mostly ride my bike)
by benreesman | 2025-08-03 17:16:40+00:00
Even this one victory (and it was more than one) is one more than the fucking nothing we're getting on pushback from the SEC to the FDA to the FCC and back again now: this is #CrimeSeason baby (or so its called on Twitter), oligarchs in the front row and all. The last 3 administrations have been soft on FAANG and its going really badly.

The argument that she had the correct agenda, won a few, lost most to a captured judiciary (correct me if I'm mis-characterizing your position) is probably the stupidest thing I've seen on one of the dumbest threads in recent memory.

Can you clarify where I've lost the plot with your argument and restore some of my sorely tested faith in humanity?
by turnsout | 2025-08-03 17:17:19+00:00
Three things to add:

1. Neither the Lisa nor Mac "copied" the Alto. They took inspiration, but again, the Lisa project began before the team ever visited Xerox. These ideas were in the air in SV, but no one had figured out how to commercialize it. Sort of like conversational UI circa 2015.

2. The Mac was more than a warmed-over Lisa. If you use both, you'll see how much more polished and complete the Mac is.

3. The Mac was a product where the price point really mattered, and was part of the product identity. You can't have "the computer for the rest of us" at the Lisa's price point. Getting that retail price down required a ton of ingenious software and hardware engineering, which was driven forward relentlessly by Jobs.
by zevon | 2025-08-03 17:17:27+00:00
Just a random powered USB-C Hub with a few external drives on one port and a Thunderbolt SSD I had from an old project on the other. For now, I just use the SMB server built into MacOS because I've not gotten around to installing Asahi on it.

I think I turned auto update off on this machine but if it reboots, you would have to login first. Doesn't bother me, though. I don't have any uptime requirements.
by exiguus | 2025-08-03 17:17:40+00:00
I think there are two kinds of people: Those who fly often and those who fly a few times a year. Regular flyers know their airports, the days and vacation times. Then you can reduce to 30 minutes airport time. If you only fly a few times a year or don't know the airport well and are traveling during the vacation season, you have to play it safe. Then 1 hour of flight time can quickly add up to 4-6 hours. However, as long as airplane fuel is subsidized, few people will pay twice as much for trains, even if they are just as fast or faster and much more comfortable.
by kccqzy | 2025-08-03 17:18:46+00:00
I do this after every long drive: I reflect and think about whether there were any near-misses or potentially unsafe actions during the drive and I write them down. Things like: that one time I forgot to look over the shoulder when I changed lanes and the car behind honked at me; or that one time I passed a bicyclist with only 2 ft separation. Reflecting on these afterwards makes me more aware of how I can improve my own driving safety.
by OmarShehata | 2025-08-03 17:18:51+00:00
> The last thing we need is a formal framework of how to have organic discussions.

this is no different from best practices for programming though. People take a rule that generally works well, but a manager who doesn't understand it tries to enforce it blindly ("more unit tests!!") and it stops working

computer engineering & social engineering share a lot of the same failure modes (which is good news, if you are very good at debugging computers, but find people & politics confusing, you can unlock the latter once you see in what ways your insight in one domain can transfer to the other)
by no_op | 2025-08-03 17:19:31+00:00
Apple's "strategic vision" for AI is to add a computer use agent (AI assistant) to the OS to perform tasks on behalf of the user, plus contextually surface AI capabilities in many specific contexts they've got utility (copy editing, image generation, photo organization, translation, coding).

What's missing here? What else should they be doing? What are their competitors doing, in any space relevant to their markets, that's much different? None of these critiques ever seem to say.

If AI ends up being another 'normal' technology, Apple's advantages in distribution (~2B active devices, with a user base that installs updates pretty reliably), ability to give their AI tools access to your existing data and apps, and general facility with packaging tech so consumers actually understand what it's good for, put them in an extremely strong position to capture value from it.

If AI ends up being something other than a 'normal' technology, if we really are a few years from building the sand god, well, all bets are off, and it's a little silly to evaluate the strategic planning of an individual company against that backdrop.
by const_cast | 2025-08-03 17:21:12+00:00
Well they're already doing this and much worse, so no need to appeal to something fake. There's plenty of actual awful things our elected officials are doing which you can point to.

But, the idea is, that we're not out here proposing that we stop paying taxes. We're not the ones committing a Jan 6th, are we?

The solution to Trump isn't assassinating him or whatever, it's legally impeaching him or not voting for him. That's how a democracy works.
by vannevar | 2025-08-03 17:22:03+00:00
The analogy of education to housing "bubbles" doesn't work. Housing bubbles are economically destructive because dropping prices induce new sellers to drop their price even further, which reduces the market value for everyone. There is a reinforcement loop.

