MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CoolestBeans | 2025-09-19 21:29:04+00:00
I learned an instrument (guitar), then I learned another instrument (bass guitar). I caught up with my family, I got to spend a lot more time with my nephews and nieces. I got to spend a lot of time with my dad. I picked back up circuit design and made an overdrive guitar pedal from scratch and learned KiCad in the process. I caught up with old friends but lost touch with other ones. I probably acted like an ass to a lot of people. I finally came to understand why people like watching sports. I learned how to write in cursive. I walked a lot. I listened to a lot of music. I listened to some podcasts.

I dunno, it sucks and its painful. You're constantly worried and people who at first try to support you then get pissed off at you for something you can't really control. I hope you can find your way through it.
by juancn | 2025-09-19 21:29:05+00:00
Also, depending on the system, time spent on hardening is many times happening concurrently with some other tasks.

Maybe you trigger a load test, or run a soaking test or whatever, while that runs you do something else, pause and check results, metrics, logs, whatever.

If something is funky, you may fix something and try again, get back to your other task and so on.

It's messy, and keeping track of that would add significant cognitive load for little gain.
by margalabargala | 2025-09-19 21:29:10+00:00
You're still missing the point. It appears you're arguing against a commonly made argument that is not the one I am making.

I can afford a $1k ski trip if I plan and budget for it. You can apparently do the same for a $10k trip.

Jeff Bezos does not need to do that for a yacht. It makes no difference to his quality of life, his ability to feed, house, or care for himself.

When someone has so much in excess of what they will ever need, then failing to use what they do have for good, that makes them a bad person.

Choosing to plan and budget for a $10k ski trip instead of charity does not put you in that bucket. If you were instead able to make a $10k ski trip, each weekend November to April, each year, on a whim without thinking of finances, and did not donate to charity, then that would make you a bad person.

It's not "did you theoretically have the ability to help the child with cancer", it's "did you have that ability with essentially no downside to yourself". If you can take a $10k ski trip, and donate literally $0 each year, then you're a bad person.
by jpadkins | 2025-09-19 21:29:37+00:00
> it's equally easy to point to income inequality for this

Have you ever considered what causes income inequality? Maybe policy that favors globalist, ownership class over salaried workers? H1B in it's current form favors owners/managers over workers! We are saying the same thing. We have to analyze the causes of income inequality in order to solve it.

I will leave you with one last thought: the states with the lowest gini co-efficient are the ones that have been more conservative over time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

policy matters!
by everybodyknows | 2025-09-19 21:30:04+00:00
> For winter I got a standing tanning machine. Which I use 2-4x a week for 1 minute per use. I calculated this was equivalent to 5-15 minutes outside, depending on time, but engages the entirety of the bodies largest organ.

Excellent idea. In my temperate climate, I use the outdoor method, with one further tweak: Cover the head and arms, which get too much inadvertent exposure anyway during daily activity.
by alberto_balsam | 2025-09-19 21:30:30+00:00
That is a great quote.

Eno knew what made music powerful, and created many powerful pieces himself and with others, but the article captures well how artists can lose touch with that energy:

"When I listen to that song again, I think, ‘Jesus, I would never do that now.’ I could not leave that in that condition ... It’s so badly played but actually that is the character of the piece. I just wouldn’t make it now like that."
by throw0101a | 2025-09-19 21:30:44+00:00
> Disney willingly pulled Kimmel off their own networks, because a major distributor of their content(Sinclair) threatened to not air it, which accounts for about 20% of the viewership of the show.

"This is a nice merger deal, shame anything should happen to it…" does not look like a recipe for a free will / willing action to be made.

For the record, the merger is with Nexstar, not Sinclair, but the point is the same:

* https://www.nexstar.tv/nexstar-media-group-inc-enters-into-d...
by mrguyorama | 2025-09-19 21:30:57+00:00
If there literally are no Americans (instead of just, no Americans at the price point you are willing to pay), then $100k is a small price to pay to enable your business.

