MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by taneq | 2025-09-02 02:22:11+00:00
> But once you get past "I'm selling something so manifestly useful that people find me to pay me for it", it sure seems like the things you, the sales rep, have to do to get their dollars skew rapidly toward the "seller-push" side of things. What else works? Folks gotta know about you and they gotta know you can solve their problems, right?

I don't think there's anything else you can do, other than reinterpret 'manifestly useful' more widely as 'desirable'. Other than just having a legitimately useful product, the options I can see are:

- 'Make the product mandatory in some way' (eg. getting on large companies' preferred equipment lists, getting named as required equipment in a standardized testing procedure, providing an accessible interface to an impenetrable government department, etc.)

- 'Make more people aware of the product (in a non-pushy way) so they can choose to buy it' (eg. sponsoring crazy stunts the way Red Bull does, running an F1 team, becoming associated with celebrities etc.)

These still require an actually desirable product, of course.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-02 02:22:15+00:00
Of course they do. Collective Shout is all about puritanical moralizing with a tinge of feminist flavor. They think male activities are bad and view gaming as a male centered hobby. Hence they will go after every game eventually.

But they’re irrelevant. The real problem is their noise is made relevant by spineless moralizing payment infrastructure like Visa and MasterCard. These companies must be held accountable and regulated to accept every payment that isn’t explicitly illegal under a court order.
by codeforafrica | 2025-09-02 02:22:22+00:00
SEEKING WORK | local or REMOTE

Location: Africa or REMOTE

Willing to relocate: yes, to any location in Africa, where I can get the necessary permission to live and work. Occasional travel is possible.

Technologies: Linux, Front or Backend Web Development, General Software Development, System Administration.

Résumé/CV: on request (software development, CTO, mentoring, training, fluent in English and German, german citizenship)

Contact Email: see profile or http://codingforafrica.at/

Like this Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31518945], I am looking for similar work, but I am open to work on any interesting project. I am a European software developer who has lived and worked on four continents. Now it's time to move on and so I am in the process to relocate to Africa.

I have more than a decade of experience running a company, doing software development, support and training and mentoring adults and students, as well as working on educational projects, and I am willing to take on a mixture of roles as needed to support a project.

I value good teamwork over fancy tech, and I don't shy away from working on legacy code. I am primarily motivated by solving problems, so let me help you solve your problems.

I am open to work for companies anywhere as long as the work can be done fully remote from Africa.

While I could find a job elsewhere I believe that the experience living in an area where my work is going to have an impact gives me a better understanding of the needs of the location I am serving. Whether it is through direct contact with clients and users or just by being part of a local community and learning about the reality of living there.

In addition, I want to use some of my income to hire local interns and junior developers and train them in order to pass on my experience. I also sponsor children that otherwise can't afford to go to school (see my website). If you want to support this, I would love to work with you. Also if you are interested in hiring African developers yourself. I can help you build up your team.
by martin-t | 2025-09-02 02:22:27+00:00
The way I see it, there are 2 concepts - morality and legality.

Morality is complex to codify perfectly without contradictions but most/all humans are born with some sense of morality (though not necessarily each the same and not necessarily internally consistent but there are some commonalities).

Legality arose from the need to codify punishments. Ideally it would codify some form of morality the majority agrees on and without contradictions. But in practice it's written by people with various interests and ends up being a compromise of what's right (moral), what people are willing to enforce, what is provable, what people are willing to tolerate without revolting, etc.

> retaliatory murder

Murder is a legal concept and in a discussion of right and wrong, I simply call it a killing.

Now, my personal moral system has some axioms:

1) If a punishment is just, it doesn't matter who carries it out, as long as they have sufficient certainty about what happened.

2) The suffering caused by the punishment should be proportional by roughly 1.5-2 to the suffering caused to the victim (but greater punishment is acceptable is the aggressor makes it impossible to be punished proportionally).

Rape victims often want/try to commit suicide - using axiom 2, death is a proportional punishment for rape. And the victim was there so they know exactly what happened - using axiom 1, they have the right to carry out the punishment.

