MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-17 11:04:31+00:00
If you think your policeman is incapable of accepting different political positions, the "conversation" can mean you listening and asking questions to highlight the position of the policeman.

In my country joking about incapability of some public organization is a common topic of jokes it doesn't reveals anything about you, you are just citing "public opinion" as being broadcasted by the state media. You can choose your equivalent in your country.

I thought it is republican accepted stance to rant about the libs not being able to do anything for the public? That's what I think about ranting about the state of the highway.

I thought some like to rant about the "trade restrictions" of the EU? That's what I had in mind.

Will that kind of thing bring you into trouble?

---

> statsi [sic!] troops

That's a good reference, because that's actually what I have in mind. It's not just my personal believe, it is about a lesson from a historic successful revolution.

The troops of the StaSi (ministry for state security) and the NVA (national peoples army) were also convinced that the demonstrators are all rapist, that do horrible things, that will riot and deserve to be shot. They were well prepared to repeat what happened in China just some weeks earlier. The marksmen were all well positioned, the police made violent noise and gestures. Everything was prepared for the next massacre. Do you know what prevented that? The demonstrators being peaceful, singing and praying. It was quite important that nobody shouts, nobody lets themself in anger kick against even a garbage bin.

Like you wrote the police has infinite resources compared to you. They are quite well prepared to you rioting. You know what they aren't prepared for? You treating them like a decent human.

That's why treating them as the brutal animals they often reveal themself as, won't actually help you. They expect you to, and this strengthens their opinions about you. You know what actually might help? Treating them like gentlemen.

> It doesn't have to be logical to you

It isn't about being smart, it's about the power of public opinion. When you say "it has been like this", you are actually weakening the public opinion. That's why that doesn't cause what you want it to.

---

> General disrespect of authority

This shouldn't have any effect on a judgement. Can you seriously be convicted for such nebulous crimes in the USA?
by Shacklz | 2025-08-17 11:04:32+00:00
> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.

The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depressing.
by silverliver | 2025-08-17 11:05:10+00:00
This is why open source software is stronger than ever despite its shortcomings and efforts of large orgs to kill it. Rather than bending backwards and treating it like property (as originally demanded by Bill Gates in his open letter decades ago, we did the right thing and treated it like knowledge (e.g. like mathematics).

Intellectual property was a horrible flawed idea that the world will continue to pay for dearly for decades after it is finally discarded.
by bjackman | 2025-08-17 11:05:28+00:00
We don't actually know how to build the CPU that would replace your vulnerable one.

New CPUs are largely immune to the specific attacks that were published before they were designed. But we aren't gonna get a fast CPU without sidechannels and IMO it's not possible in theory to build a branch predictor that never makes potentially exploitable mispredictions.

In a sense this doesn't change your point but I wanted to take the opportunity to point this out. "This CPU is vulnerable to attack X" just means researchers have found an exploit in practice, which we already knew in theory was there.

This wasn't the expectation before Spectre/Meltdown but now we live in a world where you need to assume a degradation in your CPU's effective performance as we learn about its vulnerabilities and need to apply software workarounds.

I am building "one mitigation to rule them all" called Address Space Isolation but this doesn't fundamentally remove that fact, it just means that when we learn about a CPU's vulns we don't have to build a new mitigation we just have to change the settings on the existing one (and it should be more efficient than the bespoke one would be).
by defrost | 2025-08-17 11:05:45+00:00
The British people, of course, includes those British Nationals with English as a first language, who served in the British armed forces in World War Two.

The UK government, needing workers to help fill post-war labour shortages and rebuild the economy, invited many British people to come to the metropole.

Like all those dark skinned folk of the Windrush generation, and a good number of people who came across to the UK from India and Pakistan.

In more recent, pre-Brexit, years that invitation to fill a labour vacuum went out to fellow EU member states.
by Andrewagagma | 2025-08-17 11:06:16+00:00
---

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with an AI that can analyze personality traits from your daily chat screenshots.

It’s still a side project, but I’ve noticed some interesting patterns in how people communicate.

What do you think your chat history says about you? Would love to hear your thoughts or experiences with AI personality tools!

(If you want to explore it, I’ve shared a demo in the first comment.)

---
by netsharc | 2025-08-17 11:06:23+00:00
You read some stuff on search and you think it somethings that happens more than it really does.

In general they don't care, it's not coming out of their paychecks, they'll give you another burger, go away now.