Last I checked, Software Developers did not have a 0% unemployment statistic, so clearly there are American software developers that could be employed in those jobs, but FAANG still hires an H1B. Gee, I wonder why.

Maybe it's because H1Bs are cheaper than an American. Maybe it's because H1Bs cannot say no without risking being deported.

This claim that "No no no, every H1B was fine and totally could not even possibly be replaced by American labor" flies in the face of the actual reality of the tech industry. Microsoft can't find an American to write code? Bullshit, they just fired tons of them.

The fact that it is less abused in other industries should not be used to paper over the games the tech industry play. FAANG have been found multiple times to be collaborating to suppress tech industry wages. This is just another way they do that.

>could not find anyone qualified to do the fucking job in Georgia.

There was not a single American anywhere in the entire united states that could do things to build a car factory? Really? They couldn't fly someone out from Texas, or Michigan? Am I supposed to believe we don't have any human beings in the entire united states that know how to build part of a factory?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-19 21:31:03+00:00
Most of this is in properly accounting for capital costs (i.e. interest on borrowed money) when calculating net margins. If you have to invest capital in something then the interest cost between when you make the investment and get the return goes into the formula, but the number that comes out at the end is still going to have a plus sign or a minus sign in front of it and that matters more than the magnitude.

It's usually not about the number of people. If you have two projects and both of them are profitable then you can hire more people and do both, even if one of them is more profitable than the other. The exception would be if that many qualified people don't exist in the world, but that's pretty rare and in those cases you should generally divert your focus to training more of them so you don't have such a small bus factor.

Another common mistake here is the sunk cost fallacy. If you have to invest ten billion dollars to be able to do both X and Y and call this five billion in cost for each, and at the end of that one of them has a 5% net margin and the other a 75% net margin, or even if the first one has a -5% net margin, you may not be right to cancel it if you still have to make the full ten billion dollar investment to do the other one. Because it's only -5% by including a five billion dollar cost that you can't actually avoid by canceling that product, and might be +20% if you only include costs that would actually be eliminated by canceling it.
by roughly | 2025-09-19 21:31:12+00:00
The hollowing out of the middle class in the US isn't because of immigrants, it's because of a sustained campaign by capital to reduce the power of labor over the last 50-odd years and to concentrate wealth as best they can. Immigrant labor contributes to that because we've got inadequate labor protections and because we bought into the idea that lower consumer prices was a fine reason to ignore both labor and antitrust.
by eastbound | 2025-09-19 21:31:28+00:00
How long is the Ticketmaster-LiveNation exclusivity contract with the artists and the venues?

- Whether 1 and 10 years, the monopoly could fall for another provider in half the median duration. In fact, venues could collide together to replace the monopoly.

- Or, if Tickermaster really provides an extra income to venues able to change the type of venue by an order of magnitude, we might see an elitist top-class of artists, and then a non-elitist second class with more popularity, more decent venues, and affordable prices.

- Then we can talk about why we always hear the same artists on radio.
by kkfx | 2025-09-19 21:31:29+00:00
What has really changed is in the knowledge of the average developer: once upon a time, they knew something, there were code monkeys, of course, but there were also many with solid knowledge. Today, most have very limited knowledge, if that, and no longer know how to work at a system, hardware, local level, etc., so development is entering a phase described long ago by Lisanne Bainbridge: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...
by seec | 2025-09-19 21:31:56+00:00
I agree. My own experience with it, being forced to go to "bible study" and many Christian events/groups in my youth; is that it is an ideology pushed by very despicable people who will constantly behave in extremely abusive ways and require of you that not only you let them do that but you actually "love" them (by acting in ways that are against you own values and serve them in a very practical way).