So even if they were not gonna be raped again, I still say they had the moral right to kill him. But of course, preventing further aggression just makes it completely clear cut.

---

> No one should take matters into their own hands

I hear this a lot and I believe it comes down to:

1) A fear that the punisher does not have sufficient proof or that aggressors will make up prior attacks to justify their actions. And those are valid fears, every tool will be abused. But the law is abused as well.

2) A belief that only the state has the right to punish people. However, the state is simply an organization with a monopoly on violence, it does not magically gain some kind of moral superiority.

3) A fear that such a system would attract people who are looking for conflict and will look for it / provoke it in order to get into positions where they are justified in hurting others. And again, this is valid but people already do this with the law or any kind of rules - do thing below the threshold of punishment repeatedly to provoke people into attacking you via something which is above the threshold.

---

BTW thanks for the links, I have read the wiki overview but I'll read it in depth tomorrow.
by layer8 | 2025-09-02 02:22:34+00:00
The first programmable device I owned was an HP scientific calculator, which had a big Enter key, the only key spanning the space of two regular keys on the device. A friend opined that you could tell that it was a real computer and not just a calculator by the presence of that key. It wasn’t true though, the Enter key was there for the HP’s RPN operation and wasn’t otherwise relevant to its programmability.
by codeforafrica | 2025-09-02 02:22:44+00:00
Location: Africa or REMOTE

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: yes, to any location in Africa, where I can get the necessary permission to live and work. Occasional travel is possible.

Technologies: Linux, Front or Backend Web Development, General Software Development, System Administration.

Résumé/CV: on request (software development, CTO, mentoring, training, fluent in English and German, german citizenship)

Contact: Email: see profile or http://codingforafrica.at/

Like this Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31518945], I am looking for similar work, but I am open to work on any interesting project. I am a European software developer who has lived and worked on four continents. Now it's time to move on and so I am in the process to relocate to Africa.

I have more than a decade of experience running a company, doing software development, support and training and mentoring adults and students, as well as working on educational projects, and I am willing to take on a mixture of roles as needed to support a project.

I value good teamwork over fancy tech, and I don't shy away from working on legacy code. I am primarily motivated by solving problems, so let me help you solve your problems.

I am open to work for a company anywhere as long as the work can be done fully remote from Africa.

While I could find a job elsewhere I believe that the experience living in an area where my work is going to have an impact gives me a better understanding of the needs of the location I am serving. Whether it is through direct contact with clients and users or just by being part of a local community and learning about the reality of living there.

In addition, I want to use some of my income to hire local interns and junior developers and train them in order to pass on my experience. I also sponsor children that otherwise can't afford to go to school (see my website). If you want to support this, I would love to work with you. Also if you are interested in hiring African developers yourself. I can help you build up a team for you.
by lmm | 2025-09-02 02:22:56+00:00
> There isn't a similar degree of legal risk with MPL 2.0, nor with non-copyleft licenses (which is the subject of this subthread, not proprietary licenses)

There is a similar degree of legal risk with the overwhelming majority of licenses in use. Yes, using exclusively permissively-licensed software would let you avoid this particular risk - but given that essentially no-one (BSD advocates are, if anything, less scrupulous about avoiding proprietary software than GPL advocates - you rarely hear of BSD-land pushing firmware into a separate nonfree repository or the like) does that, it's clearly not a risk many people care much about.
by Panzer04 | 2025-09-02 02:23:12+00:00
Most people are economically illiterate and don't understand what subsidies actually imply.

They literally only "hurt" you if you have the local industry to harm to begin with. Otherwise, if someone else is paying the subsidy, it gives you a good for cheaper than you could have had otherwise.

The current admin just turns this up to 11 with their ideologically driven nonsense.
by dgfitz | 2025-09-02 02:23:50+00:00
> Eventually, as models and their users both improve

I like how this is presented as a given thing that will happen, that models are going to just improve forever. That there isn’t some plateau on “user skill with LLMs” like it’s fucking calculus mixed with rocket science that only the elite users will ever attain full fluency in using.

