MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-01 12:02:38+00:00
If you wanna break it down by "systems" the most expensive part is the regulatory compliance you need to engage in before you start.

People shit on the healthcare industry for being written into law and they shit on the credit processors for taking a cut of every transaction but the degree to which various flavors of paper pushing engineers are required by law to be given a cut of every single creation, alteration and major repair of a structure is mind boggling.

And this racket is a large part of what puts the squeeze on low end projects.

If it takes me $50k of engineering to be granted a $100 permit to do another $50k of tree clearing and dirt work on a lot then whatever I build needs to make up for that. If not for BS compliance those numbers would be something like $5k, $100, $20k

All of this expense, levied upon literally every single project everywhere, all to prevent the 1/100 or 1/1000 case where someone does something (that they likely knew was) stupid and causes a runoff problem or whatever, that could likely be mitigated by the same costs after the fact where and when it happens.

And this is before you start discussing all the areas where industry and company lobbyists have got their clients inserted into the IBC at the expense of the public.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-08-01 12:03:18+00:00
> The tools of control are always built with the best intentions

Not to be overly pessimistic, but I'd say tools of control are only occasionally built with the best intentions. Normally they are built with, though maybe not the worst but certainly bad intentions. Good intentions are the marketing spin that comes after the fact to ease adoption like lube on blunt object headed in your nether regions.
by aragilar | 2025-08-01 12:03:55+00:00
Maybe I'm a bit weird, but I don't know why you'd want to run tmux locally as an alternative to using tiling wm/tabs/other equivalent feature of your terminal emulator? I use tmux in two ways: 1. Persistent long-running sessions (which typically involve having more than one tty going at once, so something like shpool seems like a downgrade). 2. Local named-network-namespace sessions where I'm connected to a VPN and so not having to reconnect to the same namespace/vpn for every new tty is a benefit.

Also, if you do physically connect to a headless machine, it's nice to not need to keep having to open a new getty session (or be able to log out of a session) ;)
by rikroots | 2025-08-01 12:04:23+00:00
From my experience with my canvas library, devs seem to want different types of documentation for different purposes:

1. Something that tells them what the library does: what problems it's gonna solve for them; how easy it is to work with; etc. Having something to play with is really useful here, for instance some "Getting started" code to (very quickly) show them the basics and let them play with the library. A set of "learn to" lessons tackling some interesting problems is good bonus documentation, alongside a good range of demo code.

2. Something that they can show to whoever controls which libraries they can use in the product they're working on, to help convince them to let the dev use the library. Usually involves some marketing copy and comparison charts - whatever A/B tested copy|crap floats the boat.

3. Some easy-to-use lookup reference stuff - what function do I have to invoke to get this specific thing done? Stuff that their coding environment doesn't reveal at the click of a button. This is where the LLM-focussed documentation comes in (I think), given the move to using code assistants: failing to (be able to) teach the models what the library can do (and how to best do it) can lead to bad code and wasted time, which reflects really badly on the library.
by afthonos | 2025-08-01 12:06:12+00:00
In the US, the tip is an expected part of the expense of eating out (and increasingly having any human in the loop). I hate it, and I really wish it wasn’t the case, but it pretty much is. If you say “I didn’t tip because the service was what I expected”, you’re pretty much considered an asshole.

(Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons why the costs of eating out in the US and seem so much lower. Most people who come from non-tipping cultures don’t understand that Americans actually tend to pay significantly more than sticker price, especially after you include taxes, which are also often excluded).
by johnecheck | 2025-08-01 12:06:30+00:00
"Sane and normal people can't participate in every local government decision unless it's their job. Hence why we have representative democracy".

While true, times have changed. The information flow is orders of magnitude faster and have you seen any sane and normal people lately? The norm is spending hours scrolling social media. The argument that nobody has spare time/attention and thus we all need representatives falls flat to me.

