MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-09-24 15:47:12+00:00
Any time someone is talking about the ref's influence on sports I get to plug one of my favorite books, Scorecasting by Moskowitz and Wertheim. The premise of the book is simple: using statistical analysis, can you prove or disprove various beliefs about sports? Several chapters are dedicated to various ways that officials influence the games that they're calling. The book does make a compelling case that they do, but in the least expected and to my mind genuinely most noble way: it seems that when officials do bend the rules, it's usually to avoid doing anything at all. In baseball, strike zones shrink on an 0-2 count because a called third strike feels like the official deciding the outcome but a swing and miss, or contact in-play, feels like the two teams playing the game and deciding the winner. In Association Foot-the-Ball, the tendency in big matches, in close matches and later on in matches isn't to call more penalties on any one team than the others, it's to penalize less overall. In matches that aren't that close or important the tendency is that the underdog will receive fewer penalties, or in blowouts the team in the lead tends to take more penalties than the team that's behind. What's really fun is that because human behavior is feedback loops that accept feedback loops as input even the appearance of bias can sometimes introduce bias. When they studied hockey they went with the assumption that, all other things being normalized for, each team should be equally likely to be the next to take a penalty. Some individual teams might be more likely than others to take a penalty, but across dozens of teams and dozens of seasons it should more or less shake out square. But it turns out that similar patterns apply: in close games, or during the playoffs fewer penalties overall but also the first strong evidence of something that hockey folk have always suspected: make-up calls. You're right, sometimes it's really close and sometimes the officials just get it wrong, and this book demonstrates statistically that after close or incorrect calls, or calls that seemed to have an inordinate effect on the game, the team that was put at a disadvantage is much more likely to be the next put at an advantage.

So yeah, officials do influence play and frankly I think it's a good and healthy thing for the sport overall when they do. In the case of balls and strikes I support automated calls because that's very simple (the ball is either in the box or not, and we can hem and haw about how we define the box during the off-season) and the infra to do it is already in-place. But in difficult, judgment-call situations (to take american football as an example, what's the actual, objectively-defined line between a corner getting handsy and defensive pass interference?) I not only think humans are necessary despite their biases but because of them. Obv bias in favor of any one team or style of play needs to be rooted out but the way that officials actually call games, even when it varies from the rules, seems to actually benefit the sport, the athletes and the fans in a lot of unexpected ways.
by dmos62 | 2025-09-24 15:47:15+00:00
Steve Jobs was also known to lock teams in a room until they arrived at a common vision. It's a difficult task, to align everyone, but in my limited experience not doing it resulted in extremely inefficient execution. What's more, people feel belittled and rejected if you disregard their viewpoints. Sometimes you need to get things done regardless of what people feel or think, but you can't sustain that for a long time.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-24 15:47:37+00:00
Great for shareholders, not great for workers. Who has the most exposure to gains from productivity growth? Not most Americans. Making America more productive and richer only matters if the gains from that are taxed to provide broadly for its citizens.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ...

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-24 15:47:41+00:00
> The journalists don't think they're writing these stories to amplify the police narrative (they think they're unbiased). They just don't have the judgement (or will?) to look beyond the initial narrative which is police-driven.

No, they know what they are doing and you can tell they know what they are doing by the careful way language is used differently for similar facts when the police or other favored entities are involved vs. other entities in similar factual circumstances (particularly, the use of constructions which separates responsibility for an adverse result from the actor, which is overwhelmingly used in US media when police are the actors—and also, when organs of the Israeli state are—but not for most other violent actors.) This is frequently described as “the exonerative mood” (or, sometimes, “the exonerative tense”, though it is not really a verb tense.)

Carefully calibrated, highly-selective use of (often, quite awkward) linguistic constructs does not happen unconsciously, it is a deliberate, knowing choice.
by kragen | 2025-09-24 15:47:44+00:00
Possibly if this sounds interesting you should check out Dolt: https://github.com/dolthub/dolt “Git for Data! (...) a SQL database that you can fork, clone, branch, merge, push and pull just like a Git repository.”

With respect to querying Git repos, I was pleasantly surprised with how usable git cat-file --batch was as a programmatic way to walk around the Git graph in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/threepowcommit.py, which reads about 8000 commits per second on my laptop—not fast, but not as slow as you'd expect.
by philwelch | 2025-09-24 15:47:48+00:00
Stalin likely killed more of his own people than Hitler did if you count artificial famines, which I do. This shouldn't be surprising because Stalin was in power for longer and had a greater degree of unchecked power over the Soviet Union than Hitler ever did. Of course, many of the people murdered by either regime weren't actually communists.

