MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jimmydoe | 2025-08-29 03:53:00+00:00
I am not particularly worried about authoritarian in China in long term.

Western especially the US has long been the release valve for CCP to manage dissidents and alike, and it’s been quite effective, countless young souls looking for freedom was assimilated and became faceless in the capitalism machinery abroad, instead of fighting for their future in China.

The self enshitification of USA will slowly but surely close that loophole CCP has been enjoying, and force more young Chinese to make China a better place for themselves as they will have no other choices.
by AstralStorm | 2025-08-29 03:53:06+00:00
See the key here is, the AI provides a very enticing social partner.

Think of it as a version of making your drugged friend believe various random stuff. It works better if you're not a stranger and have an engaging or alarming style.

LLMs are trained to produce pleasant responses that tailor to the user to maximize positive responses. (A more general version of engagement.) It stands to reason they would be effective at convincing someone.
by randycupertino | 2025-08-29 03:54:08+00:00
This is a really interesting and insightful comment! I'd add WWI/WWII to your examples- the French were so used to entrenched warfare they poured all their efforts into the Maginot Line because fortifications and prepared positions were the thing to do... only to be trounced with the mobility and swiftness of blitzkrieg.

Also imo USA & the UN let Rwanda genocide happen because they were gunshy after Black Hawk Down in Mogadishu thus everyone was so reluctant to commit forces even though even limited intervention early on could have stopped hundreds of thousands of atrocities. The overreaction to Somalia paralyzed effective action anywhere else.
by MrDunham | 2025-08-29 03:54:09+00:00
There was a great comedic bit on this:

"Thank you for flying Delta? I'd fly a kite if it was $11 cheaper"

I couldn't find the comedian, but the truth in it hits.

Side note: if I recall correctly Delta listened to their customers a decade+ back, gave more leg room, then nearly went bankrupt because no one wanted to pay more for the service.
by vostok | 2025-08-29 03:54:39+00:00
As someone who lives in a city, I'm not sure what I'd do with a car that is smaller than a tank. If it's a small car then it's probably for local trips and super inconvenient to park / re-park / etc. I want a big car to comfortably fit my family, our outdoor toys, and maybe even tow something.

Even if I lived outside a city, what do I gain by driving a smaller car? Going from 35 to 55 mpg? Parking is plentiful and equally convenient for big cars these days.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-29 03:54:48+00:00
Most developing countries are capitalistic and still have a system where when you go into a shop and talk to somebody, it's often the person who owns that shop. It's part of the many reasons I'm a huge fan of decentralization in basically everything. It's absolutely wonderful.

I don't think capitalism inherently trends towards corporatism. Very few companies can grow massively on their own merit. It's often a mixture of anti-competitive behavior and mergers/acquisitions. So one obvious thing is to actually prevent mergers/acquisitions unless there is a provable and immediate benefit to customers, and split up companies if that benefit can be shown, to a civil law standard, to have not played out at any point over the next let's say 20 years. And obviously crack down hard on anti-competitive behavior with criminal consequences for executives and board members.

Boom, corporatism solved. But you need to solve it before it happens because otherwise you end up in a scenario where corporations will eventually also come to own politicians.
by hilbert42 | 2025-08-29 03:55:04+00:00
This seemingly repulsive story is nothing of the sort but rather a mine of very interesting information.

Its historical coverage of the problem of sewerage and waste disposal is both wide ranging and comprehensive—how early humans spread waste to fertilize crops to Ancient Rome's obsession with cleanliness and its sewer infrastructure through to Dr John Snow, cholera and the shutting off of the Broad St pump and London's Great Sink of 1858 and Joseph Bazalgette's great sewer infrastructure.

The article concludes with modern sewer treatments and sewerage as a resource—the gathering of disease/medical information and the recovering of valuable materials therefrom.

This article is both very well researched and presented and it's well worth the read—or one can listen to the audio stream.

Highly recommended.
by xethos | 2025-08-29 03:55:29+00:00
I can hit 40-60 WPM on a BlackBerry keyboard, but a chicklet keyboard is too much for honest-to-god software developers?

