MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xg15 | 2025-09-28 20:38:03+00:00
I think that's an interesting point though that is often neglected - not all abstractions are created equal.

In a browser, both the DOM, web APIs, etc are abstractions - so are frameworks like React, ect. However, there is usually a lot less anger and attention directed at the former than the letter.

My theory why this is the case is that the former is a "hard" abstraction boundary while the latter is "soft": For a web site, it's intentionally not possible to peek below the abstraction layer of the web APIs. However, in exchange, the browser also puts in a lot of effort to make sure that web devs don't have to go below the abstraction layer: By providing watertight error handling for everything below the layer and by giving rich debugging tools that work with the concepts given by the abstraction.

In contrast, any frameworks and libraries that build on top of that are "soft", because developers can - and have to - lool into the code of the framework itself if some problem requires it.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-09-28 20:38:24+00:00
Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way is probably the best place to start if you're coming at this from 0. It covers the basics of most of the foundational math you'll need along the way and assumes basically no prerequisites.

After than Statistical Rethinking will take you much deeper into more complex experiment design using linear models and beyond as well as deepening your understanding of other areas of math required.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-09-28 20:38:41+00:00
Simple question: in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and there was peaceful “annexation” of GDR into FRG, in which West Germany effectively took over, with its constitution taking into effect in new federal states, the GDR assets being taken over by western economic structures etc. Was it imperial by its nature?

From Russian perspective it’s kind of the same (except the war part of course). Same language spoken, shared history etc. If you look at any empire, they colonize other nations. This specific conflict is framed as imperial by analysts based on the notion that the annexed territories are where a completely separate nation forged, which is being colonized. It’s not a historical but a propaganda narrative, that attempts to hide all the complexity of this topic.
by silisili | 2025-09-28 20:39:12+00:00
Outside of corporal punishment, which is a divisive topic, the only thing I can think of are a) not making school compulsory, and b) not tying government money to headcount.

If you have problem kids, expel them immediately and let the parents figure out the education. Which goes back in a way to my initial point - you have to at some point pick who's in charge. We've decided as a society it's the parents, so make public education an easily revokable privilege.

Right now we seem to have chosen the worst of both worlds - forcing kids to spend time with untouchable psychopaths all day every day.
by asdff | 2025-09-28 20:40:15+00:00
A broken clock is right twice a day. America has some of the highest numbers of lawyers per capita by far out of developed nations. These lawyers do not work for us, most middle and low income people do not get legal representation that they need at all. You learn where these lawyers actually work when you work in corporate, and you see quickly how this single department has complete unilateral control over all operations of the organization. Everything goes through them and they can shut down anything. Even directives by the chief executive officer who is supposedly at the helm are crafted by legal.

And when you understand that the american government is controlled by corporations, given the above logic that really means it is controlled by their lawyers. Most politicians in representative government come from law backgrounds as well.
by Joker_vD | 2025-09-28 20:40:33+00:00
Just so you know, the "return x < 0 ? -x : x;" compiles into

abs_branch: mov eax, edi neg eax cmovs eax, edi ret

on x64, and into

abs_branch: srai a5,a0,31 xor a0,a5,a0 sub a0,a0,a5 ret

on RISC-V if you use a C compiler with a half-decent codegen. And "branchy" clamp() translates into

clamp: cmp edi, edx mov eax, esi cmovle edx, edi cmp edi, esi cmovge eax, edx ret

Seriously, the automatic transformation between ?: and if-then-else (in both directions) is quite well studied by now. And if you try to benchmark difference between branching and branchless implementations, please make sure that the branches you expect are actually there in the compiler's output.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-09-28 20:41:01+00:00
The worst is we don't know what we don't know. That sounds trite, but in fact the scientific method is about generating a consensus among "rational, educated, intelligent people."

That doesn't mean it's correct. It doesn't even mean it's objective. The best you can get is a consensus among a subset of humans that certain things happen because of certain other things, and certain models can predict some of these things with limited accuracy.

This turns out to be useful for human experiences, as far as it goes. But we literally can't imagine what connections we're not aware of, what formalisms and models we can't create because our brains are too limited by their evolutionary wiring, and what experiences we're not having because same.

You could argue that these invisible imperceptible things can't affect us, by definition. But we don't know that's true. There could an entire universe of influences and abstractions we're not aware of.

And there probably is. Realistically, what are the odds that our not very large or clever brains really do have the potential to understand the entire universe?

What we think of science is more like the gap between the smartest 1% and the rest of the population. Science is a good way to make those 1% insights sticky and useful to everyone else.