> There is a dominant thread of anti-intellectualism that lumps virtually all WW2 deaths as "victims of communism". This is total nonsense, obviously, promoted by neo-Nazi and Nazi sympathizer groups.

That's not what I'm doing and I'd advise you to review the HN guidelines, particularly the one that reads, "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
by vlovich123 | 2025-09-24 15:47:50+00:00
> This has an advantage compared to a multi-threaded CPU-based cache, because it avoids performance overheads associated with multiple threads having to synchronize with each other to realize they are about to start a stampede.

The switch presumably also has multiple cores which still need to do this work, no? Or is the claim that moving this synchronization to the router behind a network hop saves CPU cycles on the app server?
by lambdaone | 2025-09-24 15:48:01+00:00
At this point, the benefits of an official governmental digital ID system exceed the drawbacks; the argument against digital identity documents died a long time ago with the total loss of privacy due to the amalgamation of all existing systems combined with the ubiquitous tracking of physical and online presences; that horse has bolted, and trying (and failing) to shut the stable door now won't help.

The current battle for digital personal rights is the right to private communication and data storage, and thanks to encryption and open source software, that one's not lost yet.
by fpsvogel | 2025-09-24 15:48:02+00:00
Agreed. If I weren't a computer nerd I probably wouldn't feel this way, but on Linux I feel more empowered. Even if there are more things to tweak/fix (which is not necessarily true these days), there IS probably a way to do it.

On MacOS, I more often have to give up and live with the annoyances.

Hardware is the the big exception. None of my PCs have had nearly as good build quality or battery life (on Linux, at least) as a Macbook. Maybe I should try a Framework.
by reaperducer | 2025-09-24 15:48:06+00:00
It is super annoying to be clicking back and forth through tabs only to have some text erroneously highlight and then stay that way.

It's more annoying when your web site won't let me copy a package tracking number to paste into my chosen package tracking program. Maybe I don't want to use your system. Maybe the program I have is better.

Just because a web dev can't think of any reasons someone would want to copy text doesn't mean the reasons don't exist. It just means the developer lacks imagination.
by tux3 | 2025-09-24 15:48:07+00:00
There are places that have this norm, but it's exceedingly rare, and it's not some perfect utopia. We're all susceptible to emotional appeals to different degrees, and emotions aren't some inconvenience that you should try to eliminate in favor of pure cold calculations, they also have a place and a reason to be.

People care about different things, so trying to focus just on facts can end up with people talking past each other, because they have different goals, value systems, or other fuzzy human feelings that can't be graphed in an Excel spreadsheet and compared numerically.

I'm not saying that emotional appeals and sophistry are fine, but I find that often when people accept an emotional appeal over a cold purely factual argument, it's because the factual argument is missing the point. A more important part of the discussion is understanding what other people actually care about to make sure we're not all talking past each other, or spending hours arguing details that won't matter in the end.
by svieira | 2025-09-24 15:48:16+00:00
> the number one concern "what happens if we end up owning this codebase but ... don't know how to steer a model on how to make progress"

> Research lets you get up to speed quickly on flows and functionality

This is the _je ne sais quoi_ that people who are comfortable with AI have made peace with and those who are not have not. If you don't know what the code base does or how to make progress you are effectively trusting the system that built the thing you don't understand to understand the thing and teach you. And then from that understanding you're going to direct the teacher to make changes to the system it taught you to understand. Which suggests a certain _je ne sais quoi_ about human intelligence that isn't present in the system, but which would be necessary to create an understanding of the thing under consideration. Which leads to your understanding being questionable because it was sourced from something that _lacks_ that _je ne sais quoi_. But the order time of failure here is "lifetimes". Of features, of codebases, of persons.
by randycupertino | 2025-09-24 15:48:37+00:00
Even if the science is strong, so many flash in the pan cell therapy startups just can't execute on clinical operations. They get through IPO on investor FOMO and promises of exciting times ahead but then the stock tanks tanks when the trials take forever, cost more than anticipated and no other drugs to fall back on.

Rough market for the 127 people laid off.
by zeristor | 2025-09-24 15:49:01+00:00
I did download YouTube videos a few years ago, I did value that YouTube could keep your place.

But it’s a real mess it keeps crashing, something I might too humbly put down to me having too many files, but passive aggressively put it down to YouTube on iPad not having a limited amount of storage space.