The small screen is equally ludicrous. The desktops of a few decades ago had lower resolution on physically smaller displays, and I consider a large, crisp display a must-have for longer sessions - not a hard requirement for smaller, quicker tasks

Not having a trackpad is one reason the iPad supports USB mice too, and giving some users a trackpad would result in the same complaint: "This is terrible, can I use a real mouse please?". More to the point, parent is complaining about keyboard cases with trackpads, which are mediocre in part precisely because Apple has constructed a software ecosystem that is hostile to powerful, desktop-style programs
by trinsic2 | 2025-08-29 03:55:35+00:00
Appreciate the responses. Not quite sure what to focus on yet. I'm still just brain storming and looking for sources on the subject.

I wondered if upbringing and life experiences that produce emotional stress wires the brain in a certain way that causes distortions in thinking that are cumulative over time. Cognitive bias is one of those as well that might be open to interpretation on this.

There is an article on this phenomenon[0] that talks about this subject. It may, or may not be passed by genes. But I think the interesting point is that this might lead to echo chambers when interacting with other individuals which could amplify distortions that could cause groups of people to see the world slightly different from a baseline.

I wonder if there is any evidence about the evolution of the mind in regard to stress tolerances.

[0]: https://darnall.tricare.mil/News-Gallery/Articles/Article/42...
by dhdjsjfjejd | 2025-08-29 03:55:44+00:00
I'm not arguing that it was a good slide: just extremely average in the context that it was created. If there was a problem with communication, then it was solely on the reader for not being fluent in their own field. The engineers were presenting a nuanced view of their data, which went above the heads of the NASA personnel who were evidently only capable of interpreting a simple "yes or no" answer.
by oefrha | 2025-08-29 03:55:44+00:00
Yeah, for $100k or slightly less you can hire very good devs with 5+ yr experience in CN or DE. Often speaks English at full professional proficiency without the help of LLMs too. I know because I currently work for a fully remote startup with people from both countries. For that kind of money you can do what in the U.S., hire below average juniors? Even the most clueless junior likely makes more in SV.
by btown | 2025-08-29 03:56:41+00:00
https://colcarroll.github.io/ppl-api/ is likely a good starting point to get a taste of examples in Python; some use custom languages, but the success of Python-native frameworks in the LLM world I think has shown that embracing that makes interop and composability more possible at scale.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941145 has some discussion here as well, though it’s a few years old.

Pyro and NumPyro seem to be popular at the moment!
by h4ny | 2025-08-29 03:56:50+00:00
I have been using NoScript for years and I find calling it "perfectly usable" is a bit of a stretch at least for my use case. I can only see it being "perfectly usable" if you only visit mostly the same sites most of the time and have already enabled whatever you need to enable.

I visit new websites all the time because of HN and Reddit, and without JavaScript many sites just don't work or look too broken for me to want to read anything. Unless we collectively decide to stop using buttons instead of anchors for navigation and stop having external, unrelated JavaScript blocking the actual site (that, sometimes funny enough, doesn't require JavaScript to function), it's not going to get any better.

I went through a phase where I think JavaScript is bad and have used CSS instead of JavaScript for a lot of things (mostly because I enjoy writing CSS). The thing is if you have ever tried developing any substantial and moderately complex feature for an actual product with CSS instead of JavaScript, while keeping them readable, maintainable and scalable, you will realize that they are good for different things and talking about them in a mutually exclusive way isn't helpful.

Both CSS and JavaScript are constantly evolving, I agree with you that there are now things that we should do with CSS instead of JavaScript and increasingly more so.
by kamaal | 2025-08-29 03:57:13+00:00
>>Agreed, as an OO scripting language it's lovely, especially compared to Perl where the OO features never meshed quite right.

Back then the whole OO crowd was with Java though.

