MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tromp | 2025-09-25 12:16:40+00:00
> Pascal contends that a rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and should strive to believe in God. The reasoning for this stance involves the potential outcomes: if God does not exist, the believer incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries; if God does exist, the believer stands to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition, while simultaneously avoiding boundless losses associated with an eternity in Hell.[2]

Should a rational person play in the lottery? If they lose they incur only small losses. If they win, they stand to gain immensely. No, the expected pay-off is still negative.

Pascal tries to make the expected value positive by promising infinite rewards, but God or any supposed behaviours to please that God are not really needed in there. There might be another God who provides the same rewards to those who refrain from the supposed behaviours.

Perhaps a rational person should simply believe in an infinitely rewarding afterlife for those who believe in one.
by solatic | 2025-09-25 12:16:52+00:00
No, this isn't how power works. Money/wealth is economic power, which can be grown through the application of renewable resources (e.g. human labor, electricity, resources that can be grown like wood) to build that which is more valuable to the participants of a transaction than the sum of its parts. As more wealth is created, more areas of power are created. If you disband a hierarchy (e.g. a company goes bankrupt/out of business), power hasn't been diluted back down to the individual level, rather power has been destroyed. Hypothetically, if humanity went extinct tomorrow, there would be no power left at all.
by thrance | 2025-09-25 12:17:00+00:00
> I'd say the article is extremely opininated and biased against primarily trump and rfk

I mean, at this point an article would be biased not showing opinion against Trump and Kennedy. How else to discuss their unhinged rant on paracetamol and autism in an official press conference? I'm not kidding, I'd be suspicious of any article that keeps a very neutral language and seriously considers their unsubstantiated word slurry.
by apothegm | 2025-09-25 12:17:08+00:00
Causation or correlation? For instance, perhaps a poor diet encourages the presence of certain oral bacteria over others, and also is causative for pancreatic cancer without the bacteria having any causative effect on the cancer. (I do believe that the microbiome has a massive effect on health, but this is either lazy science or lazy science reporting in jumping to a conclusion of causation.)
by conartist6 | 2025-09-25 12:17:54+00:00
If your goal is to lower the velocity of your organization, e.g. because in practice code churn or poor quality are major problems, then by all means do this.

If you still need to move fast, then don't.

This is the "don't run in the hallways" version of software culture, but I would contend that you should choose your pace based on your situation. It's just like gradient descent really. The be efficient sometimes you need to make big hops, sometimes small ones.
by gdbsjjdn | 2025-09-25 12:19:50+00:00
It's not a case of the manager not supporting her, it's a case of the manager putting something that could have been informal - "I'm happy with your performance and if you need to take some breaks during the workday I support it" - and made it a formal thing that is risking getting her fired.

The manager in question has admitted they fucked up and didn't realize how much HR would try to force my friend out for being a problem.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-09-25 12:20:59+00:00
"but it’s a sure-fire way to rid yourself of those pesky skilled and experienced employees. "

That's so true. In my niche, everybody WFH, only the most desperate folks take stationary/hybrid offers - and only for the time it takes them to find the proper job. (Yeah I know everybody's different but I just share my anecdata - we do meet in person sometimes but it is not forced and we genuinely enjoy it.)
by Veliladon | 2025-09-25 12:21:03+00:00
It's a double edged sword. The problem is that there's a lot of bad actors out there. You know why Apple doesn't let companies get access to the raw camera data on the Vision? Because Meta is salivating at getting inside people's homes and being able to get even more data.

Some of us are able to navigate the minefield through a lot of hard won experience acquired over years if not decades. I lived through the J2ME era with compromised JARs, premium rate scams, carriers monopolizing things, and all the bullshit that came along with it. The App Store, for all its MANY faults basically solved all that for normal people in one fell swoop.

A lot of people aren't going to realize what they might be giving up until it's too late. Apple is at least trying to mitigate this by keeping as much processing as possible on device and trying to secure those devices as best they can. For a lot of people who aren't technically inclined this is a godsend. DMA somewhat counteracts that because it forces Apple to give up some of the control that is keeping these bad actors at bay.
by octo888 | 2025-09-25 12:21:29+00:00
What I've often found is that people only really accept feedback from the Tech Lead, and peers are dismissed (not outright and not obviously - kind of sealioning etc). Peer-to-peer code reviews are another instance implementing a thing that pretends hierarchy does not exist.

You can only get basic tweaks accepted. The sunk-cost fallacy is a huge force.

Maybe I've only worked at crappy places
by jasongill | 2025-09-25 12:21:31+00:00
I disagree - your AI model should be decoupled from your control logic; so if the model determines that you need to move the boom, your control logic takes that action - either via hydraulic retrofit, canbus control, or just faking it in a simulator, and the AI model observes and reacts to the change as a result of that action.

