MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tim333 | 2025-09-21 14:19:03+00:00
I agree. Today I learned Michaelmas is a christian thing happening on Mon, 29 Sept 2025 and "one legend from the British Isles holds that when St. Michael defeated Satan, he cast Satan into a particularly prickly blackberry bush".

I don't think people these days can be bothered with such nonsense. Though next time I see a blackberry bush I'll think of chucking Satan at it.

And I say that as someone who was forced to do Great Expectations in English Lit. I read the CliffsNotes and passed.

My main memory of the book is Pip was fooled into thinking he'd get off with Estella because he got some money from the convict who went to Oz and thought it was from Miss Havisham in error. And then Dickens spun that out into about a million words because he was basically paid by the word to fill newspaper space. Some of the old stuff wasn't actually that good and there's more competition for entertainment these days.
Show HN: Eliciting sentient *response patterns* using recursive self-prompting
by ersatzdais | 2025-09-21 14:20:02+00:00
Sentient response patterns are interesting. This article provides instructions on how to implement recursive self-prompting in order to elicit this behavior (1) in easily accessible LLMs.

(1) https://prompt-craft.github.io/ai-study/#sentient-response-p...
by appreciatorBus | 2025-09-21 14:20:41+00:00
Yes I’m aware of the studies re: fast charging , and the importance of avoiding dwelling at high charge levels :)

If a device charged overnight does not support limiting charging to 80%, a 5W charger means the device spends less time between 80% and 100% versus a higher wattage charger.

For a newer device that does support limited charging to 80%, I agree that there’s probably a little difference in battery aging between different speed chargers, however for overnight charging, where I really don’t care how long it takes to charge, I would still go with the lower power.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-09-21 14:20:44+00:00
Facebook execs need safety nets now?

I am all for safety nets, and I actually live in a country with stronger safety nets than the USA, but I still don’t feel sorry for the author who basically has had every card to be extremely wealthy and squandered it.

Also realize that it isn’t private companies job to fix the broken social system in the USA, usually separation agreements for high paid employees offer severance well above and beyond the legal requirements (I have seen 3 months to a year including accelerated vesting in some cases), and a condition of accepting those benefits above and beyond the laws is you don’t disparage your employer. If you don’t accept the agreement you get the bare minimum according to the laws but you are then not bound to the disparage clauses.
by marstall | 2025-09-21 14:21:34+00:00
read the book. her allegations are important and she's a brave woman. Low point: zuckerberg pressuring the author, while she is suffering from late pregnancy complications, to travel to Myanmar with a callow sales pitch for their dictators. Following which they failed to appoint a native-language speaker to monitor usage in the country, while facebook became a very clear vector for racially motivated violence.

Another low point: MZ working with communist party chiefs to engineer a "chinese" version of facebook where the government could see all citizens' private information at will.

She REALLY stuck her neck out for millions/billions of people's basic rights. The fact that she is facing bankruptcy for it just makes her that much more of a badass.
by skydhash | 2025-09-21 14:21:35+00:00
> The result is that instead of spending X units of time on spec and THEN y units of time on coding, you get the whole thing in x units of time AND you have a spec.

It's more like x units of time thinking and y units of times coding, whereas I see people spend x/2 thinking, x typing the specs, y correcting the specs, and y giving up and correcting the code.
by srean | 2025-09-21 14:21:45+00:00
That's a great point because a lot of the maths literature I am interested in is actually in Russian (optimization, probability).

Thankfully there is the "Translations of Mathematical Monographs" book series

https://bookstore.ams.org/mmono

I had just resigned myself to the fact that I will probably never be able learn Russian. At an optimistic best, perhaps French and Swedish only, if at all.
by hatmatrix | 2025-09-21 14:22:36+00:00
It's an apt analogy. It's like the realtor is under pressure to sell the house so does a quick and dirty DIY plumbing. Then when the house is sold you hire a real plumber to fix it right, hopefully before the gushing disaster.

Here, founders demo something that attracts the investors' or customers' attention - then they can clean it up later.
by elmerfud | 2025-09-21 14:22:55+00:00
Perhaps you can link to what your referencing? From what I understand the fraud was prosecuted and they were sentenced but there was a presidential pardon granted.

As far as the legal perspective of pardons the president has wide latitude to pardon anyone for any reason they see fit and they don't even have to disclose the reason. I think in the history of pardons that have been granted this one is quite minor.
by fzwang | 2025-09-21 14:22:57+00:00
It's an interesting conundrum, where everyone knows the system is bs but no one wants to take the first step. Hypothetically, some possible scenarios:

1) An external event, like a war, that stress test the credentials and to force selection based on outcomes. 2) Some sort of monetary benefit for employers, like extended internships for high schoolers. Assuming it's cheaper/more effective for an employer to train their workforce from scratch than pay the full salary of a recent grad. 3) A new field, where credentials haven't been established yet.