When I worked at McDonald's we'd have the favorite burgers pre-made and they'd be left at the warming tray, so orders can be taken care of in maybe 30 seconds, but I guess nowadays that's too wasteful so the burgers are made on demand. There was a day like "Big Macs for $1" day, so we had a line of maybe 50 Big Macs queued, wrapped and ready to eat, that the foreman said "Slow it down with the Big Macs!".
by scotty79 | 2025-08-17 11:06:30+00:00
> They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since.

I feel like I see now more dismissive comments than previously. As if people, initially confused, formed a firm belief since. And now new facts don't really change it, just entrench them in chosen belief.
by egorfine | 2025-08-17 11:06:47+00:00
I love software subscriptions.

Photoshop license was $750 and I had to save for months to purchase one - all in a country where no one ever purchases software. Then Adobe introduced subscription model which made Photoshop available for me at $10/m. So yeah, I'm all in on subscriptions.

Having said that, I feel like I will never ever give a single cent for a purely hardware switch subscription. This doesn't look fair from any perspective.
by ekianjo | 2025-08-17 11:06:59+00:00
national security is not up to the judiciary

> The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
by varispeed | 2025-08-17 11:07:02+00:00
The snag is: 'experts' aren’t neutral oracles. Many are underpaid and end up parroting whoever funds them. Lobby groups quietly buy authority all the time. So the real challenge isn’t just training on expert judgments, it’s making the model sharp enough to spot the BS in those judgments - otherwise you’re just encoding the bias straight into the weights.
by mobileturdfctry | 2025-08-17 11:07:14+00:00
I think "elite" is the wrong term maybe. I think the use of that term is pulling more from how these stories tend to paint the two groups. One being the "haves" the other the "have nots". It's true "socioeconomic status" in some way can be considered in this category I'm thinking of, but I'm thinking more from an academic perspective. People who show a true curiosity about the world around them. People who will survive in pretty much any situation because they're the ones who have the most to contribute to a society.
by immibis | 2025-08-17 11:07:38+00:00
Haven't even read the new guidelines since I don't use blue sky (because it's crap) but every time I see someone complain about a "lefty safe space" it seems like what they actually mean is the exclusion of trolls, many of whom are associated with the right wing, which should not be confused with excluding the right wing itself.

For instance, intentional misgendering lies within the intersection of right-wing behaviour and trolling. Banning it is often (intentionally) construed as banning right-wing behaviour, when it's actually banning trolling.
by reactordev | 2025-08-17 11:08:01+00:00
This is precisely why I deleted my LinkedIn profile all together.

While it's nice to have a cover letter. I've never included one myself, just a beefier resume with a strong opening statement. I'll read a cover letter if you send one but to me it's not required. Just your resume and your person is all that I need. Anything more is just pandering to indecision and wasteful spend.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-08-17 11:08:13+00:00
I would feel a bit more charitable if Elon explicitly condemned the Nazis and Nazi-adjacent ideologies. He seems to be having a lot of Nazi-related incidents, and to the best of my knowledge he hasn't explicitly condemned the ideology.

He could frame it as "that wasn't a Nazi salute, but I condemn the Nazis and think they're a bunch of losers".

How many Nazi-related incidents should it take to merit giving a direct clarification of beliefs?
by twiss | 2025-08-17 11:09:18+00:00
You're right that AES-128 is fine. Normally the birthday paradox only applies to cryptographic hashes.

The only way it would apply to symmetric keys is if you have a server that stores 2^64 encrypted messages, and can somehow find out which messages used the same symmetric key (normally not possible unless they also have the same IV and plaintext), and can somehow coerce the user who uploaded message #1 to decrypt message #2 for you (or vice versa). Obviously that isn't realistic.
by shiandow | 2025-08-17 11:09:32+00:00
So according to you you could simply lower a membrane and a pipe into a still body of salt water and it would spontaneously separate into sweet water and brine until the build up of brine prevented this from continuing?

Yeah I am still not seeing it. If that were the thermal equilibrium I don't see how it wouldn't separate spontaneously, or why you can mix salt and water with no input of energy whatsoever.

It goes against anything I know about entropy and osmotic pressure.
Show HN: NZ1 new compression for embedded systems and games
by Forgret | 2025-08-17 11:09:46+00:00
NZ1 is a small compression algorithm designed for embedded systems and IoT.

Minimal code with no external dependencies.

SIMD support (AVX2, NEON, SSE2) for fast compression and decompression.

Configurable window size (1 KB–1 MB).

Built-in CRC32 for data integrity.

Achieves high compression ratios on repeating data with stable speeds (~30 MB/s).

Repository: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/NZ1

Full docs: https://ferki-git-creator.github.io/nz1-site/
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-08-17 11:09:53+00:00
It's not useless at all. We expect people whose answer to everything is "it depends" to answer more or less at random, when they don't have enough information to say otherwise.