But it's highly presumptuous to assume that human cognition has no limits, and the universe fits comfortably inside our brains.
by userbinator | 2025-09-28 20:41:14+00:00
The most irritating circumstance for this is looking for files named with a hash:

3ea4f... ... 97dce... ... 126b9...

This is one of the settings I immediately turn off on Windows via the registry key mentioned in the other comments here.

I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead of trying to read your mind.

These days, it's more like "trying to change your mind". I absolutely hate the "the user is wrong" authoritarian mentality that unfortunately has infected a ton of software, even open-source.
by regularization | 2025-09-28 20:41:45+00:00
I remember in the 1970s when the Soviet Union was called a gerontocracy. Gorbachev becoming general Secretary at the age of 54 was seen as a breath of fresh air. As your chart shows, one third of the US Senate is over the age of 70. We have people like Biden and Trump as president. Sign of the times (who are respectively 10 and 7 years older than Xi). Incidentally, Xi is the oldest member of the Politburo Standing Committee.
by trhway | 2025-09-28 20:42:02+00:00
Whether the mass shooting was stopped or not is impossible to say.

What is a fact here is that the "106 people from 59 organizations" spent several weeks to stop or at least significantly decrease the level of bullying against one student. One can only wonder why stopping bullying is that hard and expensive (100 state and federal employees at the minimum cost of $1K/employee/week). And why that "school resource officer" hadn't been doing his job?

And why other adults can't get involved and stop bullying before it reaches the level when government has to get involved? These days adults don't "correct" teenagers anymore like it was done in the past and like say adult dogs do to badly behaving puppies.
by nanolith | 2025-09-28 20:42:22+00:00
I'm living with heart failure. I have 20-30 years before I'll need a transplant, if I live a perfect lifestyle and keep my other health issues under control. Due to my other health issues, I am not a good candidate for a human heart transplant. It's not that a human heart transplant would fail, but that when I'd be placed against others on the list for a new heart, my other health issues would reduce my priority such that there is always someone with higher priority to receive a heart, up until the point in which I'm no longer healthy enough to receive a transplant. There are far too few human hearts, and far too many people who need one. All that the transplant boards can do is give hearts to those with the greatest momentary need, with the best chance of surviving.

Xenotransplantation is one of the life lines I'm counting on. I'm hoping that, by the time I need it, the issues that we currently have will be worked out. I have zero ethical issues with breeding and eventually culling pigs in order to save human lives. I hope that there will be other, better, breakthroughs by then, but if not, the best I can hope for is that the pigs are raised in a sterile and enriching environment, and that the only bad day they have is their last day.
by zakelfassi | 2025-09-28 20:42:28+00:00
Fair push, thank you. Let me clarify where I'm coming from.

Re: Figma vs Illustrator –– totally agree Figma doesn't cover Illustrator's full surface area. But in a lot of product/UI/marketing work, "good enough + collaborative + extensible" beats "feature-complete." The fact students default to Figma signals where the center of gravity is drifting, even if print/illustration shops still anchor on Illustrator.

Re: Omarchy + Framework –– not claiming market dominance — it's tiny and new. My point is more about signal: indie dev culture experimenting with modular laptops + DHH's OS is the kind of early-edge activity that tends to foreshadow bigger cultural/tooling shifts.

I write from a Silicon Valley x indie dev POV: watching sparks at the periphery because that's often where the next fire comes from.
by traspler | 2025-09-28 20:42:45+00:00
Even though I am for the eID I do share your worry but I don‘t think it‘s hopeless. Both politically and socially there are avenues to combat such over-identification. Still, most uses will probably more private than sharing copies of your ID so I am not sure what the gain for companies will be as it might just limit the customer base without much data gained. That does not seem in the interest of those companies. It‘s easier for the government to enforce certain checks, which is also not ideal but still there are avenues to fight this if it happens.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-28 20:43:10+00:00
Here are some stories from academics that had trouble getting companies to actually run rigorous experiments about ad effectiveness:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

I don’t think ad companies are really trying to disprove the idea that their business model works. The intelligent statisticians work for the ad companies or in the ad departments of the product-selling companies.
by sensanaty | 2025-09-28 20:43:17+00:00
As an IC turned temporary manager that went back to being IC, yes, absolutely my skills atrophied. This isn't even a programming thing, this is just a regular human thing with most, arguably all, things that you don't practice for a while.

Also I find the idea that most managers or technical leads are doing any kind of "deep thought" hilarious, but that's just maybe my apathy towards management speaking.
by izabera | 2025-09-28 20:44:23+00:00
atomics aren't free even without contention. the slogan of the language is "you don't pay for what you don't use", and it's really not great that there's no non atomic refcount in the standard. the fact that it is default atomic has also lead people to assume guarantees that it doesn't provide, which was trivially predictable when the standard first introduced it.
by cpard | 2025-09-28 20:44:49+00:00
The valuable lesson from what Cloudflare claims is that if you want to make an LLM perform as you expect you have to build considering their strengths and weaknesses.

