MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roenxi | 2025-09-22 11:01:48+00:00
> The U.S. Geological Survey's most recent forecast, known as UCERF3 (Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast 3), released in November 2013, estimated that an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 M or greater (i.e. equal to or greater than the 1994 Northridge earthquake) occurs about once every 6.7 years statewide. The same report also estimated there is a 7% probability that an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or greater will occur in the next 30 years somewhere along the San Andreas Fault.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Andreas_Fault#The_next_%22...

I question their research skills. I would avoid California if geology was my main motivator.
by sfn42 | 2025-09-22 11:02:00+00:00
I learned Java in uni and think it's a fine language to start with. It's also been modernized a lot in the past decade, and if you really want a more modern language it's easy to transition to Kotlin.

I'd take Java over Python or JS any day. It wins on performance, it wins on type system, js is just a plain trash language not at all suited for general purpose programming (TS solves some problems but not all and it has its own problems) and python is fineish but it's slow and just kind of icky, I'd never do serious software development in python. It's fine for small scripts and notebooks and such, we learned python as part of our math classes while the programming classes focused primarily on Java. We also had a class on web development using JS, ML using Python and windows programming using C++ and C#.

I struggle to see any significantly better candidates for a first language than Java. Sure you could go with C but nobody really uses it any more outside of niches. C++ is out, too much stuff. I really like C#, it's my daily driver and I wouldn't mind it as a first language but I think Java is more approachable for beginners. Less confusing syntax to learn. I don't know Go but maybe that could be an alternative? Other than that I'm a bit out of options.

Java is a fairly simple language that's easy to learn and allows teaching a lot of important concepts that will be useful in other languages moving forward. That's a big thing I think, it's not meant to be the only language. The word polyglot is used some times, to me it just means programmer. I don't know any competent developers who only know one language. You end up learning multiple and I think Java is a good entry point.
by kevincox | 2025-09-22 11:02:52+00:00
But rate-limiting public data is a huge pain. You can't really just have a static file anymore. Maybe you can configure your HTTP server to do IP based rate limiting but that is always ineffective (example public clouds where the downloader gets a new IP every time) or hits bystanders (a reasonable download the egresses out of the same IP or net block).

So if you really want to do this you need to add API keys and authentication (even if it is free) to reliably track users.

Even then you will have some users that find it easier to randomly pick from 100 API keys rather than properly cache the data.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-09-22 11:02:52+00:00
GDPR allows processing based either on consent (which doesn't need to be "written" but does need to be explicit and informed) or legitimate interest (or some other reasons that tend to be irrelevant for this kind of thing).

Legitimate interest does NOT require consent, is murky, and thus often gets used to justify things that should not exist under GDPR but the most likely consequence is that the company gets to do it for 3+ years before being told "no, you can't do that anymore"...
by ameminator | 2025-09-22 11:03:07+00:00
First, 60-70% of Israeli Jews are of Arabic descent, not European.

Second, while it's possible to complain about the circumstances of the creation of Israel, I'm not sure that doing so now, in context, offers anything constructive. It seems that by most reasonable definitions, Israel is a country, if a small one. Do you suggest that Israel be eradicated? If so, what happens to all the Israelis, who likely wouldn't be welcome in the area after the country's destruction? Is it any more justifiable to ethnically cleanse one group from the area than another?

I don't have an answer to this conflict, but it isn't clear to me that suggesting "this country shouldn't have existed at all" is an answer either.
by Mindwipe | 2025-09-22 11:03:13+00:00
> I love how enthusiastic this post is while being wrong.

This is a very funny thing to say given that post is entirely correct, while you are wrong.

> Making a copy of a thing does not violate copyright

Yes it does, unless it's permitted under a designated copyright exemption by local law. For instance, you mention that the video player makes a copy from disk to memory, well that is explicitly permitted by Article 5(1) of the Copyright Directive 2001 in the EU as a use that is "temporary, transient or incidental and an integral and essential part of a technological process", as otherwise it would be illegal as by default, any action to copy is a breach of copyright. That's literally where the word comes from.

> If I own a license to listen to Metallica - Enter Sandman.m4a that I bought on iTunes and in the download folder I screw up and I make

> Metallica - Enter Sandman(1).m4a

> Metallica - Enter Sandman(2).m4a

> Metallica - Enter Sandman(3).m4a

In legal terms you do indeed owe him something, yes. It would probably be covered under the private copy exemptions in some EU territories, but only on the basis that blank media is taxed to pay rightsholders a royalty for these actions under the relevant collective management associations.
by heldrida | 2025-09-22 11:03:17+00:00
I believe we are in a recession, and I received downvotes for mentioning it last time. But there aren't many opportunities out there. Most opportunities are in AI startups, and some people claim it's a bubble. If that's true, sooner or later, things will get much worse. Just imagine...