We need to explore alternative forms of representation to allow people to choose their level of engagement in various levels of government. Perhaps I'm happy to delegate all national matters to a representative I trust but want to regularly weigh in on local decisions.

Between the technical challenge of trust/security and the inevitable political resistance to such ideas, I sadly don't expect to see them implemented any time soon.
by swores | 2025-08-01 12:06:47+00:00
My yubikeys aren't biometric ones, so it's possible I'm wrong about what they support, but I'm pretty sure it's possible to have your SSH key on them and require both fingerprint and password to use it.

https://www.yubico.com/products/yubikey-bio-series/

(And I'm sure they're not the only company who makes such devices, they're just the one I'm familiar with myself.)
by cedws | 2025-08-01 12:07:03+00:00
I appreciate that on a site like GitHub which is massive and complex, it's not as simple as just writing some code to garbage collect commits and drop them. It could have far reaching consequences.

However, GitHub have had so many years to correct this behaviour. This is something they should have been working towards from the moment it was clear this is risky behaviour.

I don't really understand what's going on over there at GitHub, everything besides their AI stuff feels like it's being ran by a skeleton crew with only enough capacity to keep things running.

"If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security" -- what happened to that?
by bearl | 2025-08-01 12:07:12+00:00
The EA folk have thought about this and the answer is that you make money with bitcoin and then give the proceeds to medicine sans frontier or some similar organization. I don’t know the best “anti-genocide” orgs, but if you can’t find one you could make your own. That might be the best solution given that you’re “bored.” The most optimal solution via crypto windfalls is not the least boring one.
by nyeah | 2025-08-01 12:07:21+00:00
I appreciate this perspective. To oversimplify, you're challenging total beginners to self-teach guitar repair at a level beyond what normal guitar shops offer. Your attitude toward playing seems like my attitude toward my profession, which I'm actually good at.

But here's my perspective on guitar. I'm closer to a perpetual beginner than to a good player. I partly blame the Marauder, because the chords just never sound sweet. It's a bummer, not a joy, to play it.

I have access to YouTube and I've tried to fix my Marauder. Two shops have tried, although one guy admitted he was working from YouTube. (I'm certain it's fixable. It's two pieces of wood with a bridge and a nut on them. The neck is straight enough to be very playable.) But I have a job and a family and I'm not luthier material. I finally gave up and bought an old Fender for too much money. $800 or something. I play it regularly. It stays in tune. I feel good when I play it.

I confess I have some brand-name vulnerability to Fender. "Classic" whatever whatever. Some child inside me doesn't want an Ibanez, he wants a Tele. I'm the kind of guy who would buy that yellowy "antique white" color if it didn't always seem to cost a bit extra. So yes probably I could get a better guitar for the same money if I knew the less famous brands.

Plus anyway the metalheads (or somebody) have run up the prices on Ibanez guitars.
by epistasis | 2025-08-01 12:07:51+00:00
The past year has been utter chaos, madness, and sadness for STEM in the US. I hope that Tao's grad students don't suffer from this too much in the immediate term. In the long term, all science is being harmed greatly, and we are causing a gigantic bubble in the pipeline of the production of scientists, most severely damaging those who are graduating soon.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-01 12:07:57+00:00
> how much money would it take for you to go scrub toilets

If my needs were otherwise met, and there were clear instructions allowing me to do this in confidence that I wasn't inconveniencing any users of the toilet, I'd do it free. (Cleaning a toilet is less messy than changing a baby, and that's not hard either.) Given proper PPE, I'd do even more "disgusting" jobs, if they were jobs that needed doing: I draw my line at cleaning up sharps, but that's only because I'm not trained.

Maintaining communal infrastructure is not a thankless task: you can know that everyone who uses the infrastructure until next maintenance time benefits from your work, which is more than most people can say about their jobs. There are people who take pride in their work, even if you consider that work low-status, and beneath you. Do different work, then!

