MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-12 20:36:06+00:00
I don’t think it is possible to just “quit” using social media. The problem is that quitting feels to most people like giving you your weapons when your enemy still has them. Maybe if everyone “disarmed” at the same time it would work but how could you coordinate that? No one wants to sit out social media only to let their opponents continue to use it as an effective way to spread THEIR message.
by mvdtnz | 2025-09-12 20:36:22+00:00
It's not just you and there's a ton of gaslighting and astroturfing happening with Nano Banana. Thanks to this article we can even attempt to reproduce their exact inputs and lo and behold the results are much worse. I tried a bunch of them and got far worse results than the author. I assume they are trying the same prompts again and again until they get something slightly useful.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/aSbOVz5
by dmoy | 2025-09-12 20:36:35+00:00
Some of it is that "getting a patent" isn't always a high bar, and the real bar is "successfully using a patent in a lawsuit". Patent examiners don't have the time and resources to thoroughly vet every application, so there are a lot of patents granted that are pretty much worthless.

In this specific case I don't know. I would have to ask.
by tptacek | 2025-09-12 20:36:35+00:00
Sketch is an extraordinarily solid piece of software and they continue to use Sketch to build Sketch; meanwhile, show me someone who hasn't shipped an outage and I will show you someone who has probably never seriously worked in infra, so I don't really see what the high-order bit of the observation is. I have literally seen this exact pattern --- a refactoring PR that flipped a continue to a break --- cause an incident in human code (which is what all code was up until like 9 months ago).
by hyperman1 | 2025-09-12 20:36:41+00:00
Interesting. I see a lot of people around me using QGIS and all kinds of both free and paid gis tools. I never worked with ArcGIS, except for importing their files, but it seems to be universally loathed around here, even if licensing and money is not the problem. So what are the places where ArcGIS does better?
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-09-12 20:37:19+00:00
>Does that mean the 145 figure is only a guess on your end ?

EDIT: Mea maxima culpa, confusion crept in, my 145 number was supposed to be a much looser guess for actual working full time mathematicians. I miswrote this in the original post as applying to math PhD students, which are much lower. Closer to a 130 median.

ORIGINAL: It's not quite a guess, but I don't have precise data on this exact thing either. Previous studies in this field have consistently found a range of between 140 and 150, and you can probably find those with some Googling if you want to corroborate it yourself. I have a long cached memory of seeing a study where theoretical physics PhD students had an average IQ of 150, which also loosely supports this, since theoretical physics is almost its own form of pure mathematics.

>an individual's IQ is not something set in stone, and can absolutely be improved with training

Most psychological research I've seen says no such thing, unfortunately. Believe me, I would love for that to be the case - one extra point of IQ correlates to roughly $1000 extra income per year in the US, and so if your 20 point claim were really true we could potentially cause a double digit spike in GDP over the next few months just by implementing it in smart ways. But my baseline belief is that study is almost certainly an outlier in a sea of similar studies which support the null hypothesis.
by straydusk | 2025-09-12 20:37:19+00:00
I'll tell you what, I was interested in this place, but this would stop me in my tracks. For an A/B testing shop to do this (which I can promise you they did not A/B test), it pretty much invalidates everything they supposedly stand for. This is one of the goofiest, most non-functional things I've ever experienced on the internet. This would be a fun hackathon project... should have stayed there.
by rlpb | 2025-09-12 20:37:22+00:00
> As she was taking it I told her if it got broken while it was out of my hands that was her responsibility, it cost a thousand dollars.

If that's the claim, I think an appropriate response would be to send the kid out of class (with their precious phone), or home. Can't have them not paying attention in class, and if they are literally a walking liability to discipline in any other way: fine, so be it.
by cyberax | 2025-09-12 20:37:42+00:00
> Batteries and storage.

Nearly useless for Germany. Some intraday storage will be helpful, but it will not strongly affect the wintertime fossil fuel consumption and the overall CO2 emissions.

> That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.