On the other hand there’s a number of amazing videos I’ve downloaded to watch which have been remotely wiped. Grrr
by qwery | 2025-09-24 15:49:04+00:00
I too am a selector of text. I select text for many valid reasons. I have never selected text for an invalid reason.

A lot of websites include (anti-)features that make it extremely difficult for me to read and this severely limits the amount that I interact with the site. Features that hijack text selection in some way or preventing it entirely for whatever misguided reason are some of the worst offenders. Yes, I realise that not everything is for me -- I am getting that message loud and clear.

Preventing text selection is one of the most egregious and hostile ways to make your software unfriendly, but those insidious "share this quote" popout drawers are slowly fading in right behind it[0], hyperactively reflowing the layout and appending random snippets of selected text to the URL.

Reading is the most basic, most fundamental way to interact with the web. It's fundamental to using software in general. It seems to be necessary to point out that 'reading' and 'looking at' are not interchangeable terms. Frankly, designers should know better.

[0] Except they're not, because you can't select the text, obviously.
by fidotron | 2025-09-24 15:49:16+00:00
I too not long ago went through the inheritance gunk with the UK.

> These then need to be 'notarized' by a legal person - with seals and embossed stamps before they can be used to identify me. It's medieval.

My experience of this was they (the insurance/solicitors) were just being obstructionist for fun, because when confronted with the requested notarized documents they kept moving the goalposts around, and only a threat to withdraw business from them on other fronts made them snap out of it.
by doktrin | 2025-09-24 15:49:41+00:00
> I think they just want families with young children to pay to sit together, like everyone else has to

Oh great so now I have to sit next to someone’s unattended child in the name of fairness? Am I gonna get the option to subsidise the family’s seat grouping instead of being saddled with that noise? Talk about creating problems for no good reason.
by iKlsR | 2025-09-24 15:49:46+00:00
Here's what I did that worked for last two teams I managed. We used slack as a hub for everything, we had some brittle [1] services so there were cron scripts that ran every minute and would alert to slack when it was down @ing someone. Likewise rolled own dumb logger that just simply existed as a middleware initially to capture requests and responses and certain events were logged to slack and disk in the code with `event(enum, json)`. This slack bot could also dump certain info for users or events with some slash commands provided you had an id. From these logs and other bits added over time could see when execs connected or someone had difficulty with auth, a job or method took abnormally long and current active sessions etc. This grew to support ceo, marketing and other devs and got pretty involved at some point we had small services tied in that could visualize geojson over a map for a trip completed, dump a replay session or get all stacktraces for the day. Also for 3rd party services we couldn't tie into directly used a proxy setup where we didn't call it directly but inside a wrapper where we could capture data so a call to `api.somesite.com/v1/events` became `mysite.com/proxy?site=api.somesite.com/v1/events` in our apps so when our clients called this we knew and could again log.

Since this seems close enough to the similar problem I had you could take a look at this approach and start with what's being requested or the repeating problems and have a central hub for others ingest these via discord or slack and appropriate channels #3rd-party-uptimes, #backups, #raw-logs, #events. From this we rarely used our dashboards, bugsnag or had the need to ssh into any server to pull access or error logs.

- [1] This one was particularly so because they had a org policy to randomly reset vpn passwords and the only way to change it was using a desktop client to basically set the same password again.
by hollerith | 2025-09-24 15:49:55+00:00
>40% want lower house prices and rents (tenants and would be buyers) and 40% want higher house prices and rents (landlords and owners).

I think it is more that the electorate and their agents don't know how (or disagree on how) to keep housing affordable or more precisely don't know how to avoid passing laws and regulations that have the unintended effect of raising the cost of housing.
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-24 15:50:01+00:00
The key problem with the government "requesting" a company do something is that the government has nigh infinite unrelated decisions that can be used to apply pressure to that company.

It's unreasonable to expect some portion of the executive branch to reliably act counter to the President's stated goals, even if they would otherwise have.

And that opportunity for perversion of good governance (read: making decisions objectively) is exactly why the government shouldn't request companies censor or speak in certain ways, ever.

If there are extenuating circumstances (e.g. a public health crisis), then there need to be EXTREMELY high firewalls built between the part of the government "requesting" and everyone else (and the President should stay out of it).
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-09-24 15:50:04+00:00
$19 for just the Disney no-ads plan. (Which has asterisks indicating that there will sometimes be ads.)

The worst thing about this is that DVRs solved commercials on cable back in 1999, "unskippable" isn't an issue there.