So in reality, CANbus control should be no different than hydraulic control to your system - just another style of I/O
by piggg | 2025-09-25 12:21:47+00:00
I remember in the 2000s a large-ish Telco network in the US was running ospf on an IX. A few of us on IRC did the what if? And one of us brought up the adjacency and it worked.

Same network also had all their network links in MRTG public too with no auth - if you only knew the hostname/URL you could see it all (which their staff would sometimes drop in Noc communication when linking a graph and you attempted to go there to poke around).
by uyzstvqs | 2025-09-25 12:22:16+00:00
BlockTube also has an advanced blocking feature[0], which lets you define blocks using JavaScript if statements. You can flip it around to a whitelist-system by returning true (block) by default, and returning false (don't block) on your rules. But this does hide videos from search, recommended, homepage, etc.

What you're suggesting could potentially be done by creating an extension which checks the channel_id, then blocks calls to the /videoplayback endpoint if the channel is not whitelisted. Though do be aware that titles and thumbnails could also be explicit.

Side note: All of this is very technical and not suitable for the average parent, which is not great.

[0] https://github.com/amitbl/blocktube/wiki/Advanced-Blocking
by willvarfar | 2025-09-25 12:22:20+00:00
From the title this put me in mind of the "draco standard", a dragon head mounted atop a pole that wailed in the wind which Roman cavalry used when they charged into battle.

Yeah I know it's completely different, but HNers will enjoy discovering this rabbit hole so let me lead onwards: Time Team reconstructed one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNYcVuO-PoE :D
by incomingpain | 2025-09-25 12:24:14+00:00
>I've been sorting through my content on Google recently.

There's allegations that gemini is already trained on this data.

>Does anybody believe Google (and other companies) might soon start scanning personal files we hold on their storage facilities? Is that a legal possibility for them?

Free accounts already have agreed to be used.

>It seems to me that it's a huge pool of fresh training data that they would inevitably want to get their hands on. And given how much they have already trained on, it seems the next logical step from a business standpoint.

Im actually not so sure they have or ever will do. The problem isnt quantity, it's quality. Sure it could train on a bunch of trash in people's but then when inferring, it'll produce trash.

>Clearly they would need to change their privacy policies and terms of agreements and inform users of these changes. Is it possible they could slip this sort of change in without much notice?

you've been agreeing to them being able to read the content of the files for antivirus and antispam reasons for a very long time. To start doing it for AI requires no change.

>I was also wondering if anybody might have pointers for the best strategy to securely backup offline. I don't want to just shift my family photos from one company to another where business execs are training their own model. Anybody else handled this recently?

One of the useful apps I found was 'foldersync' which makes backup to cifs shares possible.
by benpacker | 2025-09-25 12:24:18+00:00
I think crossing a language barrier here would be hard: you'd need a codegen step to compile the RPC spec to Typescript for the client-side DX and that would need take into account the full range of differences in serializability across the languages.

For cross-language RPC, I think we're still better sticking to a well defined system where the spec is data (OpenAPI, GraphQL, etc.) instead of the spec being code that only one side understands.
by biztos | 2025-09-25 12:24:18+00:00
I was so used to my American bank not actively selling me snake oil that I stupidly bought a very expensive snake-oil subscription from my German bank when I was living there. Ended up with a warehouse full of snake oil (metaphorically speaking) and a sunk-cost fallacy before I finally figured out they just had a strategic partnership with Snake Oil GmbH so my account representative got a commission on my stupidity.
by gorgoiler | 2025-09-25 12:25:25+00:00
Your comment includes capital letters and punctuation! These are skills we all learn to ensure our writing is as legible as possible to the reader. Quotes, periods, commas, clauses, paragraphs etc. are all stylistic decisions that support the underlying text and message.

I contend that learning the art of story telling through a stack of patches is just as important and, once learned, comes just as naturally as utilizing vocabulary, grammar, syntax and style with the written word.
by immibis | 2025-09-25 12:27:35+00:00
There's a Fox News video of this on Youtube and the comments are literally completely insane. A third of them saying it was Democrats, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, etc. Another third saying it was immigrants and it's Democrats' fault for letting them in. Another third saying it was the Chinese. A few saying it's the woke Marxist agenda. Not a shred of sanity in sight.

There wasn't a single "hey maybe it's just some random people trying to earn money", much less a "hang on, this isn't actually a crime".
by jijijijij | 2025-09-25 12:27:48+00:00
Well, Russian, Hebrew and English are not my country's languages either and yet here we are.