No. It's not moving goalposts. Switching from gas to electric heat pumps for heating is absolutely relevant here. It's now inhibited by the high _electricity_ prices ( https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-transition-cle... ). Ditto for the ICE to EV transition.

The German government is now directly planning to pay around $20B in direct subsidies ( https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-pushes-17-billi... ) to build _gas_ power plants to alleviate some of that. I expect the final bill will be around $50B just for the new natural gas generation.

Germany is also quietly reassuring investors that it's safe to build natural gas by extending the subsidies: https://www.energyconnects.com/news/renewables/2025/january/...

As usual, actions speak louder than words.

If you're willing, we can place long-term bets on that. I'd be delighted to lose, but I don't expect it.
by ejstronge | 2025-09-12 20:39:12+00:00
> As an example, courts ordered the Associated Press allowed back into the White House press pool after the Trump administration attempted to remove them. You or I would not be allowed to just show up at the president's events to watch/listen in person. That is a special right.

This was overturned.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/business/media/appeals-co...
by lenerdenator | 2025-09-12 20:39:27+00:00
> To save civil society, we need to end our decade-long experiment with global social platforms. We tried them. They became dark and awful. It’s time to move on.

I mean, the lack of global social media platforms didn't do much for RFK or JFK or MLK Jr or Malcolm X or Harvey Milk or...

This sort of thing happens in any society where people have differences over how the state or capital should be used, and where at least some of those people can obtain or craft weapons. It's not just the US, either, though the availability of firearms is far more widespread here than in other Western nations. Canada, the UK, France, all have had politically-motivated assassinations (or attempts at assassinations) in the pre-social media era.

Humans are very good at being awful.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-12 20:39:34+00:00
The article doesn’t get specific about what the policy violation is. Despite the title, the Amazon statement didn’t say the letter was threatening. Here’s the relevant part of the article:

> Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser declined to address Shahrour's specific case but said the company doesn't "tolerate discrimination, harassment, or threatening behavior or language of any kind." The company revoked Shahrour's access to email and tools while conducting its investigation.

As an aside: this India Times website is terrible. It overrides copy/paste so you cannot copy text and share it here easily. And it messes with reader mode too. How do browsers even allow this? Is there a way to disable it on a mobile browser?
by Dwedit | 2025-09-12 20:39:38+00:00
Meanwhile Shift-JIS has a bad design, since the second byte of a character can be any ASCII character 0x40-0x9E. This includes brackets, backslash, caret, backquote, curly braces, pipe, and tilde. This can cause a path separator or math operator to appear in text that is encoded as Shift-JIS but interpreted as plain ASCII.

UTF-8 basically learned from the mistakes of previous encodings which allowed that kind of thing.
by AfterHIA | 2025-09-12 20:39:44+00:00
It's a travesty that more computer people aren't familiar with Jeff and also his son Aza. Ubiquity is brilliant (I recently used Claude to create a functional Chrome port) and the idea of, "highly useable information appliances" is still years ahead of its time. To me it seems like the most, "visionary" voices have been largely ignored by the industry- Engelbart, Ingalls/Kay, Raskin(s), Brenda Laurel, Ted Nelson (...)

The funny thing is that given how crap things have gotten it doesn't seem like it would be very hard at all to architect a, "radically improved" version of modern computer interfaces. We even have LLMs to help facilitate parts of the system that might have been historically difficult to implement. Why not instead of building a, "modern" Windows or Mac OS you made a, "useable" version which was optimized to run on anything or could run with any stalling on a modern computer? I don't want Windows 11; I want Windows 25' I want it to work orders of magnitude faster than Windows 98 rather than using Moore's Law to create something that can, "do more with more resources but averages out to roughly the same experience as previous generations."

We're still effectively using the same computers we were using when I was a kid in the 1990s.
by layer8 | 2025-09-12 20:39:50+00:00
The use of 8-bit extensions of ASCII (like the ISO 8859-x family) was ubiquitous for a few decades, and arguably still is to some extent on Windows (the standard Windows code pages). If ASCII had been 8-bit from the start, but with the most common characters all within the first 128 integers, which would seem likely as a design, then UTF-8 would still have worked out pretty well.