You can see the same behavior if you try to ask an LLM to code in an API that is not commonly used.

When it comes to MCP tooling I followed a different path but with similar assumptions.

There are tools that LLMs have been Rled to death to use. So I’m modeling my tools after them.

Specifically, I try to have a “glob” tool, used to let the LLM figure out structure. A search and a read tool and use regexp as much as possible for passing parameters.

You can see an early version of this pattern here: https://github.com/typedef-ai/fenic/blob/main/examples/mcp/d...

It has been working well, at least in terms of the model knowing how to invoke and use the tools.

I have to say though that each model is different. I see differences between Claude code and Codex when I use the MCP for development, at least on how good they are in retrieving the information they need.

Maybe I should try to run some benchmarking and compare more formally
by surfingdino | 2025-09-28 20:44:57+00:00
Estonia (and now Ukraine) have worked on being able to do a "backup" of the country and a "restore" elsewhere if needed. (I am oversimplifying, but contingency plans have been part of the overall design that eID is a part of.) The UK doesn't have such designs and contingencies in place. The private sector is no better, every year there are major security breaches. It is premature to stick Digital ID onto a rickety network of badly secured databases.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-09-28 20:45:10+00:00
There are many behaviors that other species do that we don't, even behaviors that we used to do that we've collectively decided are socially unacceptable - rape, cannibalism and infanticide easy come to mind. The longstanding history of such behavior, I would hope, reflects the difficulty of reducing it, and not our stance on whether it should be reduced. Often the most difficult part of change is confronting the fatalistic position that nothing can be done.

The vast majority of lung cancer cases are caused by smoking, still it was a worthwhile effort to reduce asbestos use. Likewise, and generally, we can address issues by targeting a wide array of causal factors. How many of those school shooters do you recokon were also socially outcast or bullied?
by dbrgn | 2025-09-28 20:45:43+00:00
Companies can already request and will still be able to request a PDF scan of your ID. Or worse, video ident through a private third party.

This is the status quo for ordering alcohol online, or if you want to open a bank account.

The new E-ID based on SSI (self-sovereign identity) is so much better than the status quo from a real-world privacy perspective towards companies that must verify your identity or age.
by nurettin | 2025-09-28 20:46:23+00:00
Why not do Indexable = Any and pass that? Even if it doesn't help your jit or the IDE, at least it is more explicit than

def lol(blarg): # types? haha you wish. rtfc you poor sod. Pytharn spirit ftw!!! ... return omg[0].wtf["lol freedom"].pwned(Good.LUCK).figuring * out
by Spivak | 2025-09-28 20:47:24+00:00
> Indeed the main issue is that there are dodgy employers and landlords who simply flunk the law

I'm surprised that this is your framing, I don't think I would hesitate to offer a willing tenant or otherwise good employee a job because of their legal status. Mostly just on principle, it's not my job to be an arm of the state and I resent being deputized. They're physically here in my town, better they have somewhere to live and a means of supporting themselves rather than being homeless. If the state wants to find and deport them they can do it themselves on their own time.
by Animats | 2025-09-28 20:47:31+00:00
> Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?

I hope not. That's never worked. Napoleon, Hitler, and the Wagner Group's comic-opera invasion all failed.

The Economist seems to view this as the end of a happy era for Europe, an era when the EU could focus on making the EU work well and provide a good life for its people, without worrying too much about external problems. They're not wrong.

Putin's stated goal is to re-establish a Russian empire, out to the boundaries of the 19th century Russian Empire.[1] He's been saying things like this for years now: "Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them, he did not take anything from them, he returned [them (to Russia)]. Apparently, it also fell to us to return [what is Russia’s] and strengthen [the country]. And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire
by Syntaf | 2025-09-28 20:47:54+00:00
I feel like it's more often a result of suffering from success that leads to these situations, rather than a lack of foresight to begin with.

For example I work on a python codebase shared by 300+ engineers for a popular unicorn. Typing is an extremely important part of enforcing our contracts between teams within the same repository. For better or for worse, python will likely remain the primary language of the company stack.

Should the founder have chosen a better language during their pre-revenue days? Maybe, but at the same time I think the founder chose wisely -- they just needed something that was _quick_ (Django) and capable of slapping features / ecosystem packages on top of to get the job done.