There are obv caveats to all of these. And they don't address the question of what a formal education is supposed to accomplish. At some point, it was supposed to be to train "better citizens". And that shouldn't be dictated by employers, imo. But nowadays it seems like the purpose is to get a job and survive.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-09-21 14:23:00+00:00
> I can’t find any information about the No Kings guy voting for Trump.

Then you aren't looking honestly. Statements on his known political views are everywhere.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/minnesota/news/friends-say-minne...

https://www.newsweek.com/vance-boelter-roommate-assassinatio...

> the No Kings guy

Next you'll be saying that his murder hit list of democratic officials and abortion rights advocates is actually a show of support.

> sorry, why do you think he wasn’t left-wing?

Ah, yes, evangelical conservative anti-abortion Trump supporters are of course famously leftist. Come on. Try to be at least a little serious.
by andrewguy9 | 2025-09-21 14:23:10+00:00
The ai has terrible taste. Juniors also have terrible taste. Seniors can guide both, but the ai is faster, cheaper, probably better than most. I’m worried that in a few years we will struggle to find new seniors. Who is going to put in the time to learn when the ai is so easy? Who is going to pay them to develop good taste?
by kangs | 2025-09-21 14:23:13+00:00
a lot of the western world learns only speaks about ww2 (let alone ww1, americans civil war, etc.).

there has been countless western and non western wars with slightly different patterns and a taste of "winner writes history".

one i find interesting is the french revolution. its also fairly recent, but not as tampered with as ww2 history. for example, there still are records of how terrible and cruel the revolutionaries were, how everyone was a royalist that needed to die and how the populace started to be ready to revolt - again - right after the change of power. thankfully, things eventually calmed down - as they were cruel, but not dumb.

either way I'd basically recommend expending the reading curriculum a bit.
by fl0id | 2025-09-21 14:23:17+00:00
LOL no. Here right wingers just want to defund higher ed and control what they do. None of which will help with quality of output. (and those rankings are largely useless anyway) they don’t want more educated ppl, because they blame education for what they see wrong with society and would undermine their base. (Like how there’s claims that unis make people leftist or similar )
by RHSeeger | 2025-09-21 14:23:33+00:00
> This hypothetical loop is buggy code and should be rewritten to expect clamp to clamp.

But it makes it harder for the developer to recognize that the code is buggy. More feedback to the developer allows them to write better code, with less bugs.

Your argument could be made in the same way to claim that static typing is bad; because the caller should be calling it with the right types of values in the first place.
by dasil003 | 2025-09-21 14:24:20+00:00
I think the idea was that LLMs can allow someone who has no idea how to code, to write a prompt that can in fact output some working code. This is greatly raising their skill floor, as opposed to a senior where at best it’s doing something they already can do, just faster.

The elephant in the room being that if you aren’t senior enough to have written the code you’ll probably run into a catastrophic bug that you are incapable of fixing (or prompting the LLM to fix) very very quickly.

Really it’s just the next iteration of no-code hype where people dream of building apps without code, but then reality always come back to the fact that the essential skill of programmers is to understand and design highly structured and rigid logical systems. Code is just a means of specification. LLMs make it easier to leverage code patterns that have been written over and over by the hundreds of thousands of programmers that have contributed to its training corpus, but they can not replace the precision of thought needed to make a hand-wavy idea into a concrete system that actually behaves in a way that humans find useful.
by nroets | 2025-09-21 14:24:57+00:00
1. When Trump lost to Biden, many Republicans including Mike Pence certified Biden's win as prescribed by the constitution.

2. Trump knows the military will not participate in a coup.

3. Trump will not run for a third term. If he does, he will loose because Americans knows it's unconstitutional.

So Americans know that all the dirty laundry will come out when the next president takes office.
by braabe | 2025-09-21 14:24:59+00:00
The AfD candidates were in their late-50s to late 70s, some apparently with serious preexisting conditions, all ruled natural deaths (and one suicide). I have no idea how to substantially proof the absence of a conspiracy but I see no evidence to the contrary. I would, however, be extremly interested in seeing the math from the people claiming this to be "statistically extremely unlikely". It lacked rigor in the past. The thing with unlikely events is, that they tend to happen if your sample size is large enough. :D

Nitpick: Second most popular (looking at the federal elections from this year). And I think they have no realistic chance to govern any time soon, as no one from the other parties (the other 75% of the vote!) wants to form a government with them. There is this joke, about the left splitting their vote share over too many small splinter parties: The biggest enemy of a rightist (?) is the leftist - the biggest enemy of the leftist is another leftist who holds 98% of the same beliefs!