The accident of history is less that ASCII happens to be 7 bits, but that the relevant phase of computer development happened to primarily occur in an English-speaking country, and that English text happens to be well representable with 7-bit units.
by ojosilva | 2025-09-12 20:39:56+00:00
Yeah, the design is nice, colors, etc, I used to be fascinated by ExtJS 3.x's Windows-like webapp theme, even though I never really used it, because, like a sibling thread remarked: it's a bad idea to reinvent the desktop. Anyway, right now their product may be a good fit for my team, so I browsed and spend some time watching the video...

1) url history piles up pretty quickly, going back was irritating, closing a "OS" window should unstack that from browser history

2) more than one way to get to things (ie desktop icon + menu) so I visited certain pages ("About") more than once and felt trapped in a maze of deja-vus.

3) no way to scroll down and get the full glimpse, had to proactively click on words + icon, or menu items, to spot if inside there would be something relevant. Then, once the window opens: tabs, lots of tabs...

4) since the information is not really hierarchical, I can't delve into say Pricing. Got click on all the menu items... "Didn't I visit that before?" - and history kept piling up, so where was I before?

5) In Pricing, I read "Free tier - no support" - of course! - then $0.0001 for pay-for-use for the feature flag (every time the user switches the feature on/off? I don't get it, I'm sorry) ... then another free x pay-as-you-go box. Scroll down, then a huge calculator... . How much does it cost for my second app?

6) Cramped: lots of information in a reduced window - hit maximize every time, lots of borders.

7) Product features are really impressive, but the demo video gave the impression that it's really a busy app, overwhelming at times, with lot's of filtering options that look necessary to get the info out of the tool (great for power users, though!). But then the website is also busy and complex. If we add both up, app and website = high cognitive overload! I think I'll go shopping around first then come back later.

A disaster.

I hope they eat their own dog food. I'm pretty sure they will get lots of bad signals from their website.
by nailer | 2025-09-12 20:40:19+00:00
> If we could ask Charlie, I am sure he'd also think it was worth it!

Yes, agreed. He already did. He wouldn't want to disarm the nation to prevent his own death.

> I have no sympathy for white supremacists

Yes agreed, I sure Kirk would agree too, but that's offtopic here.

> Charlie once said that George Floyd was a "scumbag"

George Floyd was a scumbag. If you hold a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach, you're a scumbag.

> I am sure Charlie would have greatly appreciated me exercising my first!

Yes, agreed. He wouldn't share your opinion but he would support your right to free speech.
by throwaway31131 | 2025-09-12 20:40:34+00:00
I’d say it’s not even problem solving and it’s more pattern recognition.

I actually love LC and have been doing a problem a week for years. Basically I give myself 30 minutes and see what I can do. It’s my equivalent to the Sunday crossword. After awhile the signals and patterns became obvious, to me anyway.

I also love puzzlerush at chess.com. In chess puzzles there are patterns and themes. I can easily solve a 1600 rated problem in under 3 seconds for a chess position I’ve never seen before not because I solve the position by searching some move tree in my mind, I just recognize and apply the pattern. (It also makes it easier to trick the player when rushing but even the tricks have patterns :)

That said, in our group we will definitely have one person ask the candidate a LC style question. It will probably be me asking and I usually just make it up on the spot based on the resume. I think it’s more fun when neither one of us know the answer. Algorithm development, especially on graphs, is a critical part of the job so it’s important to demonstrate competency there.

Software engineering is a hugely diverse field now. Saying you’re a programmer is kinda like saying you’re an artist. It does give some information but you still don’t really know what skill set that person uses day to day.
by mort96 | 2025-09-12 20:41:04+00:00
> Some of it is that "getting a patent" isn't always a high bar

Which is a big fucking problem, to be honest. I would not want to enter a lawsuit with Nintendo to try to convince a judge that the patent I'm clearly violating is invalid.