No such mechanism happens in education, once you have your degree it is yours forever. There is no secondary market. If the value goes down, sure, other people will not pay as much for new degrees, but there's no direct connection between the market value and the tuition. There is no reinforcement loop.
by andrewrn | 2025-08-03 17:23:27+00:00
Nice piece. At this point I am pretty exasperated at the ~ decade of efforts I've made to reduce my social media usage as a gen-z person.

The greyscale, the turning off notifications, the uninstalling of apps, the screen time blocks. The only things that have had long-term (and yet still incomplete) benefit is physically separating myself from my phone, like leaving it in the car or at home during dinner, as well as maximally delaying phone usage in the morning.

Whats frustrating is that the discourse, like in this essay, usually revolves around summoning discipline or willpower on the part of the user, and usually doesn't discuss the behavior of the tech companies. These apps and technologies are engineered very carefully to exploit the fast, instinctual type 1 side of your brain that, for good reasons, has evolutionary has dominion over the deliberate, thoughtful type 2 thinking that I think most of us would prefer to be doing more of.

Because of this, I just don't see this scourge changing through efforts on the parts of the users. Maybe that's pessimistic.
by threetonesun | 2025-08-03 17:23:27+00:00
It used to be common to say you're taking a "mental health day", which was a recognition that while maybe you were not physically ill (or were, just not in a way anyone else had to worry about or to an extent that you couldn't make it to the office), you were not in a state to contribute meaningfully to the work being done.

Which is fine. And better than the people who show up no matter what and drag others down by being miserable and making mistakes.
by nixgeek | 2025-08-03 17:24:10+00:00
Most new drives are sold into consumer/end user retail around $20/TB and only seem to dip a little during sales (with most sellers also quantity limiting any sales, also). Getting to $10/TB is possible but typically involves buying manufacturer recertified, and may involve going smaller (14-16TB drives) than you might prefer.

I managed to find 64x Seagate Exos 20TB for $13/TB new about 2 years ago, on NewEgg of all places, but I’ve never seen that deal repeat. :(

All the new 30TB+ HDDs using HAMR technology from Seagate and WD still feel like expensive unobtainium.
by thoijro442334 | 2025-08-03 17:24:20+00:00
Can you blame him ?

Facebook is a sewer (like all of internet to some extent); Instagram is a teenage depression-inducing drug; and Whatsapp is sufficiently important that it can't be monetized to destruction.

I'm surprised Meta is valued like Google, and not like HP or some other has-been, given that it's running on the spamming crummy ads towards lonely boomers and divorced millenials.

The only bright-spot is their AI lab with Yann and the PyTorch team.
by turnsout | 2025-08-03 17:24:59+00:00
You're completely discounting quality of execution, which in this case is everything. It's the whole ballgame.

I had friends who were Palm Treo die-hards, and they dropped them unceremoniously in 2008 when they used an iPhone for the first time. They were already used to carrying around a phone that could do email and access the internet. But the qualitative jump to the iPhone was so big that it upended the industry and became quite literally the most successful consumer product of all time. If you can't see how that's different from Palm, I don't know what to tell you.
by dash2 | 2025-08-03 17:25:03+00:00
I've seen exactly the same thing in Latin, where instead of learning "nominative", "accusative" and "genitive" cases for nouns, pupils were told about "case 1", "case 2" and "case 3". First, this disconnects their knowledge from the previous centuries of knowledge about Latin grammar. Second, it relies on the assumption that long Latinate words must be difficult, whereas meaningless numbers must be easy. So silly.
by kepano | 2025-08-03 17:25:47+00:00
In practice 2-10 individual channels with 1-3 posts per week has less overhead than one off-topic channel with 30 posts because there's less mystery meat. It reduces the "am I missing something important?" feeling.

We do also have an off-topic channel but on our team the individual rambling channels get more posts. Maybe because it's less likely to derail an existing conversation and allows more continuity with each person's thoughts.
by nucleardog | 2025-08-03 17:26:34+00:00
> It rarely becomes a source of career hindrance or long-lasting judgement, it just ends up being useless because there's not a lot of incentive for the expert side of the equation.

Yeah, the incentive structure for something like this is totally misaligned for this to work effectively in many cases outside of a very small, tight-knit team. (In which case... why the formality in the first place?)

For the "juniors": Why waste time digging through documentation, searching, or thinking--I can just post and get an answer with less effort.

For the "seniors": I'm already busy. Why waste time answering these same questions over and over when there's no personal benefit to doing so?

Sure, there are some juniors that will try and use it as a last resort and some seniors that will try their best to be helpful because they're just helpful people... but I usually see the juniors drowned out by those described above and the experts turn into those described above.

I think we _could_ come up with something that better aligned incentives though. Spitballing--

Juniors can ask a question. Once a senior answers, the junior then takes responsibility for making sure that question doesn't need to be answered there again--improving the documentation based on that answer. Whether that's creating new documentation, adding links or improving keywords to help with search, etc. That change then gets posted for a quick edit/approval by the senior mainly to ensure accuracy.