That is an extremely telltale signature. Put another way, if your assertion is right, then a simple 5 minute quiz like this should be enough to rule out people who are claiming to be senior, but who actually arrive at extreme answers. A 5 minute quiz like that would be worth tens of millions in improving hiring practices.

So either we're all leaving millions of the floor by not building a company around this, stat, or your assertion is just wrong. There can indeed be senior engineers who are nonetheless very principled even in low-context situations.
by tripzilch | 2025-08-17 11:10:55+00:00
I mean, DS9 was literally a TV serial, of course nothing ever changes.

Bashir's statement is a true one, made out of compassion. Lee's statement is almost comically/logically/obviously false in a real Universe, unless you're in a fictional TV series designed to not ever change. Except of course for the plot arc, which again, true to Bashir's statement is not anyone's fault.
by k9294 | 2025-08-17 11:11:56+00:00
I have quite similar problems. Not at a depression level, but decent ups and downs attached to my work and satisfaction with it.

I don't feel much satisfaction in socializing, random conversations, hobbies, or relationships after the initial romance phase—they become boring. Work feels nice. My reflections and therapy have led me to realize this is more about proving self-worth and the desire to be proud of my work (for whatever broken childhood reason). It's a desire for external validation.

I haven't solved this yet. I can say that I feel happier when I go out and do activities like learning salsa dancing or participating in a debate club once a week. Though these activities work (I do feel happier), I never feel like I fit into those groups. Right after the activity ends and the free, unstructured socializing starts, people become boring... salsa people socializing (booze, dancing, shallow conversations) or debate club people (just shallow conversations). It just feels dull.

I recommend reading "No More Mr. Nice Guy" by Dr. Robert Glover - https://www.amazon.com/No-More-Mr-Nice-Guy-ebook/dp/B004C438...

Either you'll find that it's about you and the book will highlight a lot of things, or it's not—then just toss it away. It helped me reconsider some parts of my life, as well as my behavior and attitude.
by bapak | 2025-08-17 11:12:19+00:00
I seriously dislike this kind of comparisons.

We're faster! (please disregard the fact that we're barely more than a demo)

Everyone knows about 80:20, the slowdowns will come after you start doing everything your competition does.

Look at Biome. We're 15x as fast as ESLint (but disregard the fact that we don't do typeaware linting). Then comes typeaware linting and suddenly they have huge performance issues that kill the project (I'm unable to use Biome 2)

This happens over and over and over. The exceptions are very, very few (Bun is one example)
by tucnak | 2025-08-17 11:12:30+00:00
Its board, as well as boards of the related orgs, is crawling with ex-State guys, even some CIA assets (most recently Fernando Ruiz Perez) etc. They're in bed with WeProtect (State Dept) as well as McCain Institute guys. The connection is not obvious, but see this as starting point https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/270...

What's telling is the fact that they never targeted the U.S. and U.S. policy-makers EVER, despite being mostly Washington guys with lended tech credibility of SF VC's.
by alphazard | 2025-08-17 11:12:56+00:00
IQ is a discovery about how intelligence occurs in humans. As you mentioned, a single factor explains most of the performance of a human on an IQ test, and that model is better than theories of multiple orthogonal intelligences. To contrast, 5 orthogonal factors are the best model we have for human personality.

The first question to ask is "do LLMs also have a general factor?". How much of an LLMs performance on an IQ test can be explained by a single positive correlation between all questions? I would expect LLMs to perform much better on memory tasks than anything else, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was holding up their scores. Is there a multi factor model that better explains LLM performance on these tests?
by ricardobeat | 2025-08-17 11:13:15+00:00
Express is still popular, but a lot projects these days use a full-stack framework like Next.js, SvelteKit, etc.

Fastify, NestJS (bleh), Koa, Hono are the modern replacements for express, none of them have caught on as a standard though. My personal favorite for small projects is Polka (https://github.com/lukeed/polka), when I'm not using Go instead.
by democracy | 2025-08-17 11:14:39+00:00
I knew a guy who wrote assembler for an 8bit pc without line breaks - he'd just keep typing to the end of the editor line and then continue. And he wasn't producing junk either, he made some really impressive games for the time. That's probably as close as I've seen to "genius."

That said, I wouldn't have wanted to work with him in a commercial environment. It was a way of thinking/programming I could never wrap my head around.
by mafuy | 2025-08-17 11:16:50+00:00
You're projecting your strong opinion on others.