This is starting to read like religious cult propaganda, which is probably scarier than whatever else ends up happing with this shit.
by exidy | 2025-09-02 02:24:13+00:00
This is the problem with the digital world. Time is analogue and continuous, digital clocks are just a quantised approximation.

Midday and midnight are points in time that have no duration -- as soon as they are observed they are passed, so midnight is 12am and midday is 12pm.

This is easier to visualise on an analogue clock with a continuous seconds hand. Although the hand sweeps past 12 it spends no time there.

Alternatively think of a digital clock with very high precision. While your ordinary clock will show 12:00pm at midday for a full minute, your high precision clock might be showing 12:00:00.0000001 -- indisputably "post meridiem".
by floxy | 2025-09-02 02:24:44+00:00
>If you picked a random person off the street and asked for their thoughts on em dashes, you'd probably get a blank stare.

But the people you will reach online will be online, and not some random person-off-the-street. The average person on the street will give the same blank stare on the topic of compilers, regular expressions, black-holes, or robotics, but I still want to read about those topics. And if I want an LLM's take on those topics, everyone knows where to turn to get that.
by majormajor | 2025-09-02 02:25:01+00:00
> the fact that $2.5 trillion of actual investor money chose Google

Of course, a lot of money invested in Google was invested at a much lower price; if everyone sold all at once you'd have a hard time finding 2.5T of new money to buy all those shares. We could argue about if "not selling" is the same as "choosing again at the new price" every day... but... Google's not the interesting case here anyway.

For a young company in a hot industry like OpenAI total market cap is even less relevant since so much of the company simply isn't liquid anyway and the numbers come from far fewer instances of purchases than for an established public one.
by keeda | 2025-09-02 02:26:00+00:00
I'm curious to hear more about your take on why the culture change could be a mistake. From speaking to a couple of long-timers at Microsoft, while they didn't seem to have complaints under Ballmer, they did seem to welcome some aspects of Satya's culture change, specifically how it had become much more collaborative internally. To me, that seemed like a fix for the internal dynamics at MSFT depicted in that popular comic about Big Tech org-charts: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
by jrsdav | 2025-09-02 02:27:42+00:00
I’ve recently developed a serious allergy to this phrasing:

> “This was not just X; it’s really Y”

Here are some real examples taken from various sources:

> "Regenerative businesses don't just minimise harm; they actively create positive change for the environment and people."

> "This milestone isn’t just about our growth. It’s about deepening our commitment to you…"

> "This wasn’t just a market rally. It was a real-time lesson in how quickly sentiment can fracture and recover when fundamentals remain intact."

Hard to say for certain that this is AI slop, but just like em dashes, I see it routinely pop up in LLM prose. And I feel like it’s infected nearly everything I’ve read that was written within the last year.
by stockresearcher | 2025-09-02 02:27:47+00:00
(2012) https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/spring2012/feature/roc...

> Shotwell had lunch with a co-worker who had just joined the then-startup company SpaceX. They walked by the cubicle of CEO Elon Musk. “I said, ‘Oh, Elon, nice to meet you. You really need a new business developer,’” Shotwell recalls. “It just popped out. I was bad. It was very rude.” Or just bold enough to capture Musk’s attention. He called her later that day in 2002 and recruited her to be vice president of business development, his seventh employee.

Can you imagine something like that working today?
by tzs | 2025-09-02 02:28:12+00:00
Even in the first tier cities there is usually significant personal car ownership, often with more than half of households owning one.

Is that because many people find even first tier city public transit inadequate for much of their normal in-city transport, or are there a lot of people living in the first tier cities who need to visit the smaller cities or rural areas often enough that it is worth keeping a car just for those occasions?
by amy_petrik | 2025-09-02 02:28:58+00:00
I disagree. The pickup driver still has hope. A dream, a wish, a future. They may be aggressive jerks on average, surely, maybe they think they're better, maybe they're a bit emotionally out of control, sure. But if they're in a game of chicken, if the icy spectre of death appears before them, they will still give pause to consider the stakes, to think of their loved ones.