Python's Moat was beginner friendliness to write simple scripts, which at the time- Perl was more like a thermonuclear scripting language. Most people who never wanted to graduate to that advanced stage of writing mega million lines of Perl code over a week(which was literally the use of Perl then), realised they needed some thing simpler, easier to learn, and maintain for smaller scripts- Kind of moved to Python.

But then of course simplicity only takes you that far, and its logically impossible to have a simple clean interface to problems that require several variables tweaked. Python had to evolve and is now having the same bloat and complications that plague any other language.

Having said that, I would still use Java if I had to start a backend project.
by TZubiri | 2025-08-29 03:57:24+00:00
This is one of the takeaways I wasn't able to formulate. Author added some disclaimers which already clarified their inexperience with the world. But I think that a.. preference for avoid human interactions, and a worldview of computer systems with no human systems are what explains why Author wasn't able to quickly adapt to this adult experience.

What sealed the deal of this interpretation to me:

"He literally writes down a phone number on a piece of paper. This is all feeling so surreal."

Why would this feel so surreal? Gauging by the dates, Author was born in around 1994, phones where definitely a thing, and phone numbers more so. My interpretation is that this guy was absolutely absorbed in computers, every social interaction occured in dms, or emails or posts, or articles. Both the 'unsophisticated' act of transmitting numbers and the need to deal with a human in real time were foreign. Without going into harsher labels like autism or antisociality, I think it's definitely the type of behaviour (described as being heads down), that is necessary to be competent enough with computers to build a hypertechnical security product over the span of almost a decade.

The point of view of the banker and how he fumbled this as well is a nice touch, illustrates the advantages of throwing a bone to your business partners. I mean even if you think of it from a non social perspective, only business, this is a supplier like any other, loyalty and gifts go a long way in general. But I guess that you don't need business acumen for a startup, you can just hyperfocus on your product and have your investors worry about the rest.
by aniforprez | 2025-08-29 03:58:34+00:00
If you want me to blame "software design" then I can point to the fact that the TV app lags constantly on my M2 especially when I click the "download episode" button which should not ever be a thing on their native hardware, that there is a WindowsServer process that steadily eats up all the RAM that consistently needs to be quit in order to free up memory, that the headphone balance constantly resets to some random value where the audio comes mostly out of my left ear which has apparently been a problem for decades, that Spotlight is less than useless and STILL shows "Disk Utility" as the top result when I search "dis" instead of showing Discord an app that I open on an almost daily basis, that randomly the fingerprint login simply will not work for seconds at a time...

This is just the stuff I remember. This is a 16GB M2 Macbook Pro. Not a single native Apple made app or process should be lagging, let alone using up enough memory that sometimes apps just completely crash. Again, my windows desktop hasn't had a blue screen or a hard crash in the decade that I've used it and it had a worse configuration with 16GB of RAM and an old AMD CPU.
by root_axis | 2025-08-29 03:59:13+00:00
Are people really replacing customer service agents with LLMs? It doesn't seem practical.

Customer service handles all the things that customers aren't trusted to manage on their own with a self-service portal - that's the whole point of having a trusted human involved at all. Giving those tasks to LLMs won't work because the customer can just prompt inject their way to whatever toolcalls correspond to their desired outcome.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-29 04:00:49+00:00
Update 0: Fixed title, it's 5 rather than 4, and possibly another that's undisclosed.

Update 1: Apparently, GNOME bureaucracy is holding up the processing the application of a new maintainer for over a month now. Major browsers responded by deprecating/removing XSLT support. XSLT is/was mainly used for rendering and transforming SGML, HTML, and XML to other forms, I didn't even realize browsers supported it directly. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/150

--- List

0: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/139

1: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/140

2: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/144

3: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/148

4: BIGSLEEP-433713988 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/433713988

> Please be aware: nobody will merge your fix because there are no active maintainers remaining. (If anybody is interested in maintaining libxslt, please let me know.) Having patches here will help a lot anyway, though, since downstream vendors will be able to use them.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/144#note_245...