Do you really think most people would live lives of idleness, if not compelled to behave otherwise? If you saw something that needed doing, and you had the means to do it, would you just… walk by? If I may, that says more about you than it does about anyone else.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-01 12:08:35+00:00
> They wanted to bring indoor maps and navigation to their retail stores... It turns out that this doesn’t just apply to retail. Every office, university campus, events venue, hotel, airport, warehouse, factory — basically everywhere indoors have some need to navigate people around, provide relevant information, and improve efficiency.

You'd think they would add this information to openstreetmap then or at least put a map on their website (and put it in the public domain so others like OSM can add it to their maps). Or put it in the store so people can take a picture. I go into target and there are posters saying to install an app for maps. Put the map on the poster!

> and they could pop up relevant promotions along the way

Oh, right, they don't want to provide information. They want to track people and spam them.
by zsoltkacsandi | 2025-08-01 12:08:52+00:00
> Application Intrusion Detection And Prevention With Fail2Ban

Please stop recommending fail2ban for securing/hardening servers and applications.

It is mentioned even it’s readme that:

> Though Fail2Ban is able to reduce the rate of incorrect authentication attempts, it cannot eliminate the risk presented by weak authentication.

It provides a false sense of security.

fail2ban only makes sense where sane defaults cannot be applied (password auth, no MFA, etc.) in some very special (and justifiable) cases, but regular self-hosters really shouldn’t host these applications. If you are targeted by a serious attacker, fail2ban’s “protection” can be easily bypassed with a large enough botnet, or simply moving on with exploiting another vulnerability/attack vector.
by zettabomb | 2025-08-01 12:08:54+00:00
The conclusion I come to from this is that yes, I actually do need tmux, as the alternatives proposed are far more annoying and provide no benefit. I don't have a need for graphics in the terminal, and frankly I find it odd that we wouldn't simply display graphics... with the graphics system. But I do have a need for seamless session persistence and multiple terminals, and I do enjoy splitting a window when I'm running a command on multiple servers.
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-01 12:09:13+00:00
You stole my story! :)

I was a mediocre developer and student in my CS program and actually considered getting out at a few points. I really loved systems and building solutions though, and I ended up becoming a DBA.

For some reason my mental model resonated with Perl. I was able to use it almost like a writing process, getting my “outline” laid out in Perl and refactoring supplementing with more efficient C code or third party stuff later.

It was cool, i started fixing data integration issues and automating processes around the databases. Eventually a colleague and I basically built an application that made our DR testing failover and failback processes a two-click event. I left that company long ago and I know a bunch of our stuff ran almost 20 years before the system was migrated to AWS.

IT is more industrial and efficient these days. That’s not a bad thing, but I had alot of fun being the kid showing the old people what Linux was and gluing all of these systems to orchestrate them. Unfortunately Perl is an artifact of that era.
by epistasis | 2025-08-01 12:09:38+00:00
This is not "rejection" this is cancelling an existing grant.

> Breaking: NSF is suspending roughly 300 grants with UCLA, following a DOJ finding on Tuesday that the university violated Title VI by "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."

https://bsky.app/profile/dangaristo.bsky.social/post/3lvc7ld...
by willvarfar | 2025-08-01 12:09:44+00:00
Public support for Israel is steadily falling; this poll was published just a couple of days ago https://news.gallup.com/poll/692948/u.s.-back-israel-militar... and other G7 countries are moving to recognise Palestine.

So will the administration's push to use pro-Israel reasons to censure and penalise the universities steadily get out of touch with what the public want and sympathise with?
by nobleach | 2025-08-01 12:09:57+00:00
Honestly, my only gripes with TMUX have been:

1. Having to zoom a window before copying multiple lines of text (Kovid brought this up in the interview that was mentioned in this article)

2. The weirdness of copying text from the scrollback buffer into the clipboard

I've tried so many things for the second one over the years. I think I have it working okay-ish these days. But there are still plenty of times that I say, "aw screw it", and literally use the terminal's copy command.