The amount of emotional/psychological abuse coming from the women in charge of those bible study groups was absolutely maddening. I have many horror stories. Now, I can understand why they say and do the thing they do; and I can definitely be compassionate about their shortcomings that makes them behave that way. I could almost forgive them. But I definitely cannot "love" them under any circumstance. As far as I'm concerned, they are an illegitimate dominant force and need to be fighten for good.

I think the ideology of "love your enemies" is pushed hard precisely for case like this. They intuitively know they are pushing a lie to enslave others to their bullshit and if people ever figure out what's going on, they need to have a "failsafe" to avoid retaliation.

I dumbfounded when people push Christianity as something worthwhile and even good. They are responsible for a lot of suffering, obscurantism and unjustifiable domination and a whole lot of warmongerings. It still happens today and is still a way to brainwash a lot of people and forbid them from thinking for themselves. It is an utterly destructive ideology and the only reason the world is what it is today, is because some people got wiser in France a few centuries ago and said that they have enough of the bullshit.

I think the modern tentative of presenting Christianism as something good is because they have lost the war and have fully migrated to deceptive "argumentation", wolf in sheep clothing style.
by derefr | 2025-09-19 21:32:01+00:00
> Inaction is a manifestation of one of two things: ignorance, or conscious decision to not act.

Under which of these categories would you classify the following assertion:

> As much as I've learned about subject X, I still feel that neither I — nor most people who are already acting, for that matter — truly have enough information to take an informed stance here, as the waters are being actively clouded by propaganda campaigns, censorship, and false-flag operations by one or both sides; and I believe that acting without true knowledge can only play into someone's hand in a way that may damage what turns out to be an innocent party I would highly regret damaging, when this all shakes out a decade down the line. I find myself too knowingly ignorant to conscientiously act... yet I also do not highly prioritize gaining any more information about the situation, as I have seemingly passed the threshold where acquiring additional verifiable and objective information on the conflict is cheap enough to be worth it; gaining any further knowledge to inform my stance is too costly for someone like me, who is neither an investigative journalist, nor a historiographer, nor enmeshed in the conflict myself. So I fear I must opt out of the conflict altogether.

I find myself increasingly arriving at exactly this stance on so many subjects that other people seem to readily take stances (and allow themselves to be spurred to action) on.

I suppose I may differ from the average person in at least one way — that being that, if I were tricked into harming innocent parties, I would hold myself to account for allowing myself to be tricked, rather than externalizing blame to the party responsible for tricking me. After all, only by my learning a lesson in avoiding being manipulated, do I actually lessen the likelihood of the next innocent party coming to harm. Which is a lot more important to me, in a rule-utilitarian sense, than is avoiding social approbation for not taking a stance.
by jayers | 2025-09-19 21:32:22+00:00
They don't have any political leanings but they do have a philosophical project. If you dig into the site a little you'll find that they're published by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (housed at UVA) and IASC exists to promote research into the contradictions of modernity, by examining how culture manifests itself in metaphor, symbol, ideals, principles, institutions, and material objects [1]. I've been a reader of THR for a few years and I'd say generally they publish articles that promote moral realism and humanism. They're sort of metaphysically open-minded.

[1]: https://iasculture.org/about/vision
by pdm55 | 2025-09-19 21:32:24+00:00
I used PhET Circuit Simulations in a classroom of 14-year-olds. Luckily, I had: (1) the freedom to space the tasks over a number of hour-long lessons; (2) plenty of equipment to also build the circuits; and (3) a lab assistant to make sure the multimeters were working. The PhET simulations allowed the students to construct circuits before setting them up with actual wires and resistors. Also, I could see which students completed the PhET simulations first and move them over to setting up the actual circuits. They worked as a couple of groups to build the physical circuits while the slower students kept working on the PhET simulations.

I helped those students who were building physical circuits, helping them to remedy their missteps. Then those students became group leaders once all students moved on to building physical circuits. Each group would always have some difficulty, but having "experienced" group leaders meant there were far fewer problems for me to solve.