Listen, I am not at all celebrating Chinese politics as absolute, their grave human rights violations, minority suppression, the Uyghur genocide or imperialist ambitions. I am not even saying they are the least, in fact they are probably the most dangerous. But they contribute little to the erosion of political dignity in my reality.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-25 12:28:51+00:00
Ah, my most hated enemy. Java Serialization.

I know that some JDK devs will argue that it's one thing that made Java popular. And I'm sure they are right. But man oh man if it's not one of the biggest footguns in the current JDK. It also constantly gets in the way of Java language development. They had to figure out, for example, "How do I serialize a lambda"? Which should really tell you just how ridiculous this thing is.

If there's one breaking change to the JDK that I'd welcome, it's the removal of Java serialization. But that will never happen because WAY too many companies depend on it.
by interloxia | 2025-09-25 12:28:55+00:00
https://corporate.ryanair.com/news/ryanair-confirms-wed-nov-...

"confirmed that it will move to 100% digital boarding passes from Wed Nov 12th"

"from Nov 12th passengers will no longer be able to download and print a physical paper boarding pass but will instead need to use the digital boarding pass generated in their “myRyanair” app during check-in to board their Ryanair flight."
by reaperducer | 2025-09-25 12:29:21+00:00
leading standards support

Except no support for:

CSS Canvas Drawings CSS filter() function Video Tracks Audio Tracks FIDO U2F API SPDY protocol JPEG XL image format HTTP Live Streaming HEIF/HEIC image format SVG fonts CSS hanging-punctuation

And broken support for:

CSS font-smooth CSS Initial Letter Speech Recognition API CSS -webkit-user-drag property CSS3 Multiple column layout CSS text-indent Synchronous Clipboard API HEVC/H.265 video format TLS 1.1 text-decoration styling CSS display: contents CSS Container Style Queries CSS clip-path property for HTML CSS Counter Styles Ruby annotation WAI-ARIA Accessibility features Media Fragments autocomplete attribute: on & off values DOMMatrix SVG effects for HTML X-Frame-Options HTTP header DNSSEC and DANE WebXR Device API DeviceOrientation & DeviceMotion events Permissions Policy asm.js Network Information API theme-color Meta Tag Document Policy

Source: https://caniuse.com

The whole "Chrome is the leader in standards" meme is a lie.
by pm215 | 2025-09-25 12:29:59+00:00
I think the other thing that often muddies the waters in discussions of code review is that open source projects and internal codebases are generally in rather different situations. An internal codebase is usually worked on by a fairly small group of experienced people, who are both creating and also reviewing PRs for it. So:

- the baseline "can I assume this person knows what they're doing?" level is higher

- making the "create PR" process take longer in order to make the review process faster is only a tradeoff of the time within the team

- if something is wrong with the committed code, the person who wrote it is going to be around to fix it

But in open source projects, there are much more often contributions by people outside the "core" long-term development team, where:

- you can't make the same assumptions that the contributor is familiar with the codebase, so you need to give things extra scrutiny

- there are often many fewer people doing the code review than there are submitting changes, so a process that requires more effort from the submitter in order to make the reviewer's job easier makes sense

- if there's a problem with the code, there's no guarantee that the submitter will be available or interested in fixing it once it's got upstream, so it's more important to catch subtle problems up front

and these tend to mean that the code-review process is tilted more towards "make it easy for reviewers, even if that requires more work from the submitter".
by leoedin | 2025-09-25 12:30:09+00:00
I do think commit messages should give some reference to what they're changing.

However, in more than a decade of software development, I don't think I've ever got much use out of commit messages. The only reason I'd even look at them is if git blame showed a specific commit introduced a bug, or made some confusing code. And normally the commit message has no relevant information - even if it's informative, it doesn't discuss the one line that I care about. Perhaps the only exception would be one line changes - perhaps a change which changes a single configuration value alongside a comment saying "Change X to n for y reason".

Comments can be a bit better - but they have the nasty habit of becoming stale.
by Illniyar | 2025-09-25 12:30:31+00:00
Seems like a good thing for founders, doesn't force them to quit school to start a funded startup. Especially for under-privileged youths who might not be able to miss a high paying job opportunity or have no income for months.

Seems like a bad signal for YC though - if you aren't committed enough to quit school or at the very least reject job offers and do your startup anyway - feels like you might not be committed enough to do what it takes?