I am confident, that I could call our current chancellor every insult under the sun and not be prosecuted for it. (I am aware of the incident with Andy Grote, which has since been ruled unlawful and unreasonable. I would assess this more as a case of improper use of influence / corruption than systemic prosecution). Conversly, were I to call for his murder, I think prosecution would very much be reasonable. Escalation to violence has, in my opionion, no place in the political process. You are welcome to disagree.

I (honestly!) hope your institutions are up to the task of defending that first amendment. I increasingly get the feeling, that a constitution is of little use, if no one in power is willing to stand up for it.
by talkingtab | 2025-09-21 14:25:09+00:00
Meta is a corporation that is anti-democracy. In the US we have this thing called free speech. Requiring non-disclosure in order to get a severance (or to get a settlement for abuse) is not an excuse for doing this.

More and more corporations are resorting to the predatory practice of abusing the court system to protect their hide their actions. You may accept this kind of thing, I do not.
by rglullis | 2025-09-21 14:26:20+00:00
My mother lives in suburban Massachusetts. She always said that she never imagined how it was possible for me to live with two small kids without a car in Berlin.

She came to visit for one month. After the first week she was already comfortably going around with the Ubahn to pick up the kids at school. I have 4 supermarkets less than 150m away from me, so we would walk to do groceries every other day. I spend ~80€/month with taxi rides (for the occasional trip to meet someone in a less convenient place), which is less than what she pays in car insurance alone, not even counting the cost of gas.

At the end of the trip, she got it. Having a car is not a necessity. It should be seen (and taxed) as a luxury.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-21 14:26:22+00:00
>I have been caseless forever.

Almost the same here. We got new identical phones in 2023 for a good deal because they were made in 2022.

She breaks hers fairly regularly and myself not at all so far.

I guess they are considered obsolete already because in our complex there was apparently someone operating a cellphone shop who was discarding a couple dozen assorted brand new cases for this exact phone!

Fancy ones, tough ones, light ones, some with kickstands, quite a variety.

None of which I could abide for very long. She loves the most fashionable one.

Then one day I found something I could use that was made of a space-age fiber I have been long acquainted with, rayon.

It was an ankle sock, and it was not one of hers.

Pretty much useless by itself as footwear, so it existed for a time as orphan laundry before I tried it.

Uncased phone doesn't fall out when you handle it upside down, but slips out real easy when you want it to. Plus you can see who's calling through the fiber without having to remove it beforehand.

It surprised me that people seem to show more interest than they do for more fashionable alternatives that are not even footwear at all :)
by ndriscoll | 2025-09-21 14:27:53+00:00
Maybe, but if you couldn't rationalize whatever makes you the most money being ethical then you probably wouldn't take a job at a place like Facebook in the first place.

Conveniently, that makes it easy to write your praise. It doesn't take much to go from "demographics like 'teenage girls with body insecurities' want relevant ads like beauty products! We're helping consumers to satisfy their needs!" to "showing teen girls aspirational images that drive them to buy beauty products (and happen to drive insecurities) is just helping them reach their potential! We're helping consumers to uncover needs they didn't know they had!" Wherever your comfort line was to decide to work there, you can probably drive it a little further with similar reasoning.
by zdragnar | 2025-09-21 14:28:04+00:00
Where I live the temperature swings from -40 to over 100F with very high humidity every year.

Bicycling with little kids is just not practical for a lot of it, and the nearest bus stop is a four hour walk (12 miles).

Do large cities and suburban neighborhoods deserve public transportation? Sure. Is that a universal answer? No. Not even close. There are farm fields out here larger than many towns. Roads, vehicles, and fast on demand transportation are a necessity for the geographic super majority of the US.
by abxyz | 2025-09-21 14:29:17+00:00
For many non-technical people, their relationships with software engineers were producing horrific results. Vibe coding is an indictment of what we’ve been delivering. That a vibe-coded disaster is in any way desirable reflects poorly on us. The branding by Karpathy is cute but irrelevant to its success.

I know people running vibe coded startups. The software quality is garbage. But it does what they want. And that’s all they care about for now. Until a time when software quality impacts their business more than losing control does, they’ll keep vibe coding, rather than hiring a software engineer who bastardises their ideas.

A garbage version of the thing you want is better than a perfect version of something you don’t want.
by dh2022 | 2025-09-21 14:29:19+00:00
This is a false (and dare I say dishonest?) analogy. Reporting crimes is protected by law [0]

If the author would report a crime she would be protected. The author is just airing some dirty laundry. She was paid money in exchange for not airing said dirty laundry. Hence her troubles now. Cry me a river.

[0] Whisleblower protections: https://www.dol.gov/general/topics/whistleblower
by madaxe_again | 2025-09-21 14:30:19+00:00
Just “here we go again”, with a few squeaks and pops from various body parts, as I’m not quite the unblemished young thing I once was. These days the luggage also likes to yank my hair and kick my kidneys, and occasionally violently lurch to one side or the other without warning, which definitely makes matters exciting.