I've used C# since 2008 for business software and high performance computing. I've not missed sum types at all. Most of what was added is something I see a lot of value in. I don't like that it, by design, obsoletes some older parts of the language, but that's about it.

I'm now using C# on linux almost exclusively. No complaints from me!
by aswegs8 | 2025-08-17 11:17:09+00:00
But what is scarce now, really? We are just moving up Maslow's hierarchy and strive for more abstract concepts like power, self-actualization or recognition. How would AI provide those to us? Our self-image is linked to other's perception of us. It feels like we would have to radically re-think what it means to be human. As someone above wrote, we need to overcome equating existence with toil, however, it seems so ingrained into human nature to compete that we might all have to hop on antidepressants at some point.
by varispeed | 2025-08-17 11:18:13+00:00
LinkedIn isn’t a professional network, it’s a slave auction with a newsfeed. Workers line up to show their teeth - “failure is just learning in disguise”, “kindness is leadership”, all that drivel - while hoping to be picked by a master who won’t beat them too hard.

The algorithm is the overseer. It doesn’t want insight, it wants compliance: claps, congratulations, and endless oatmeal platitudes that prove you’ll play the game. That’s why your feed is full of garbage. The mediocrity isn’t a flaw, it’s the commodity being traded.

Anyone looking for substance is in the wrong marketplace. LinkedIn is about teaching people how to smile wider while the chain gets tighter.
Should we summarize HN submissions?
by lapcat | 2025-08-17 11:19:28+00:00
A submission to HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/submit) has three fields: title, url, and text. The submission form says, "If there is a url, text is optional," and indeed most submissions with a url provide no text. This standard practice means that HN readers have only the submission title and url as clues to what the submission is about.

Submission titles are necessarily brief, not only on the author's side but on the HN side, whose title field has a limit of 80 characters. Some article titles are clickbait, and others are too clever for their own good, but even if the author is trying hard to accurately portray the content of the article, there's only so much you can say in a title.

The result of this situation is that HN readers end up clicking on articles that they would not be interested in reading if they knew what the articles were about, and they avoid clicking on articles that they would be interested in reading. As a workaround, some HN readers just go straight to the comments to see whether the article is worth reading. However, the comments tend to be hit or miss, ironically for that very same reason: a lot of readers are going straight to the comments without reading the article, so there's a kind of tragedy of the commons where a large % of the commenters are ignorant about the article. Moreover, even for commenters who have read the article, casually dismissive comments can rise to the top, upvoted by readers who haven't read the article.

What I'm suggesting, then, is that as a matter of standard practice, it could be very useful for article submitters to summarize the article in the submission text. Presumably the person who submits and article has read the article and is not dismissive of it, considers the article worth submitting. And if the submitter has not read the article before submitting, the absence of a summary would be at least a semi-reliable indicator of that fact.

I think it would be interesting to have expanded HN submission lists that include summaries inline, perhaps with the summaries limited to a certain number of characters.
by danhite | 2025-08-17 11:19:50+00:00
>> Well in fact we know (if P! = NP) that for any randomized ALG there's a good deterministic one > Oh, that's cool, do you have a reference for that?

The OP article has such a reference, but theirs is paywalled, and perhaps you missed it, so you may wish to see this no paywall link to the paper:

Hardness vs. Randomness by Noam Nisan & Avi Wigderson https://www.math.ias.edu/~avi/PUBLICATIONS/MYPAPERS/NOAM/HAR...
by sunshine-o | 2025-08-17 11:20:06+00:00
Sure, Daniel Cohn Bendit, MEP for 20 years, was a big promoter of pedophilia [0].

Here he is on television promoting it in 1982 [1].

- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Cohn-Bendit#Allegations...

- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IOAaSFpVCw
by melvinroest | 2025-08-17 11:20:20+00:00
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.

I'm a dev, and I'm interested in marketing.

I'm currently working as a data analyst in a marketing team (and a secret software engineer - don't tell the marketers, haha). While I do learn a thing or two, mostly by automating some of their things, I would like to know how to go from 0 to 100K users. I work for a corporate and I really notice that they do "corporate marketing". So it's much more about maintenance.

Would you know how to get started on learning that? It's hard to know what information is solid info versus what isn't.
by Someone | 2025-08-17 11:20:54+00:00
> That's overkill for most things since it relies on being able to patch running kernel code, which is also the definition of an RCE exploit.

The idea of dtrace is that you can do that, yes, but to that, you need to be authorized, and the things you can do are (supposed to be) limited to looking to see what’s happening in the system. You can read arguments, but can’t, for example, change the arguments of a system call or disable authorization checks on system calls.