A key understanding was that there were always discrepancies between the theoretical results of the PhET and the actual results from the physical circuits. The main source of these discrepancies was simply explained as the extra resistance provided by the wires. Evaluation was accomplished by the students building different circuits that I drew on the whiteboard and writing a report that included a photo of their group with their circuit(s).
by geerlingguy | 2025-09-19 21:33:12+00:00
Just to add context — I've been experimenting on my 2nd channel (Level 2 Jeff) with titles that are straight/barebones exactly describing the content of the video, vs a slight bit of clickbait (never untrue, but certainly more intriguing and not describing the exact topic of the video).

The ones that are dead straight with no clickbait are 10/10 (the worst performers), and usually by a massive margin. Even with the same thumbnail.

The sad fact is, if you want your work seen on YouTube, you can't just say "I built a 10 node Raspberry Pi blade cluster and ran HPL and LLMs on it".

Some people are fine with a limited audience. And that's fine too! I don't have to write on my blog at all—I earn negative income from that, since I pay for hosting and a domain, but I hope some people enjoy the content in text form like I do.
by scheme271 | 2025-09-19 21:33:17+00:00
There's also a bunch of organizations that are desperate and can't pay. E.g. a lot of rural and VA hospitals are staffed by H1B physicians. A rural hospital in the middle of Idaho won't attract a cardiologist through salary (i.e. the 500k/yr they can make in cities) and probably won't be able to afford a 100k application fee to get one. Also for lots of researchers and post-docs, 100k is more than their annual salary.

This fee is a great way to ensure that there's very little medical services available to rural populations and to help kill science in the US among other things.
by anon191928 | 2025-09-19 21:33:21+00:00
this does not sound limited powers? sounds literally opposite with proof. see quote :

"King Harald holds the rank of General in the Army and Air Force, and of Admiral in the Navy. He is the nation's highest-ranking officer."

https://www.royalcourt.no/artikkel.html?tid=28731&sek=27277
by rramadass | 2025-09-19 21:33:53+00:00
The H-1B Visa Program and Its Impact on the U.S. Economy (Oct 2024 Fact Sheet) - https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/h1b-vi...

According to many economists, the presence of immigrant workers in the United States creates new job opportunities for native-born workers. This occurs in five ways. First, immigrant workers and native-born workers often have different skill sets, meaning that they fill different types of jobs. As a result, they complement each other in the labor market rather than competing for the exact same jobs. Second, immigrant workers spend and invest their wages in the U.S. economy, which increases consumer demand and creates new jobs. Third, businesses respond to the presence of immigrant workers and consumers by expanding their operations in the United States rather than searching for new opportunities overseas. Fourth, immigrants themselves frequently create new businesses, thereby expanding the U.S. labor market. Fifth, the new ideas and innovations developed by immigrants fuel economic growth.

Similarly, a recent study found that, between 2005 and 2018, an increase in the share of workers within a particular occupation who were H-1B visa holders was associated with a decrease in the unemployment rate within that occupation. Another recent study found that restrictions on H-1B visas (such as rising denial rates) motivate U.S.-based multinational corporations to decrease the number of jobs they offer in this country. Instead, the corporations increase employment at their existing foreign affiliates or open new foreign affiliates—particularly in India, China, and Canada. A study conducted in 2019 revealed that higher rates of successful H-1B applications were positively correlated with an increased number of patents filed and patent citations. Moreover, such startups were more inclined to secure venture capital funding and achieve successful IPOs or acquisitions.

The available data also indicate that H-1B workers do not earn low wages or drag down the wages of other workers. In 2021, the median wage of an H-1B worker was $108,000, compared to $45,760 for U.S. workers in general. Moreover, between 2003 and 2021, the median wage of H-1B workers grew by 52 percent. During the same period, the median wage of all U.S. workers increased by 39 percent. In FY 2019, 78 percent of all employers who hired H-1B workers offered wages to H-1B visa holders that were higher than what the Department of Labor had determined to be the “prevailing wage” for a particular kind of job.
by jimmyl02 | 2025-09-19 21:34:01+00:00
This metric is typically tracked internally and probably wouldn't be as public because it could indicate how "buggy" a product is. An easy way to measure this is time spent taking incidents from open -> mitigated -> resolved and treating that as time spent * engineers for amount of impact.