I've also noticed that people have been discriminating against Indians. It's almost like there's a green card to voice anger against. I don't hear about it in London/UK, but in places like Lisbon in Portugal and USA, people are just shameless. The H-1B news had some of the most hateful comments imaginable.

You seem to have a good skill set and experience, but the text is hard to read. You can improve it! Maybe design the CV a bit differently. Don't be shy about sharing who you really are. Nowadays, most job opportunities are shared on Twitter or X, where people showcase their capabilities and stories. I understand that sharing sensitive information is difficult, especially due to your illness, which I hope you recover from. But it's good to bring some projects to life and talk about them publicly.

Once you get interviews, you'll notice a pattern where HR, HM are cancelling last minute, stop hiring for the position suddenly, or simply ghost. Or, when rejecting, don't provide constructive feedback. So, be mindful of the time you invest in preparing for these interviews.

Good luck and hope you find a job soon!
by eviks | 2025-09-22 11:04:38+00:00
> On average and to our senses the earth is pretty undisputable flat.

That's very easy to dispute

> have you never seen a hill or a hole?

Ok, fine, "other people ... maybe exposed with too much BS", but let's not pretend sticking to some patent nonsense can be traced to simple observations when those don't exist, that's not how you become a true believer
by Levitz | 2025-09-22 11:05:11+00:00
I'm not sure what to think of this, on first impression I don't like it, but maybe I have a misguided impression on how this works.

Does ChatGPT properly handle western social customs? I'd say yes, and I presume that's because it has a truckload of data involving such customs and even some that explicitly talks about those customs. People do stuff, it gets recorded, then into the LLM.

In this case though we are talking about "artificially" generating content such that the LLM responds how the group making the content wants. Maybe that's something that was already done and I don't really have any ground to stand on?
by farrelle25 | 2025-09-22 11:05:41+00:00
> ... is a sophisticated system of ritual politeness that emphasizes deference, modesty, and indirectness.

I'm Irish and think we have a similar culture of indirectness and politeness...

In the countryside anyway we're rarely very blunt... everything indirect...

"You'll have a cup of tea Mary?" "Ah no.. sure I'm only after a drop" "Ah go on... you will" "Not at all, I'm grand" "Go on, go on, go on you will" etc (as in Father Ted)

I'm middle-aged now so maybe this has changed with the younger generation...
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-22 11:06:10+00:00
>And if you do have an absurdly oversided rocket, you don't launch it from your platform. You float it off to the side on a dedicated launch "boat" and have it ditch its floaty as an ultra-early first stage.

The ww2 german "v2 in a tube towed by a U-boat so it can get closer to its target" project being a decent conceptual example of this.
by kevincox | 2025-09-22 11:06:28+00:00
But that raises the complexity of hosting this data immensely. From a file + nginx you now need active authentication, issuing keys, monitoring, rate limiting...

Yes, this the the "right" solution but it is a huge pain and it would be nice if we could have nice things without needing to do all of this work.

This is tragedy of the commons in action.
by lapcat | 2025-09-22 11:07:26+00:00
This reply misses the point, because my reply was to rahimnathwani who said:

> The year is useful in the title when the article provides out of date information.

In other words, rahimnathwani was suggesting, incorrectly, that appending the year is necessary only when the article submitter knows that the article provides out of date information.

In that context, when I asked rhetorically, "Why would someone even submit an article with out of date information?" I meant why would someone knowingly submit an article with out of date information? Thus, your examples are not applicable to the debate about when an article submitter should append the year to the article title, because in your examples, the out of date information is submitted unknowingly:

> Obviously because people don't check or don't know or don't understand assume it's still valid.

Of course people unknowingly submit out of date information. If you thought I was suggesting otherwise, that's a misunderstanding of the argument.
by treesknees | 2025-09-22 11:08:12+00:00
I wonder if the use of LLMs will extend the lifespan of this software. Instead of hiring a niche programmer, they can now offload the syntax and nuances of COBOL to the AI while being supervised by experienced developers.

Granted, perhaps banking isn’t the ideal place to experiment with this type of technology, but it does seem like a promising use case.
by supermatt | 2025-09-22 11:08:20+00:00
What is it with American big tech and blatant disregard for EU privacy laws.

“Legitimate interest” is being used here to skirt around the need for consent (I.e. explicit opt-in) specifically because they know users will not give consent (otherwise they could easily ask them). That is an immediate red flag when it comes to “balancing” the rights and needs of the user vs the data processors “legitimate interest”.

i.e. big fine incoming for LinkedIn.
by simsla | 2025-09-22 11:08:38+00:00
Agreed.