List of FreeBSD ports that are unlikely to build without `make DISABLE_VULNERABILITIES=yes`:

https://pastebin.com/raw/5dQ2U46f

I guess, technically, if libxslt isn't statically or dynamically linked in like browsers and some other programs do and only used as a build dep such as through xsltproc, there's not really a security issue after a build. For all runtime use / direct linking of libxslt, it's still a problem.
by nicknow | 2025-08-29 04:01:00+00:00
Why do we treat boy-girl and girl-boy as different outcomes since they are, per the question, equal outcomes thus representing one possible outcome.

We don't care about which came first or second, only what gender each child is.

Thus the answer, to the question given the information you have, is 50%. The only possible outcomes are girl-girl or girl-boy (where order is irrelevant.)

And this is absolutely NOT the Monty Hall Problem. I don't know why some people are making that reference. The Monty Hall Problem contains three possible choices and one is eliminated by the host, this is what makes the statistical math interesting in that problem. None of that is happening here.

Lets look a the exact wording of the question:

> a family has two children. You're told that at least one of them is a girl. What's the > probability both are girls?

We have a family with two children. Assume we don't know their gender. We'll represent them as XX.

We are told one of them is a female. So now they are represented as GX (remember GX = XG, since order doesn't matter.)

You are left with the question what is the probability that X is female? Well there are only two choices, F and M, and we are told elsewhere that the probability of having a girl is 50/50.

> Assume that the probability of having a girl or boy is 50% and that the birth order has > no effect on the probability.

So the chance of X being female is 50%. Thus the answer is 50%.

You can't say birth order doesn't matter and then use birth order to say the FM and MF are different results. The only possible results are FM and FF (since birth order is irrelevant.)
by DrewADesign | 2025-08-29 04:01:26+00:00
Firstly, I have no idea if it’s worth pursuing because there’s no way I’m going to sign up for anything with that little information about it. After all, Duolingo is, above all else, a data collection platform. Is it paid? Unpaid? The idea sounds potentially valuable to some but that’s the reality of my response.

Secondly, ‘unlock your inner Chad’ might sound tongue-in-cheek to you, but landing on that page cold it sounds like red pill BS.

Thirdly, nothing communicates “This took me a whole afternoon” like the 8-bit throwback music.

For a product that either has a social/cultural outcome or a psychological benefit, there needs to be some indicator that the source is reliable — expert? Person materially successful at causing the kind of positive change you’re trying to lead people through? Any reason why anybody should trust this at all.

What you need to do is before you’ll be able to tell if this is worth pursuing is figure out how to communicate the idea. If you’re planning on selling this, you really need to talk to a marketing person and based on that, enlist the help of a copywriter and designer to tell
by os2warpman | 2025-08-29 04:02:30+00:00
Hypercard died because in 1997 Apple was 3-4 weeks away from bankruptcy and 1998 wasn't that great either.

Before that, Hypercard was so valuable to Apple that they kicked it out the door to Claris and only took it back when Claris turned into a disaster (due to the Apple disaster) and everyone quit to write software for BeOS (lol).

"A friend of a friend of a friend posted to macrumors that jobs killed it because he didn't like it" has as much evidentiary weight behind it as "An elite Knights Templar strike force broke into Apple HQ and stole the source code and threatened Jobs with death if he ever released another version because if you typed 'evilmagic' into the message box, a portal to hell opened up in your room and evil sexy demons were coming out and seducing all of the wholesome pure and innocent computer nerds learning hypercarding."
by somat | 2025-08-29 04:02:49+00:00
The Wii U and Xbox 360 were also triple core machines... both triple core powerpc processors with ATI graphics... Was IBM having a sale on 3 core ppc hardware that year?