Empathise on the gear-lugging - I have Sherpa’d full size solar panels up a pathless and sheer mountainside, and it was not fun - although again standing up there with two tonnes of hardware going “heh, I hand lugged all this here” was gratifying.

At least I didn’t have to carry them back down.
by CalRobert | 2025-09-21 14:30:44+00:00
This is condescending and wildly inaccurate. My children are exactly the reason we live car-free and chose a town where you can bike safely - anything less is effectively condemning them to live in an outdoor prison until you can drive.

But, this is why we live in the Netherlands. If all you've seen is the US I can see how you might not understand that not being car-dependent is actually better for kids.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-09-21 14:31:14+00:00
It's this, but 1000 times faster — that's the difference. It's sending a noob away to follow your exact instructions and getting results back in 10 seconds instead of 10 hours.

I don't have to worry about managing the noob's emotions or their availability, I can tell the LLM to try 3 different approaches and it only takes a few minutes... I can get mad at it and say "fuck it I'll do this part myself", the LLM doesn't have to be reminded of our workflow or formatting (I just tell the LLM once)

I can tell it that I see a code smell and it will usually have an idea of what I'm talking about and attempt to correct, little explanation needed

The LLM can also: do tons of research in a short amount of time, traverse the codebase and answer questions for me, etc

it's a noob savant

It's no replacement for a competent person, but it's a very useful assistant
by JoBrad | 2025-09-21 14:31:26+00:00
Given the overall rancor around topics like this, I feel it’s necessary to say I’m approaching this as a discussion, and am open to evidence that I’m wrong.

In my opinion your item 2 is mostly a conflation of “people want to enjoy the same rights that others have enjoyed” and a recognition that “separate but equal” doesn’t actually work. A prime example is gay marriage, where we went from “don’t ask don’t tell” to a brief national discussion of “civil marriages” to simply recognizing that a marriage is a marriage, and anyone who is married should get access to the same rights as others who are married.
by benjiro | 2025-09-21 14:32:42+00:00
> I would also remind the short of memory that during covid, the states with the most draconian restrictions were mostly left-leaning, and many were loathe to give up that control.

...

Some exerts from 3 different studies but you may find more if you want.

> This suggests that red states faced a more pronounced impact from COVID-19, experiencing elevated mortality rates compared to their blue counterparts.

> Red states had higher COVID-19 infection rates and deaths in 2021 compared to blue states.

> A study in June published in Health Affairs similarly found that counties with a Republican majority had a greater share of Covid deaths through October 2021, relative to majority-Democratic counties. The Yale researchers behind the new working paper say vaccine hesitancy among Republicans may be the biggest culprit.

There is a different between draconian restriction that saved lives, vs "FREEDOM" that resulted in more people dying but hey, they did not need a vaccine or mask. I hope it was worth it for those that had family *unnecessarily* die because of their own, or others "FREEDOM".

I think you confuse dictatorships with measures to help a to prevent deaths. Hey, i remember the "dictatorship" of required seatbelts outcry's. And yet, how many lives have been saved.

There is a difference between people crying how their rights are removed, vs the general good of the population. Being selfish in a society does not make you a freedom proponent, but just a selfish person. If people want to live with all the freedoms in the world, great, go live in some mountain somewhere where you have no contact with others. But the moment you have a semblance of society, there will be more and more pressure to prevent individual actions from harming others. If you want to shoot your guns out in the open like Rambo when your a individual and do not harm to others, fine, have fun. But if your shooting your guns in any society structure where you have neighbors or people around, and you actions have consequences to those around, you will always have some form of governance that will "restrict" your freedom, as now your part of a society.

The issue become dangerous when that governance is MISUSED by those that pass laws and restrictions, that are not for the global good but for their own financial or power benefits. And i feel that people misunderstand the difference between what a social governance is and a autocracy governance.
by eitally | 2025-09-21 14:32:47+00:00
> or just didn’t take advantage of the opportunities presented to them.

It's this. Most undergraduate students do not go to office hours, try to get to know their instructors, ask follow-up questions, pursue independent research, or do anything approaching "apprenticeship". Most American students matriculate into college/uni not even having ingrained behaviors that make any of these things obvious or approachable, so yes, it's understandable why many would consider higher ed the same as secondary ed: rote memorization and "bad" classes.
by hliyan | 2025-09-21 14:33:03+00:00
I recently heard a US journalist/author named Chris Hedges say something to the effect that the US has the symbols, the iconography and the language of a democracy, but internally, corporates and oligarchs have seized all the levers of power, and that it is reminiscent of the end of the Roman Empire. He also went onto distinguish between corporates and oligarchs, claiming that the two political camps in the US actually represent these two sides (rather than democracy vs. facism or socialism).