I've found some AI assistance to be tremendously helpful (Claude Code, Gemini Deep Research) but there needs to be a human in the loop. Even in a professional setting where you can hold people accountable, this pops up.

If you're using AI, you need to be that human, because as soon as you create a PR / hackerone report, it should stop being the AI's PR/report, it should be yours. That means the responsibility for parsing and validating it is on you.

I've seen some people (particularly juniors) just act as a conduit between the AI and whoever is next in the chain. It's up to more senior people like me to push back hard on that kind of behaviour. AI-assisted whatever is fine, but your role is to take ownership of the code/PR/report before you send it to me.
by siva7 | 2025-09-22 11:08:44+00:00
That's where the math ends and clinical diagnosis starts because those number games take you only so far. Furthermore, ADHD is classified into different subtypes so it was never a question of meeting all 9 but only the subset relevant for your own subtype. It's also not diagnosed by ticking of the trait list from the DSM with your doctor but by using recognized clinical questionnaires.
by rich_sasha | 2025-09-22 11:09:39+00:00
Quality of LinkedIn feeds is the lowest of all social network sites I occasionally view. Instagram at least has attractive people and puppies.

I don't know if it's AI slop or people genuinely baring their souls and revealing corpo-BS pseudo-deep thoughts, with a drop of grifters pushing their BS "Uber but for nailcare on Blockchain" whitepapers, either way I don't see any value you could extract from it.
by fnordian_slip | 2025-09-22 11:10:40+00:00
I know it's a rather privileged thing to say, but I just passed up a job opportunity because I don't want to get back to 30 paid vacation days. Once you get used to 47 (took a voluntary paycut of 5 percent for 12 extra days), where you get so many side projects done because you have the time, it's hard to go back to the normal 28-35. So I have no idea why the US rarely goes above 20 or whatever they have.
by noosphr | 2025-09-22 11:12:31+00:00
That's because utf-8 was such an absolute mess in JS that adding an emoji in your code was a flex that it worked.

Sane languages have much less of this problem but the damage was done by the cargo cultists.

Much like how curly braces in C are placed because back in the day you needed you punch card deck to be editable, but we got stuck with it even after we stared using screens.
by hdodov | 2025-09-22 11:12:49+00:00
Just some shower thoughts about AI that I had recently. What we have right now is undoubtedly useful. But I wonder if we're too naive to think that we can truly build something smarter than us.

If we should use the right tool for the job, then I think that our brains and AI are two different tools, useful for two different jobs. And we should keep them that way. Just how higher level languages and lower level languages have their pros and cons, each useful in different situations and in different ways.
by eru | 2025-09-22 11:13:16+00:00
Steam engines were stationary at first. They were used to eg drive pumps.

> Weirdly though, electric generators in watermills would have been much more attainable - except nobody had any understanding of electricity.

Yes, and proper dynamos were invented only quite a long time after batteries. (So called self-excited generators.)

And you have to compare the early bad electric generators they could have come up with against the gears and shafts they knew to transmit the motive force of the water over short distance eg to the mill stone.
by HighGoldstein | 2025-09-22 11:13:17+00:00
> The problem, of course, is that it's not possible. But for those politicians, cryptography is pretty much magic. Why wouldn't it be possible?

Few, if any, politicians are nuclear physicists, and I'd argue nuclear physics is far more complex than cryptography, yet I haven't seen any of them ask the weapons industry to manufacture a nuke for just the bad guys.

Let's not attribute blatant malice to stupidity. People in these positions have the resources and advisors to know exactly what the consequences will be.
by regularfry | 2025-09-22 11:13:36+00:00
Can we say "language representation that is not a transcription of a spoken one"? A sequence of symbols could have meaning without mapping to sound, and taken at face value the separation on the map would seem to imply that any spoken language could have evolved dramatically out of sync with any physical representation. I can't think of any reason to think that - if you assume a phonetic interpretation - a symbol shared between North America and southern Africa would be pronounced at all similarly in both locations when the marks were made. The distances alone argue against a phonetic interpretation to me.

Do hobo signs count as a language? That seems intuitively much closer to what this might be. How much structure do you need?
by simiones | 2025-09-22 11:13:50+00:00
You're mixing up several things, all of which actually boil down to the fair use exceptions I was mentioning.

Making copies of a book you legally own for personal use is an established fair use exception to copyright. However, making copies of a book that you borrowed from a library would be copyright infringement. Similarly, lending the copies you've made of a book to friends would technically void the fair use exception for your copies.