The tricky part would be measuring time spent on hardening and making the business decision on how to quantify product features vs reliability (which I know is a false tradeoff because of time spent fixing bugs but still applies at a hand wavy level)
by mmaia | 2025-09-19 21:34:09+00:00
A characteristic of the field since the beginning. Reading What Computers Can't Do in college (early 2000s) was an important contrast for me.

> A great misunderstanding accounts for public confusion about thinking machines, a misunderstanding perpetrated by the unrealistic claims researchers in AI have been making, claims that thinking machines are already here, or at any rate, just around the corner.

> Dreyfus' last paper detailed the ongoing history of the "first step fallacy", where AI researchers tend to wildly extrapolate initial success as promising, perhaps even guaranteeing, wild future successes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus's_views_on_arti...
by llm_nerd | 2025-09-19 21:34:27+00:00
> This is a de facto shutdown of the program

Is it?

Some AI recruitments have seen 9-figure contracts. $100K is actually a surprisingly well-considered number and would still see the intake of legitimate talents, obviously contingent on the specific details. Indeed, those people wouldn't have to compete with masses of consultant trash and the whole lottery system could be done away with.

$100K actually seems perfectly coherent with forcing the program to winnow down to actual talents. People truly good enough to get the employer to pony up $100K to pull them in -- presuming there isn't some kickback fraud happening -- will truly be the best of the best.

> The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in

Paradoxically the #1 reason H1B employers bring in H1Bs is to bridge offshoring work. Pull in a dozen Indians and they're your bridge to the big Indian office, which is precisely why Infosys, Tata et al are such H1B users.
by myrmidon | 2025-09-19 21:34:47+00:00
One thing that really pisses me off about the whole populist anti-immigration stance is how thankless, hypocritical and selfish the whole thing is:

People want to avoid negative effects from immigration (cultural/language/crimerate)- fine.

But are those people acknowledging how much economical growth was driven by migrant labor over the last half century? Hell no. Would the average alt-righter be willing to sacrifice any fraction of all those compounded gains? Absolutely not- every dollar of tax is too much, even to pay a fraction of the damage that is and will be caused by them (=> energy price/co2 taxation).

As a self-identifying moderate patriot, selfish complainers of that ilk seem a worse plague on their nation than the immigrants they keep whining about.
by mcflubbins | 2025-09-19 21:34:48+00:00
I keep my iPhone until it is no longer usable (Fingerprint sensor on my iPhone 6 eventually stopped working, my iPhone X had the battery swell up and bend the case) when this happens and I need a new phone, My wife gets whatever the latest one is and I take her old one (yes, my current iPhone 11 pro is rose gold... I don't care, slap a case on it.)

I give 0 shits about my phone, I actually loathe that I need one at all.
by zeehio | 2025-09-19 21:35:11+00:00
I find that the tricky part of a good data analysis is knowing the biases in your data, often due to the data collection process, which is not contained in the data itself.

I have seen plenty of overoptimistic results due to improper building of training, validation and test sets, or using bad metrics to evaluate trained models.

It is not clear to me that this project is going to help to overcome those challenges and I am a bit concerned that if this project or similar ones become popular then these problems may become more prevalent.

Another concern is that usually the "customer" asking the question wants a specific result (something significant, some correlation...). If through an LLM connected to this tool my customer finds something that it is wrong but aligned with what he/she wants, as a data scientist/statistician I will have the challenge to make the customer understand that the LLM gave a wrong answer, more work for me.

Maybe with some well-behaved datasets and with proper context this project becomes very useful, we will see :-)