MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by samstokes | 2025-09-13 17:52:44+00:00
What an interesting and strange article. The author barely offers a definition of "systems thinking", only names one person to represent it, and then claims to refute the whole discipline based on a single incorrect prediction and the fact that government is bad at software projects. It's not clear what positive suggestions this article offers except to always disregard regulation and build your own thing from scratch, which is ... certainly consistent with the Works In Progress imprint.

The way I learned "systems thinking" explicitly includes the perspectives this article offers to refute it - a system model is useful but only a model, it is better used to understand an existing system than to design a new one, assume the system will react to resist intervention. I've found this definition of systems thinking extremely useful as a way to look reductively at a complex system - e.g. we keep investing in quality but having more outages anyway, maybe something is optimizing for the wrong goal - and intervene to shift behaviour without tearing down the whole thing, something this article dismisses as impossible.

The author and I would agree on Gall's Law. But the author's conclusion to "start with a simple system that works" commits the same hubris that the article, and Gall, warn against - how do you know the "simple" system you design will work, or will be simple? You can't know either of those things just by being clever. You have to see the system working in reality, and you have to see if the simplicity you imagined actually corresponds to how it works in reality. Gall's Law isn't saying "if you start simple it will work", it's saying "if it doesn't work then adding complexity won't fix it".

This article reads a bit like the author has encountered resistance from people in the past from people who cited "systems thinking" as the reason for their resistance, and so the author wants to discredit that term. Maybe the term means different things to different people, or it's been used in bad faith. But what the article attacks isn't systems thinking as I know it, more like high modernism. The author and systems thinking might get along quite well if they ever actually met.
by snuxoll | 2025-09-13 17:52:54+00:00
> Technology is continually reshaping industries and while many eschew learning and adopting, those who embrace it are the ones who succeed best IME.

I said it already in a reply to GP, but I'm going to say it again: I stopped caring about what people list on their resumes, your work history and education don't matter to me. I'd rather hire a hungry junior that finished a bootcamp, that has a drive and ability to absorb new things and adapt to changing environments, over somebody who's got 10 years of experience and can't do shit outside of their comfort zone.

The number of people who aren't able to learn and adapt to changing times, new tools, new ways of working, etc. is shocking.
by fzwang | 2025-09-13 17:53:01+00:00
I agree. Imo, #2 is becoming more of an emphasis over time. Teacher don't have much time/energy to pursue #1. Eventually, most of them stop caring and rely on testing metrics because that's what the admins want.

It's amazing what kids can learn if they just spent a little bit of time with a 1-on-1 instructor/advisor. The anxiety you mentioned can be crippling and something I deal with regularly. Even some of the "gifted" kids (perhaps due to the expectations) have trouble avoiding the trap of overindexing on productivity/competency metrics. They're not even self aware of it, just accepts it as normal.

For most kids I have to go through the exercise of separating these two concerns, the learning part and the signaling part, early so they can put things in perspective.
by jbay808 | 2025-09-13 17:53:34+00:00
This one still keeps me up at night, especially the figure on the 6th page.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180513182952/http://burro.case...

The short summary of this hypothesis is that the ocean develops hypoxic zones, anaerobic bacteria boom, and eventually the ocean starts releasing masses of poisonous H2S gas that wipes out most life on land (and strips the ozone layer for good measure).

They speculate that this might have been a mechanism behind the "great dying" at the end of the Permian. I'm sure the thinking has advanced in the last 20 years, but whenever people ask what the worst-case scenario for global warming could be, my mind drifts back to this.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-09-13 17:53:36+00:00
I didn't like or respect the guy but really that is probably the most reasonable thing he ever said (other than release the Epstein Files), if you believed the 2nd Amendment is important to have then you are essentially arguing for some gun deaths every year.

Note: I believe the 2nd Amendment is really the proof that the founding fathers weren't the super geniuses the mythology has them as, but hey, too late now.
by lif | 2025-09-13 17:53:48+00:00
"What is the real meaning of humility?

AI Overview

The real meaning of humility is having an accurate, realistic view of oneself, acknowledging both one's strengths and limitations without arrogance or boastfulness, and a modest, unassuming demeanor that focuses on others. It's not about having low self-esteem but about seeing oneself truthfully, putting accomplishments in perspective, and being open to personal growth and learning from others."

Sounds like a good thing to me. Even, winning.
by stavros | 2025-09-13 17:54:42+00:00
I'm Greek, and we cook what my mom used to cook, which is what my grandma used to cook. It's something like "meat once a week, fish twice, vegetables the rest". My favorite dishes are peas, beans, lentils, and I don't tend to like steak much, for example.

If we do use meat, we use it in dishes with lots of vegetables, e.g. stuffed zucchini with rice and mincemeat (though the mincemeat is optional).
by pstuart | 2025-09-13 17:54:44+00:00
I think there's an element of curiosity that is innate, and that make a huge difference. For those so blessed, learning is fun and a welcome activity (there's an entirely separate issue of actually applying any of knowledge but at least it's a start).

That said, teachers can make all the difference in connecting with students to guide them into discovery vs. cramming facts into their heads to satisfy testing metrics.
by lightedman | 2025-09-13 17:54:56+00:00
I would love to see ancient tech fabbed out on modern processes.

What's the smallest SOC you could design to run DOOM? What power envelope would that consume (exclusing display/speakers/etc.) At that size and (optimized) transistor count, what speeds could we realistically achieve?

What would a massively-multicore (gpu-style with multi-hundreds or more of cores) one of these run like?

Every time I see a project like this, these thoughts run through my head.
by serhii_f | 2025-09-13 17:56:31+00:00
I’m a software developer from Ukraine, and English isn’t my first language. Like many people, I use ChatGPT to fix my writing. My usual workflow was copy/pasting text into ChatGPT with “fix this”, then copy/pasting it back. It works, but is slow.