Every other solution to my multi-terminal workflow have been worse though! i3/bspwm with multiple terminals were okay. It was just hard to have "projects". I'd have to visit each terminal and switch to the proper directory, launch servers/docker-compose/etc.

Zellij felt like too much "hopping out into manipulation mode, manipulating, then hopping back into work mode". Those milleseconds were enough to halt my flowstate.

Single terminal with built-in tabs/splits felt clunky as I couldn't get the keyboard shortcuts into muscle memory (perhaps more time would help)
by transpute | 2025-08-01 12:11:00+00:00
Secure every endpoint that is authorized to administer the server/cloud, https://4fa2b80c.privsec-dev-2oz.pages.dev/posts/knowledge/l...

> the best modern laptops I have found are the Dell Latitude/Precision laptops with an Intel vPro Enterprise CPU. The second best group of laptops I have found are modern Lenovo Thinkpads with Intel vPro Enterprise or AMD Ryzen Pro CPUs. These are relatively easy to acquire and share these common security properties.. [firmware protection, custom CA, memory encryption, SMM mitigation, DRTM, microcode updates]
by jon-wood | 2025-08-01 12:11:11+00:00
Yes, it does, for some values of security. Operated correctly it allows you to know you can trust everything on your system from the UEFI firmware down, because if any part of that chain didn't match what you were expecting to be there the next step in the chain would refuse to execute.

Most people experience this via Windows, which automatically sets up that chain of trust so that you can know you've not had a rootkit injected somewhere. In other cases it may be Linux or something more exotic booting, and it requires some management by whoever is operating the device, but that comes with the benefit of knowing that if one of our devices has got to the point of decrypting it's storage we can be reasonably confident that it hasn't been tampered with, and so we can trust it to send good data.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-08-01 12:11:50+00:00
They are against it because they know a bait-and-switch set up when they see it. The people promoting this hardest are not concerned about child safety, what they want is a monitoring/censorship system for the internet for the in vast political and economic control it would enable. Even if they did implement a perfect ZKP initially, it would not be long before it got diluted and eventually becomes a full-on tracking system.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-01 12:11:55+00:00
A more common name for it is calendar versioning.

One spec for such a thing is CalVer, but I flatly refuse to ever label anything as that, because they got their terminology horribly wrong, making MM be 1–12 and 0M 01–12 (and so on for each of Y, W and D too). YYYY.MM should obviously mean 2025.08, and 2025.8 should be YYYY.M.
by niam | 2025-08-01 12:11:58+00:00
Whether it is or isn't seems immaterial if you're of the opinion that government should step in to solve issues where the market has proved ineffective.

If it's the case that market participants have an imperative to convince the government to screw everyone else over: a solution preventing the government from being convinced by small petty nonsense seems remarkably simple, relative to the other kinds of policy challenges that exist.
by thrwwXZTYE | 2025-08-01 12:12:02+00:00
I always wanted to program games. I programmed games as a hobby. When I graduated university there were no gamedev jobs in my region, so I went to work at Boring B2B java company.

After a while I moved to a bigger city and I started having friends who work in gamedev. They told me about crunch, bad salaries etc. I decided to keep doing Boring B2B stuff. But I went to a few job interviews in gamedev companies.

Every time the questions on the interviews were FUN. Like doing 3d math, some low level C, writing a collision detection function or simple pathfinding.

Just solving these problems made me giddy.

Maybe it's the nostalgia for the time I've learned these things as a teenager with no stress, or maybe it's just that it's something completely different to what I'm doing normally - but I felt great during these interviews.

But I'd have to get a huge salary cut and abandon work-life balance and I'm too old for this.

TL;DR: I think there's a lot of value actually looking at day-to-day problems you need to solve in your dream job, even if you decide it's not for you for different reasons.
by cbeach | 2025-08-01 12:12:04+00:00
This is an account of the impact of "mob justice" within the Scala community, which Jon Pretty faced in 2021, and devastated his career and mental health.