Now we're looking at something more like:

For the "juniors": If I ask a question, I will get an answer but it will create additional work on my end. If I ask something already answered in the documentation that I could have easily found, I basically have to publicly out myself as not having looked when I can't propose an improvement to the documentation. And that, fairly, is going to involve some judgement.

For the "seniors": Once I answer a question, someone is going to take responsibility for getting this from my head into documentation so I never need to answer this again.

This has an added benefit of shifting some of the documentation time off of the higher paid, generally more productive employees onto the lower paid, less productive employees and requiring them to build out some understanding in order to put it into words. It may also help produce some better documentation because stuff that a senior writes is more often going to assume knowledge that stuff a junior writing may think to explain because _they_ didn't know it. It also means that searching in the Slack/other channel, any question you find should end up with a link to the documentation where it's been answered which should help you discover more adjacent documentation all of which should be the most up-to-date and canonical answer we have.
by ctoth | 2025-08-03 17:26:39+00:00
Can someone explain to me how "preventative steering" isn't an implementation of the most-forbidden technique?

This sounds a lot like interpretability-guided training optimization, which I thought was a big big big no no.

It will still introduce optimization pressure no?

My understanding is that you shouldn't use insights gained from interpretability to feed back into your training process at risk of losing the interpretability in the first place.
by 44za12 | 2025-08-03 17:26:45+00:00
I have breach parser that i had written to parse through over 3 billion rows of compressed data (by parsing i simply mean searching for a particular substring), I’ve tried multiple LLMs to make it faster (currently it does so in <45 seconds on an M3 pro mac) none have been able to do that yet.

https://github.com/44za12/breach-parse-rs

Feel free to drop ideas if any.
by Nizoss | 2025-08-03 17:26:59+00:00
Hi HN!

I built this to automatically enforce Test-Driven Development in Claude Code so that I can focus on designing solutions instead of policing TDD. It uses test reporters to collect the latest results and hooks into file operations to block violations such as premature or over-implementation.

One key takeaway from building this tool is that mechanically blocking TDD violations doesn't automatically lead to better software and that the refactor phase is critical for achieving the software qualities that TDD aims to promote.

The agent often skips the refactor step of the red-green-refactor cycle, or at best performs only superficial changes. The result is code that works, but suffers from tight coupling, duplication, and poor design. This reinforced the idea that TDD’s value lies in the mindset and discipline it fosters, not in mechanically following its rules.

Another takeaway is that measuring “good design” is hard. Finding practical tools to detect unnecessary complexity was trickier than expected. Most tools I evaluated are correlated with line count, which is not very useful, or required extensive setup that made them impractical.

That said, I have added some mechanisms to prompt the agent to perform basic refactoring using lint tools. Deeper, more meaningful refactoring is still up to the developers.

I'm happy with the results so far and have received a lot of positive feedback.

It currently supports these test frameworks:

- JavaScript/TypeScript: Jest and Vitest

- Python: Pytest

- PHP: PHPUnit

I'd love to hear your feedback or questions. Contributions and support for additional frameworks are welcome!
by ben_w | 2025-08-03 17:27:39+00:00
The UK has been doing that since at least the Victorian era; it's not the USA, it doesn't share the USA's position about freedom of expression being paramount.

Slightly more recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover

And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Whitehouse
by const_cast | 2025-08-03 17:27:43+00:00
This largely isn't true. If you talk to people who work in nightlife and have for a while, they will tell you that patronage is down significantly over the past couple decades.

If you do actually go to a bar or club, you'll even notice nobody is dancing. People don't even dance anymore.

But if you don't want to believe me, we do actually have statistics. Young people are drinking less than ever and having less sex than ever. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, but if people aren't fucking and drinking - why would they be going to bars? To play Scrabble?
by throwaway743 | 2025-08-03 17:28:57+00:00
Happened at an ex-employer's where they were prying on people's chats, emails, whatever accounts they were logged into while connected to their network without them knowing, and using what they found for office politics. From what I found and had confirmed from someone in IT, at a minimum at least one manager was using mitm software, IT had sslstrip on network traffic (I know there's a real security use for it but they also used it to pry), managers requested IT to let them read other people's emails, and managers had logs of chats (not sure if that was feature for admins/paid subscribers). Also happened at a well known company someone I know worked at, where they monitored and fired people over what they wrote in chats.

Careful with what you type if they're paying for the software, devices, and/or your traffic is routed through their network.
by benreesman | 2025-08-03 17:30:08+00:00
Who said I had anything against gangsters? ;)

But lets call it what it is: when a bunch of made men see a power vacuum and set up an informal clique with its own rules and loyalty tests while protesting "just a merchant nothing to see here"?

Thats like, the entry for gangster on the Wiki for the Sopranos.