I never thought about it before but I actually had to look up die shots to make sure they were not the same processor. and if I can trust the internet they are not. Hell I had to confirm that yes the playstation 3(also ppc, queue x-files theme) only had the one core and it's screwball subprocessers like I remembered.
by tptacek | 2025-08-29 04:02:58+00:00
Tavis Ormandy's post goes into more detail about why this isn't a substantial cost for AI vendors. For my part: we've seen POWs deployed successfully in cases where:

(1) there's a sharp asymmetry between adversaries and legitimate users (as with password hashes and KDFs, or antiabuse systems where the marginal adversarial request has value ~reciprocal to what a legit users gets, as with brute-forcing IDs)

(2) the POW serves as a kind of synchronization clock in a distributed system (as with blockchains)

What's case (3) here?
by jamesbrock | 2025-08-29 04:03:43+00:00
This essay is a treatler manifesto, full of treatler clichés like “customer service simply no longer exists.”

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/treatler-treatlerite

Note that the author does not ask for universal manners and courtesy, the foundation of a pleasant society. Instead he demands “customer service” in which dignity and respect flow in only one direction.

Does the author really want new shoes, or does he mostly want to feel like a very special boy in the shoe store? It is the latter. I suspect he would choose to burn down the world rather than live in a world in which his superior social position as a Customer is unrecognized. Soon the bond markets will neutralize the status conferred by this man’s credit card and we will see which he, and the millions like him, choose.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-29 04:03:44+00:00
From the linked comment

> Process engineers for example have to account for human error rates. [...] Designing systems to detect these errors (which are highly probabilistic!)

> Likewise even for regular mechanical engineers, there are probabilistic variances in manufacturing tolerances.

I read them as relatively confined, thus probabilistic. When a human pushes the wrong button, an elephant isn't raining from the sky. Same way tolerances are bounded.

When requesting a JSON array from an LLM, it could as well decide this time that JSON is a mythological Greek fighter.
by mrdomino- | 2025-08-29 04:04:17+00:00
Yeah, you could use forward error correction too, so any n bits would be enough to reconstruct the input.

Of course then you get into needing software to decode the more advanced encodings; maybe start with a voice transmission explaining in plain language how to decode the first layer, which gives you a program that can decode the second layer, or something.

Starting to sound like an interesting project.
by sneak | 2025-08-29 04:05:40+00:00
The problem with this is that key generation is free, so being a well-behaved unknown bot is the same as being an unidentified bot, which means that you go in the block/captcha/throttle bucket.

It is only useful for whitelisting bots, not for banning bad ones, as bad ones can rotate keys.

Whitelisting clients by identity is the death of the open web, and means that nobody will ever be able to compete with capital on even footing.
by godelski | 2025-08-29 04:06:30+00:00
> Engineers are stuck in the old paradigm of "perfect" algorithms.

Reminds me of a misinterpretation of Knuth.

> Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

He was definitely knocking engineers for wanting to write "perfect" algorithms, but this quote also got bastardized to mean something different from what he said (happens to many clichés). All he said was "grab a fucking profiler before you optimize."

But now, I'm not sure a lot of programmers even know what a profiler is. When was the last time you saw someone profile their code?

Problem is we've taken the idea of "minimum viable product" too far. People are saying "Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to work." I think most people agree. But with the current state of things? I disagree that things even work. We're so far away from the question of optimization. It's bad enough that there are apps that require several gigs to just edit a 30kb document but FFS we're living in a world where Windows Hello crashes Microsoft Outlook. It's not the programs are ugly babies that could be better, they are monstrosities begging to be put to death.

I WISH we could talk about optimization. I WISH our problem was perfectionism. But right now our problem is that everything is a steaming pile of garbage and most people are just shrugging their arms like "it is the way it is". Just because you don't clean up that steaming pile of garbage doesn't mean someone else doesn't. So stop passing the buck.
by aurareturn | 2025-08-29 04:06:34+00:00
This reeks of desperation.

Nah, I think this is the future. You may not like it because HN is very privacy focused and hate giving data away to companies. However, I think it's inevitable that people will want to feed all their work data (and probably personal as well) to an LLM and let it help. I think Nadella's examples are pretty spot on for what current LLMs can do for workers if the LLMs have access to work data.

I think it's exciting personally. I think companies who care about data privacy will run some kind of private inference cloud or private DGX racks.