For every successful company built on a shaky dynamic language, there's probably x10 more companies that failed on top of a perfect and scalable stack using static languages.
by notahacker | 2025-09-28 20:47:55+00:00
I mean, if we're in agreement that it'd be more efficient to have socialized healthcare than the non-socialized healthcare the US has, I'm not sure why you started off with the insistence that the private and charitable sector made everything so much more efficient it could provide all the actual benefits of the US government for a third of the cost.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't private hospitals entirely free not to accept EMTALA patients if they also choose not to accept Medicare funding? And that some do, and remarkably still manage to be significantly more expensive than the rest of the world. Weird all these profit making companies opting in to accepting the regulation though, if it's that big a burden.

Like I said, if it was easy to do so much better than socialized healthcare simply by abolishing regulations on the private sector (which itself is a different discussion entirely from whether private companies are intrinsically more efficient), it's surprising nobody seems to have achieved this, anywhere. The true purely private healthcare system that delivers the same or better health outcomes at lower cost doesn't exist.
by judicious | 2025-09-28 20:47:55+00:00
I’m by no means an expert on this topic, but what about using predefined hash map of value to function call/closure unless that also yields branched programming underneath? Additionally, maybe you want to use macros of some kind to generate the “magic” function you’re looking for, where it constructs a single branchless statement up to N terms, whether it’s procedural macros in Rust or C macros.
by hollerith | 2025-09-28 20:48:18+00:00
Whether the elite is gone depends on whether the elite sought shelter from a nuclear attack, like it did during the start of the invasion of Ukraine. (The Russian regime has facilities built into granite in the Southern Ural mountains that can withstand direct attack from nukes.) Also, if an attacker does manage to kill everyone in the ruling coalition during a time of existential war, a new ruling coalition forms that is just as committed to the war as the old coalition.

A government of a society like Russia (or the US for that matter or Britain) doesn't collapse when it is hit very hard. Everyone rallies around the government, or more precisely, most people rally around and the rest either remain silent or get imprisoned or killed.

Hitler famously believed that the Soviet Union would collapse if invaded: "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down," he said. It didn't collapse, nor did China when Japan invaded and killed millions of Chinese and occupied all its coastal cities. Neither of China's two governments collapsed even though before the Japanese invasion the two governments were engaged in a civil war that was in itself the third most deadly war of the 20th Century.

The most powerful military in the world could not force regime change on Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s or on Afghanistan in the 2000s and 2010s. This is because when invaded, most countries will become very unified around the goal of expelling the invader -- and a big nuclear attack will elicit the same "nationalistic" feelings as an invasion.
by jrm4 | 2025-09-28 20:48:42+00:00
Nailed it. Long time Tinc user here as well for all my personal stuff. Besides the fact that onboarding individual machines is a garbage process, it's my second best "set it and forget it thing" I use; the first being Syncthing which came later (and additionally, the two work very nicely together through weird edge cases like work VPNS and suc.)
Ask HN: Where Are We Headed?
by findingMeaning | 2025-09-28 20:49:46+00:00
To a developed world from the citizen of less developed country:

Where are we headed? This is a late night thought from where I live.

I saw a tweet earlier leading to: https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/09/27/failing-to-understand-the-exponential-again/

Then from Scott: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9183

Then from Sohl-Dickstein: https://x.com/jaschasd/status/1972360405885637021

Seriously, to survive with high standard in low income country requires earning $2k/month. To save would require $4k/month.

With AI automating, the demands from low income country is service industry is most likely to be gone.

The unrest in SEA is in news everyday. This is a pattern emerging across different countries.

Immigration/Brain Drain to developed world exacerbated this condition.

I am genuinely interested in knowing where are we headed and what are we going to do?

What is the merit in being human?

What is the merit in all of this? Who is profiting? Humanity or the elites?

I am not considering jobs, or anything. Just wondering, what will the objective value of money be when this technology is realized in full effect.
by more_corn | 2025-09-28 20:50:05+00:00
There are known errors in thinking. Avoiding them can make you less likely to fall into the many reasoning errors that humans have been trapped in throughout history.

It might not make you 2% smarter on a test. It probably makes you 2% and more overall because you can examine your thinking for common classes of error, identity your mistakes and attempt to correct them.

Examine the known errors humans have made in their understanding of the world. Identify patterns in those errors, abstract those errors, apply the principles to your conclusions.

Here’s one: thinking there’s some source of truth written on commonly known that cannot be challenged. For centuries after the invention of the microscope germ theory was disregarded because a false theory of miasma predominated. Why? We got attached to pleasant sounding but made up story. We didn’t question it enough to allow the evidence before our eyes to update our thinking.

I leave exploration of other classes of errors in thinking as an exercise for the reader.