If I was making a game with capture/summon mechanics and got a call from Nintendo, I would probably take capture/summon mechanics out of my game if their lawyers were threatening enough. That's the value in unenforceable patents.
by admaiora | 2025-09-12 20:41:06+00:00
QGIS is janky? It's quite possibly the smoothest and best running GIS software available today. Most built-in tools run way faster than AG Pro, and once the move to QT6 with 4.0 is complete this october, we'll finally get native builds on M-series Mac as well.

I couldn't even know where to start listing the upsides compared to ESRI offering, fron PostGIS integration all the way to the simplicity of plugins.
by samth | 2025-09-12 20:41:31+00:00
It's not true that you need to use CPS to implemented first-class continuations. There are plenty of slow ways to do it, and even if you want to be fast you can do multiple different things. Dybvig describes a number of options in his thesis: https://www.cs.unc.edu/xcms/wpfiles/dissertations/dybvig.pdf
by viraptor | 2025-09-12 20:42:13+00:00
It's not just the dashboard. Their core infra is great, but basically anything extra, their interfaces, libraries, new services, support etc. have various issues and limitations like it never got really polished. Things like token permissions that can't be scoped in the DNS (have access to manage all entries or nothing), typescript types lagging behind implemented features, support asking you to do all the debugging instead of looking at things from their side (like they don't have the tools?) are a constant frustration to me.

And on top of that, if you've got an enterprise contract, the details of it are only available in the email to the last person that changed it.
by photonthug | 2025-09-12 20:42:14+00:00
> One thing that it doesn't really cover is the rest of German society and how those thugs managed to get power.

Just to clarify for other folks, there are many episodes re: Nazis, but it also covers everything from Khmer Rouge to more modern coverage that's truly the more banal kind of evil, covering the worst and most destructive grifters. So while it's definitely kinda preoccupied with fascism, there's another through-line with dis/misinformation, etc etc.

I do agree with your basic criticism though, fair to say the general show format for dictators is 1st part bio which is frequently unremarkable, then the 2nd part is appalling crimes. How society was complicit/tolerant enough to allow the decline to happen is usually sidelined. On the other hand though, it's kind of always the same and pretty simple. To the extent it's not simply hidden or covered up, it works like this. After things are definitely very shitty, whatever misguided optimism folks can muster is usually all about "harming the out-group will help somehow!". (It doesn't.)

But the astute dictator (or their advisors) can rely on and exploit that kind of tribalism. Common sense, static value-systems, or any sensitivity to blatantly hypocritical statements/behaviour etc just are not things that the common person can really hang on to once they are angry/impoverished/aggrieved/hungry
by diggan | 2025-09-12 20:42:15+00:00
> But a CVV must still actually be useful to some fraction of your real customers, and likewise the expiry date.

The CVV code of this card changes once every 10 minutes, so I understand them not printing that. Yet yeah, could have put the card number there with the dates, but I guess if the CVV already cannot be printed, why not just avoid all of it?

Regardless, doesn't really matter much anyways as I don't think I've used a proper card for months, everything around me supports NFC mobile payments since years back.
by lfx | 2025-09-12 20:42:25+00:00
> Does a pure AI-agent marketplace make sense?

It does, however who is your target market?

> Any UX or trust issues you’d expect with this model?

Yes, why I should trust those agents? How do they work? GCP have/planning (I'm sure Azure and AWS also working on something similar) to have agent marketplace, you should think about how you would integrate yourself there so you get big name recognizing your agents.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-09-12 20:42:25+00:00
Yes, exactly! One reason it's valuable to look at these numbers is because it makes you take a step back and say "Wait - I'm in what percentile?"