But if anyone does, YC knows how to pick founders with the right mindset.
by jimz | 2025-09-25 12:30:47+00:00
Casinos have a ton of leverage in some states. Here in Nevada MGM and Caesar's and Wynn, thanks to their expansion, are effectively treated as too big to fail and given huge amount of deference in how they operate by the gaming commission. But there are also incredibly problematic protectionist regulations that I and several other residents who didn't really know each other tried to get rid of through the admin law process, primarily allowing remote signups which would also allow out of state entities to set up shop without literally having a physical casino. Having to physically go to a casino and sign up in person was onerous and clearly pointless, and then impossible during the pandemic, and became a really silly charade. What was supposed to start as public meetings right before the pandemic got dragged out, meetings would get rescheduled at the last minute, and casinos made entirely spurious rationales like "there aren't enough local datacenters" (Google Cloud's Henderson datacenter is surely sufficient for in state traffic?), that they would want taxpayer money for potential loss of revenue (capitalism dude, what are you afraid of?) Meetings would get scheduled in Carson City and that's literally six hours away by car. Agenda items would suddenly be altered. It was a hot mess. We managed to get iGaming in theory legalized but they straight up never even pretended to start working on regulations for it, and now with the 90% loss deduction limit by the IRS on the OBBB books basically have 12.5% house edge on any line to start if it's properly priced. My model can beat 2.5% but 12.5% is insane. If the feds are going to ban pros constructively, well, I can't out lobby a casino. And the pro betting constituency isn't big enough to pander to, frankly. If there's action, it can't actually happen on shore. I realize that "people who can beat the books due to specialist knowledge and can bankroll drawdowns to the extent that returns long term profit" is also publicly not sympathetic and generally people either think we're touts (if it makes me money touting absolutely won't help me, in fact the fewer people I have to interact with the better) or something. Wagering by hand sucks, but no model is perfect, just some are more useful than others, and someone in accounting may be able to figure out that ban or bankrupt is not a sustainable strategy to run books. But with the feds involved to put that imprimatur of authority in writing, I guess I'm never getting my limits lifted. Good luck finding stable liquidity elsewhere.
by sjzisjjsj | 2025-09-25 12:30:50+00:00
> What in the world leads you to believe that it’s responsible for the current (admittedly massive) inequalities we face?

It’s a symptom of the problem not the primary cause. Our real issue is elites that view us as cattle. Rulers that care about their people take a much more measured approach to immigration.

And yes, obviously pedantic equality is not achievable. I want more roads, trains, healthcare etc and less IPOs.
by panick21_ | 2025-09-25 12:30:57+00:00
Banks being only local was utterly horrible for the economy. You had many small banks completely depended on one region and a local supply shock would kill all the local banks as well.

This regulation didn't happen to prevent monopolies, it was done to create monopolies. Banks didn't want other banks from other regions to compete against their costumers.

Canada had larger branch banks that were much more stable.

> * Monopolies and oligopolies were routinely busted, resulting in less concentration in many industries:

Yes and often what was defined as a monopoly and what an oligopoly and what was defined as 'to large' was determined by what industry had a competitor that they couldn't defeat and also had friends in high places.

The original state level anti-trust actually came out of butchers that wanted protection from centralized butchers that could use special railcars to transport frozen meat, instead of doing localized butchering.

So a lot of the history that many idolize is just a different form of companies using state power against each other.
by blackbear_ | 2025-09-25 12:31:14+00:00
You are looking at jobs where you are paid to deliver something and where coding is just a tool towards that end, but not the deliverable itself.

For example, consider computational research in a domain like healthcare: the job is to find new insights about patients or diseases that allow you to develop better treatments. Most of the time is spent on coding data analysis pipelines, but the truly vauable professional also knows enough about the domain that they are able to interpret the results, conduct follow up analyses and talk at eye level with medical doctors and biologists. The skill ceiling for this kind of position is thus quite high since you need to be proficient in three distinct domains (coding, biology, statistics).
by matt_kantor | 2025-09-25 12:32:16+00:00
> I don't work on mission-critical software

> wondering what my alternate deployment routes are

If the stakes are low and you don't have any specific need for a persistent registry then you could skip it entirely and push images to production from wherever they are built.

This could be as simple as `docker save`/`scp`/`docker load`, or as fancy as running an ephemeral registry to get layer caching like you have with `docker push`/`docker pull`[1].

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/79758446/3625
by kgwgk | 2025-09-25 12:32:32+00:00
A restaurant won’t start selling clothes because if they don’t the customers will go elsewhere to buy clothes and they won’t come back.

A stock exchange won’t start holding a book of shares to give “better” prices to customers. What would that even mean? If the price is better for the buyer it will be worse for the seller! (If you mean that they will buy for a high price and sell for a low price to keep all customers happy maybe the customers won’t go anywhere but the “exchange” will go bankrupt.)

Why would a betting exchange be different? Does Betfair for example act like you suggests or is it just something you’re imagining?