At the time I was taken aback at the lack of due process, and how one-sided accounts from ex-girlfriends could be used to destroy a man.

Now, years later his story still chills me and makes me sad about the divided and sinister state of the Scala programming language community.
by reginald78 | 2025-08-01 12:12:35+00:00
There's a youtube channel shadiversity that I haven't watched in awhile. It is mostly about fantasy media and swords but also spends a lot of time on medieval building techniques and clothing. One of the more interesting videos I watched talked about how before and even after saw mills could process and produce different sized boards people would 'grow' them instead by trimming trees to produce long straight narrow branches. There was even a still living example in some English village that some trimmed 100 years ago before the process was completely stopped.

This also reminds me of those Japanese temples where in order to preserve the institutional knowledge of how to rebuild the temple in case of disaster the monks tear it down and rebuild it from scratch every 30-40 years assuring the next generation has experience.
Launch HN: Societies.io (YC W25) – AI simulations of your target audience
by p-sharpe | 2025-08-01 12:13:12+00:00
Hi HN, we’re Patrick and James! Artificial Societies (https://societies.io) lets you simulate your target audience so you can test marketing, messaging and content before you launch them.

Here’s a quick product demo: https://www.loom.com/share/c0ce8ab860c044c586c13a24b6c9b391?...

Marketers always say that half their spend will be wasted - they just don’t know which half. Real-world experiments help, but they’re too slow and expensive to run at scale. So, we’re building simulations that let you test rapidly and cheaply to find the best version of your message.

How it works:

- We create AI personas based on real-world data from actual individuals, collected from publicly available social media profiles and web sources.

- For each audience, we retrieve relevant personas from our database and map them out on an interactive social network graph, which is designed to replicate patterns of social influence.

- Once you’ve drafted your message, each experiment runs a multi-agent simulation where the personas react to your content and interact with each other - these take 30s to 2 minutes to run. Then, we then surface results and insights to help you improve your messaging.

Our two biggest challenges are accuracy and UI. We’ve tested our performance at predicting how LinkedIn posts perform, and the initial results have been promising. Our model has an R2 of 0.78 and we’ve found that “message spread” in our simulations is the single most important predictor of actual engagements when looking at posts made by the same authors. But there’s a long way to go in generalising these simulations to other contexts, and finding ground truth data for evals. We have some more info on accuracy here: https://societies.io/#accuracy

In terms of UI, our biggest challenge is figuring out whether the ‘experiment’ form factor is attractive to users. We’ve deliberately focused on this (over AI surveys) as experiments leverage our expertise in social influence and how ideas spread between personas.

James and I are both behavioral scientists by training but took different paths to get here. I helped businesses run A/B tests to boost sales and retention. Meanwhile, James became a data scientist and, in his spare time, hooked together 33,000 LLM chatbots and wrote a paper about it (https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10....). He showed me the simulations and we decided to make a startup out of it.

Pricing: Artificial Societies is free to try. New users get 3 free credits and then a two week free trial. Pro accounts get unlimited simulations for $40/month. We’re planning on introducing teams later, and enterprise pricing for custom-built audiences.

We’d love you to give the tool a try and share your thoughts!
by patmorgan23 | 2025-08-01 12:13:14+00:00
I don't think the USSR is the best example of a constitution protecting the rights and freedoms of the people.

> Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities have equal rights

This rings pretty hollow when you look at the history of Russification. And no doubt this clause is in the constitution because of the Russification policies of the Russian Empire, yet that didn't stop the Soviet Union from doing very much the same thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification
by jmhammond | 2025-08-01 12:13:59+00:00
> For example, in grad school I worked with lots of undergrads who thought they wanted to be professors. Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”

I’m a professor, and I’d only add gesturing to represent teaching and banging head on a table to represent committee meetings.

But I freaking love my job.