That naturally leads many people to ask whether making only $200,000 a year as a professor somewhere is really a price you're willing to pay, as opposed to making multiples of that as the smartest guy in the room in any number of private industries. Opportunity cost matters!
by beeflet | 2025-09-12 20:42:43+00:00
I agree with the sentiment somewhat. Some rust libraries are dying, while some great new ones thrive (recently found iroh and wgpu to name a few). Everyone wants to write a game engine or some fun project and then abandon it, but no one wants to write a game. No application software has really "cemented" itself in the global ecosystem. Except for maybe ripgrep?

I would like to see support for more compilers (https://rust-gcc.github.io/), more interoperability with C/C++, better support for cross-compilation. Maybe less reliance on crates.io, static linking, and permissive licenses.

Still, I see Rust as the natural progression from C++. It has enough momentum to flatten all competitors (Carbon, Zig, Nim, Go) except scripting languages
by idle_zealot | 2025-09-12 20:42:48+00:00
You're right that they're not breaking the law in this specific instance. I was referring to the many instances they've lost or are disputing in court, mainly around browser engines/JIT, their handling of default app screens, third party app distribution, extra fees, and mandatory app bundle signing.

In this case they're merely being obtuse by refusing to provide an API to other device manufacturers. Unless you genuinely believe that the cost/benefit analysis of adding a new feature to their OS dictates that they basically freeze development unless they're able to recoup costs by tying it to their accessories, then you must conclude that they made the live transcription API Apple-only, and therefore not DMA-compatible, only to make EU citizens feel like their laws were depriving them of new features.

An organization interested in good-faith compliance would expose their internal API surface with some vetting process for access by interested parties. Then as the API becomes stable they would open it up more broadly. If accused of being anti-competitive by restricting access they could easily and correctly argue that they were working with potential competitors on that stable and secure API, and that their actions balanced the interests of market competition and security.

Of course, Apple is not interested in good-faith compliance. It's my belief that they should be made an example of so that they and other companies running the math in the future decide that proactive and good-faith compliance with regulations is more cost-effective than attempting to fight them.
by b112 | 2025-09-12 20:42:54+00:00
Well, I still feel the age of the platform, its use case, means that the B-52 is a good thing to point to. But, OK, fair enough... the rigors of military maintenance are indeed there, and of use. And as you've demonstrated, more rigorous than I thought.

I'll take another tact here.

https://forcedistancetimes.com/asymmetric-why-china-still-ca...

You may be aware, but it wasn't until 2017? that China could make a ball point pen from domestic parts. The tolerances of the ball, the machinery to make it, the quality of steel... just wasn't there.

Yet we've had that in the West for most of a century? Regardless, it's not about specific timelines, but instead about the fact that most of our modern world could not be crafted by hand. Modern molding, quality of steel and components, machine tolerances, all of this means we're able to make products to tolerances and specifications that were simply impossible before.

The reason I stressed the Volvo, the B-52, is because they are platforms known for fixing stress points, early wear, resolving manufacturing defects, and becoming far more reliable as a result. Unlike modern manufacturers, who mostly derive profit from full replacement of dead products, the profit motive for the Volvo and the B-52 aren't there in the same capacity.

I have nothing against profit, but in this case I do believe it has resulted in far less research into reliability. And the constant churn for 'new new', results in change with little benefit but a constant change to manufacturing methods, and so on.

It's so demonstrably bad, that Quebec (where I live) has passed laws stating that appliances such as fridges, are good not for a year, or two years, but instead a 'reasonable timeframe'. It's purposely vague, for example a single person buying a $1500 fridge, vs someone buying a $800 with a family of 4 might expect more wear and tear, and the warranty not quite as long.

But the reason behind this law, is fridges used to last a least a decade, meanwhile LG fridges often fail in just a few years these days.

Back to the main point, we have the ability to product parts with incredible consistence and to very finite tolerances. Modern failures are no more down to type of material (you cite rubber, and yes that can be an issue), or to unexpected wear.

What I've been trying to convey is, we have part manufacturing down quite well now. Longer term platforms without change, and constant improvement on unexpected wear points, would result in far better outcomes on that front.

This is a far cry from the original post I replied to, which felt robots would have little use from the overwhelming maintenance costs.