The copy that a playback device has to make of a copyrighted audio/video file for its basic functioning is typically mentioned explicitly in the license you buy, thus being an authorized copy for a specific purpose. If you make several copies of a file on your own system for personal use, then again you are likely within fair use exemptions, similar to copying a book case - though this is often a bit more complicated legally by the fact that you don't own a copy but a license to use the work in various ways, and some companies' licenses can theoretically prohibit even archival copies, which in turn may or may not be legal in various jurisdictions.

But in no jurisdiction is it legal to, for example, go with a portable photocopy machine into a bookstore and make copies of books you find in there, even if they are only for personal use: you first have to legally acquire an authorized copy from the rights holder. All other exemptions apply to what you do with that legally obtained copy.

This even means that you don't have any rights to use a fraudulent copy of a work, even if you legitimately believed you were obtaining a legal copy. For example, say a library legally bought a book from a shady bookstore that, unbeknownst to them, was selling counterfeit copies of a book. If the copyright holder finds out, they can legally force the library to pay them to continue offering this book, or to destroy it otherwise, along with any archival copies that they had made of this book. The library can of course seek to obtain reparations from the store that sold them the illegal copy, but they can't refuse to pay the legal copyright holder.
by martin-t | 2025-09-22 11:14:33+00:00
Assuming there's a tradeoff between safety and privacy (which might be a false dichotomy pushed onto people), I am perfectly fine with the current level of safety. I feel zero need to give up privacy for more safety.

I feel:

- The most danger in my life is from deranged people like some rando homeless person who decides to push me under the subway out of the blue. The second biggest danger is unemployed drug-using losers who might try to rob me in the street. The third danger is aggressive groups of teenagers (which happen to usually be a certain minority where I live) who might try to beat my up because somehow that is how they gain status among each other.

- If I was a woman, the fourth would probably be getting raped. Most probably by an immigrant, usually from a Muslim country. This might be incredibly controversial to US people but in the EU, we hear about these cases regularly. I am not saying every immigrant or Muslim is a rapist. I am not saying they rape at a much higher rate than the native population. This is why I prefaced everything with "I feel" because these 4 reasons are the narrative I see from the media. OTOH I would be surprised if there wasn't _some_ measurable correlation - I would love to see this quantified but at the same time it's the kind of thing where you get accused of being an -ist or -phobe no matter which result you get.

Anyway, taking away people's privacy does not help with any of these.

But that's not the point.

The most danger to a politician's life is from:

- Terrorists.[0]

- Non-deranged (sane) people who are so ideologically opposed to the politician's views and actions that they decide the only way to stop them is to attack them physically.

Taking away people's privacy helps with both of these. If performed by a group of people, there's the obvious need to communicate and organize. If performed by a single individual, then he still has to perform reconnaissance and acquire tools, both of which are likely to be done online to some degree.

---

So you see, it's not about people's safety. It's about politicians' safety.

[0]: Terrorism is by definition the intention to cause fear among the population. It was later redefined as trying to affect political change through violence, which is stupid but it serves the purpose of politicians using terrorists as a source of fear, despite the average person being incredibly unlikely to be hurt by one.
by FreeFrosty | 2025-09-22 11:14:41+00:00
At work I learned "Slow is fast, Fast is slow".

We can always set all the versions to the "latest" and let it break when it does, but at scale that's not affordable.

Every module must be versioned and upgraded with care; Separate epic, Separate PR, code review and proper testing on different environment. This is basically why keeping the lights on is costy and some companies just rather to cope with old versions.

Then in an environment with lots of microservices, it's inevitable to avoid shared codes; So companies tend to hire lots of engineers just to take ownership of some services to keep the lights on.
by SirensOfTitan | 2025-09-22 11:14:44+00:00
> Each of these 'phases' of LLM growth is unlocking a lot more developer productivity, for teams and developers that know how to harness it.

I still find myself incredibly skeptical LLM use is increasing productivity. Because AI reduces cognitive engagement with tasks, it feels to me like AI increases perceptive productivity but actually decreases it in many cases (and this probably compounds as AI-generated code piles up in a codebase, as there isn't an author who can attach context as to why decisions were made).

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

I realize the author qualified his or her statement with "know how to harness it," which feels like a cop-out I'm seeing an awful lot in recent explorations of AI's relationship with productivity. In my mind, like TikTok or online dating, AI is just another product motion toward comfort maximizing over all things, as cognitive engagement is difficult and not always pleasant. In a nutshell, it is another instant gratification product from tech.

That's not to say that I don't use AI, but I use it primarily as search to see what is out there. If I use it for coding at all, I tend to primarily use it for code review. Even when AI does a good job at implementation of a feature, unless I put in the cognitive engagement I typically put in during code review, its code feels alien to me and I feel uncomfortable merging it (and I employ similar levels of cognitive engagement during code reviews as I do while writing software).