Imagine the uproar and drama if the ad-skipping DVR was invented today. It simply wouldn't be allowed to happen.
by vlovich123 | 2025-09-24 15:50:11+00:00
That works when you control the client but not when you have a case like this fetching state from a DB. For that you do in fact need some kind of locking mechanism, although it’s better if it’s implemented within the cache as a pass through cache that parks the concurrent requests except one if an outbound is needed rather than hitting the database directly. That’s how Cloudflare’s CDN works to minimize requests into the origin.
by ZhadruOmjar | 2025-09-24 15:50:34+00:00
Part of me thinks it is probably activists within ICANN that think the Houthis are liberators. I also think that it's not really ICANN's/IANA's responsibility to determine which government gets control of a domain during a civil war/uprising. It becomes too difficult for them to be the arbiter of who is the government of a particular country. How long must the Houthis control the country before they get to control the domain? Is there a percentage of the country they should control before being given the keys? If a "good" leader from another faction took over the country should the Houthis retain control until that new leader proves their goodness somehow?
by pryelluw | 2025-09-24 15:50:44+00:00
I don’t feel like dollars are stolen from me. It’s more of companies abusing my goodwill to publish information online. From higher bills as a result of aggressive crawling, to copying my work and removing all copyright/licensing from the code. Sure, fair use and all, but when they return the same exact code it just makes me wonder.

Nowadays, producing anything feels like being the cows udder.
by zahllos | 2025-09-24 15:50:59+00:00
Crucial point on this though: it isn't going to be mandatory. Swiss ID cards are not mandatory either although in practice not having one can be inconvenient.

Next year Swiss ID cards will come in two variants: biometric if you want to travel around the EU and existing plastic card if you just want to have it for Switzerland.

So you can even go so far as to opt out of biometrics providing you don't intend to travel internationally.
by lkey | 2025-09-24 15:51:44+00:00
"Very few detractors in the west have any issues with highly qualified immigrants occupying scientific or research roles." Laughable, these 'few' reside in the highest seats of power and exist among the 'advisors' to the cabinet.

"It's a radical kind of dismissiveness" People keep telling me I'm wrong in the wrong way, if they were nicer I'd consider their opinions. This is an irrational position to stake out, it should go without saying.

"The broad western detraction against immigration at the moment is targeted at specific waves of mass immigration with specific compositions that have specific effects on the places those immigrants have landed."

This is such a laborious way to say "poor, brown or both". Do you get tired of dancing around like this?

"People are primarily concerned about the ability of state, social and corporate institutions"

If you were actually "concerned", you'd advocate for punishing institutions that use cheap (or 'free' if you steal their passport) immigrant labor, rather than targeting those that arrived to fill those positions. Do you have an understanding of why this never happens?

It goes without saying that much of the 'specific immigrant labor' you despise is used to fill the welfare obligations related to care-taking that you are also deeply concerned about.

"dismissive to these concerns" I was assured that 'tone policing' was the domain of the 'woke', yet here it is a second time in the same comment.

"uncontroversial and obvious." You might want to speak to your fellow travelers about which are 'good' immigrants and which are 'bad'. It suffices to say that if they agree in general, but disagree about which group is good, then it is not actually 'uncontroversial'.
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-24 15:51:54+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Mariupol

> Ukrainian officials reported that approximately 25,000 civilians had been killed…

Even if every one of those 25k were kids, still no.

The actual report "Save the Children" cites is available at https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4084012?ln=en&v=pdf - page three of the English report states:

> The violations verified in the greatest numbers were the killing (4,676) and maiming (7,291) of 11,967 children, the denial of humanitarian access (7,906 incidents), the recruitment and use of children (7,402) and the abduction of children (4,573). The number of children detained for actual or alleged association with armed groups including those which are currently under sanctions enacted by the Security Council, or for national security reasons, surged to 3,018, further depriving children of their rights. The highest numbers of grave violations were verified in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (8,554), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (4,043), Somalia (2,568), Nigeria (2,436) and Haiti (2,269). The sharpest percentage increases in the number of violations were verified in Lebanon (545%), Mozambique (525%), Haiti (490%), Ethiopia (235%) and Ukraine (105%).

(A preemptive note: These are verified cases; so the real numbers will be higher. In both conflicts, verifying every or even most cases is… tough.)

https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/average-least-16-child...

> At least 2,406 children have been killed or injured since the escalation of the war in Ukraine nearly 1,000 days ago, according to the latest available verified reports.