There is another type of driver, completely void of fear, a driver who has stared into the abyss and become the dragon. And that is the minivan driver. All hope is lost for the minivan driver. First of all, they're driving a minivan, speaks for itself. Second, we're talking about a 20 year old beater minivan held together with duct tape, driven not by fuel but by a sort of vacuum energy, the bleak desolation of it all, of life, nihilism on wheels. If such a vehicle is faced with a game of chicken, the driver won't blink but embrace the mortal transition to nirvana knowing their estate will only lose the market value of 1 beater minivan, about $20 and that death will be a sweet release from their miserable life
by sargstuff | 2025-09-02 02:29:10+00:00
What type of data "tests"? aka modeling, simulation, statistical regression, etc.

Wide variety of "what if" data environments/systems which have web accessible interfaces to backends (that are not just database systems).

commerical mathlab, sass

open source[0]: scilab; sagemath; numpy; gnu octave; julia; juniper

[0] : additional link references beyond "5 open source alternatives to MATHLAB" : https://opensource.com/alternatives/matlab
by tamimio | 2025-09-02 02:29:43+00:00
People will soon start accepting imperfections as a sign of genuine and authentic in any work that was done, and typos/mistakes as some sort of quick indicator that it was human made. Refreshing to be honest, finally people will embrace the fact that we are humans and we are supposed to do mistakes, instead of the tiring, mentally exhausting, perfectionist behavior. I remember seeing here in HN a company called ‘good enough’ or something along those lines, perfect to be imperfect!
by dereknovak | 2025-09-02 02:30:02+00:00
Location: Austin, TX

Remote: Remote preferred, but happy to work on-site

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies:

>Frontend - React, Node.js, Astro, Vite, DOM, Tailwind, HTML/CSS

>Backend - TypeScript/JavaScript, Express, Ruby, Sinatra, Python, Flask, SQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB/Atlas, Bash, Linux

>Cloud: AWS (IAM, SDK, CDK, EC2, S3, CloudFront, RDS), DigitalOcean

>Other: Docker, Git, NGINX, Jest, OpenAI, Claude, VectorDB, LangChain, OpenTelemetry, Grafana Stack

Resume/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LkhlJHlItVOXqwUApBpQ4GqGcwi...

Email: derek.novak1@gmail.com

About me: I'm a full-stack software engineer from Austin, TX with several years of experience in the JavaScript and Ruby ecosystems. Recently, I built Vispyr, an end-to-end observability platform that automates AWS deployment and simplifies telemetry setup for small engineering teams. I thrive in fast-moving, collaborative environments and have a passion for developing tools that simplify complex processes and accelerate developer workflows.

Looking forward to connect!
by nobody9999 | 2025-09-02 02:30:44+00:00
I don't know about you, but I don't have my device super-glued to my hand. In fact, if I'm going out to run errands in my neighborhood, I often don't bring such a device at all.

If I walk into a cafe (which is what GP was talking about), I'm going to (horror of horrors!) speak to the nice person standing behind the counter to ask them to make me my coffee.

I'm certainly not going to go full on passive aggressive and stand in front of the person taking orders and place my order on an "app."

In fact, if a retail establishment attempted to require that, I'd just leave.

Which I've done several times at restaurants who, when I ask for a menu, am informed that I should "scan the QR code" on a label stuck to the table with my phone to get the menu.

No thanks.
by Teknoman117 | 2025-09-02 02:30:53+00:00
An interesting example of this was i386 support (as in being able to run on the 80386) being removed way back in kernel 3.8 (early 2013). If you can support 80486 why can't you support 80386?

Well, there really wasn't much support for atomic instructions in x86 before the introduction of compare-exchange in the 486. Any time you wanted guaranteed atomicity on a 386 you had to disable interrupts, which among other things means that if you lock up during a critical section your entire system hangs. Another implication is that nearly all of our lockless data structure constructs depend on compare-exchange instructions.

It vastly simplified some very tricky sections of the kernel to remove support for systems that don't have hardware atomic instructions, so it ended up being done.
by godelski | 2025-09-02 02:31:03+00:00
> if Google and Meta got the best people, what the hell did they do in the last ten years?

Honestly, what have any of them done in the last 20 years? Forget AI for a minute[0]. A lot of stuff happened in the early 2000's but what since? I have a hard time thinking of anything post 2007 (iPhone). But what has been done since then other than some grifts? We made VR billionaires. We made bitcoin billionaires. We've now made AI billionaires. We've turned everything into a subscription, made everything a dark pattern, and everyone is just complaining how everything is broken.

Sure, these companies have made lots of money, but what have they done?

I actually do believe these companies have "the best people." I'm pretty sure they're just paid a lot less and having a difficult time advancing to staff engineer. Promoting people who are good at politics and being a yesman rather than a "does-good-work-man". For all our leetcoding, our "just make it work" mentality, and "we're going to do 10 interviews and take 3 months so that we can ensure we get the best people" I'm pretty sure we've done a really terrible job at it all. Maybe they are getting the best people, but then just putting them in handcuffs until they give up. Or maybe it's just all politics and no one actually cares about building a god damn product, and no, the stock does not count as a product and it is embarrassing that I even have to clarify this.

[0] While impressive it is still out if this will be profitable and if it'll be positive. It's unclear yet, unlike the other things. Read the rest of what I wrote...
by godelski | 2025-09-02 02:32:20+00:00
Reminds me of Bell Labs. The director was once interviewed asking "how do you manage a bunch of geniuses" and he answered "you don't." (I'm sure this wasn't the exact phrasing but the sentiment is right)

Edit: Appears my memory is better than I thought[0]

[0] https://westviewnews.org/2019/11/01/bell-labs-second-best-ke...
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-09-02 02:32:57+00:00
I agree. Reminds me of a few years back, when I got a Red Hat baseball cap which is (obviously) red. I had people telling me "oh no you can't wear that, MAGA hats ruined that". To which I say, balderdash and poppycock. I refuse to let others' mistaken assumptions dictate my behavior. If someone sees me wearing a RHEL hat and hates me because they assume I'm a Trump supporter, that's their problem, not mine.
by Spivak | 2025-09-02 02:33:06+00:00
I mean the first line of the article.

> A murder investigation has been launched at the Burning Man festival in the US state of Nevada after a man was found "lying in a pool of blood" on Saturday night, police say.

I have no idea why the BBC editor decided to be really vague with the title. When talking about a music festival "a body found," murder is probably pretty down your list of what you would assume the cause is.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-09-02 02:33:20+00:00
Because it requires a new account. Migrating PDS on bluesky does not require a new account, is invisible/transparent to your followers and following, and the end goal is that migration will be easy enough that you can do it in less than 5 minutes with no technical skill.

Bluesky/atproto is still very early/very young but the general theme is to focus on the UX and ergonomics to make decentralisation viable without forcing the user to be technical enough to care about it.

i.e. The end goal is that people should be able to say "fuck bluesky", click a button, wait for a loading bar to finish, and continue using bluesky without using bluesky PBLLC stuff.

To be clear we are not at this point yet and bluesky PBLLC is not suddenly hostile yet either. Triage is in order of priorities so some more important UX aspects are being handled first.

My personal prediction is that this should be a solved problem within less than a year but of course we'll see.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-02 02:33:27+00:00
I loved what Dalio wrote before Principles (like his white paper for All Weather) but Principles seemed to be mad self-aggrandizement done on such a scale to get a "Emperor's Clothes" kind of reaction from people. My sources were telling me about how Dalio was driving David Ferrucci crazy [1] trying to make an AI that could enforce Principles before I read about it in Bloomberg.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ferrucci