So about a month ago, I built a small tool to solve this. Now I just select text, press a hotkey combination, and it instantly replaces the text with the corrected version.

Curious if anyone else would find this useful, so I set up a waiting list page at clippy.it.com
by cyanydeez | 2025-09-13 17:56:41+00:00
Far as reporting goes, theres two tracks. Either he was upset with charlie not being far right enough, or somehow he was influences by the far left.

There is an objective way to understand the fuzzy logic problem media provides, but that leads to one type of politic.

The problem is rational thinking is whats under attack. Particularly when it leads to future predictions. Thats the danger because you can create a self fulfilling prophecy.

The far right in every country is trying to spread isolationism to reduce the capacity of society to benefit the most people because economic slavery is the only way oligarchy survives.
by godelski | 2025-09-13 17:56:51+00:00
I think you missed my entire point.

I'm happy there's alternatives. Competition is good. But that's beside my point.

Maybe to make the same mistake I'm critiquing, am I understanding things correctly? Does the free version of Wire not encrypt messages at rest?[0]. Seems weird to not make the messages encrypted when they're on device. I think this is going to be a deal breaker for people because they don't want their whole conversation history scrapped anytime they get stopped at a border crossing.

[0] https://wire.com/en/pricing
by mrkeen | 2025-09-13 17:57:06+00:00
It was a better model for reasoning about concurrency, i.e. evaluate two expressions, rather than where virtual threads is headed, i.e. "you don't have to learn anything" - just spawn two threads, keep writing sequences of statements and pretend nothing's changed since the 90s.

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-...
by mike_hearn | 2025-09-13 17:58:33+00:00
The usual reason for all of this is that programmer time is expensive (even if you're a volunteer, you have limited hours available), and not many people want to volunteer to wade through tons of legacy tech debt. That's especially true when the outcome will be an OS that behaves identically to before. A lot of stuff stays in the kernel because it's just hard to move it out.

Bear in mind, moving stuff out of the kernel is only really worth it if you can come up with a reasonable specification for how to solve a bunch of new problems. If you don't solve them it's easy to screw up and end up with a slower system yet no benefit.

Consider what happens if you are overenthusiastic and try to move your core filesystem into userspace. What does the OS do if your filesystem process segfaults? Probably it can't do anything at that point beyond block everything and try to restart it? But every process then lost its connection to the FS server and so all the file handles are suddenly invalidated, meaning every process crashes. You might as well just panic and reboot, so, it might as well stay in the kernel. And what about security? GNU Hurd jumped on the microkernel bandwagon but ended up opening up security vulnerabilities "by design" because they didn't think it through deeply enough (in fairness, these issues are subtle). Having stuff be in the kernel simplifies your architecture tremendously and can avoid bugs as well as create them. People like to claim microkernels are inherently more secure but it's not the case unless you are very careful. So it's good to start monolithic and spin stuff out only when you're ready for the complexity that comes with that.

Linux also has the unusual issue that the kernel and userspace are developed independently, which is an obvious problem if you want to move functionality between the two. Windows and macOS can make assumptions about userspace that Linux doesn't.

If you want to improve terminals then the wrong place to start is fiddling with moving code between kernel and user space. The right place to start is with a brand new protocol that encodes what you like about text-only interaction and then try to get apps to adopt it or bridge old apps with libc shims etc.
by nec4b | 2025-09-13 17:58:36+00:00
>>What percentage of the earth's surface have little wind and solar? What percentage of the human population live there?

Large parts of USA, Canada, non Mediterranean Europe and northern half of Asia. A lot of people live there.

>> And the law of economics making modular renewables cheaper is Wright's Law:

I asked which economic law makes ONLY renewables getting cheaper with time. Why couldn't nuclear get cheaper in time?
by borroka | 2025-09-13 17:58:44+00:00
"IOW, there's often more latent memory than we realize or can easily retrieve." -

I did not find it to be true almost at all, and I tested many other people on it. When I voiced my concerns, the usual answer was, "Yes, but when you pick up a book, you will remember". And then I asked, "Try it", and the subsequent answer was, "I have to admit you are right".

The "re-absorption speed" is heavily confounded by general IQ and the kind of cognitive stimulation one receives in daily life, but the original learnings are mostly gone. Among other things, this is why retrieval practice is important: it slows down the "forgetting rate".
by panny | 2025-09-13 18:00:22+00:00
That's pretty close. If I had to sum it up in one word, it would be: trains.

Car culture makes Americans fat and lazy. 40% of US adults are obese. 80% are overweight.

Walking and good food, yeah, that helps. But trains introduce short sprints into everyday life. It starts with "He's too late, he's never gonna catch it... well I'll be damned, he did it." and pretty soon, you're saying "We can catch it, just run!" Everyone on the train has a shopping bag, because trains don't have huge trunks like a car. You want groceries? Carry it. Good exercise. Trains also remove the road rage from your life, the daily stress of defensive driving in a fast moving freeway full of other angry drivers. Trains eliminate the premature death caused by road accidents which not only lower life expectancy directly, but indirectly as bread winners are taken from families. The car exhaust is gone too. Trains reshape how towns are built, with higher density and less parking. More walking! Everything mushrooms out from the decision to travel with trains. It's little wonder why Japan has the lowest obesity rate in the world.
by sointeresting | 2025-09-13 18:00:41+00:00
Huh? The link you posted shows that Trump condemned the shooting, calling it "horrific" and saying the shooter will prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. You're equating not flying flags at half mast, despite condemning the violence, to gloating over murder. You're trying to justify the gloating and celebration of violence and it's disgusting.
by echelon | 2025-09-13 18:01:00+00:00
Unlimited free speech for everyone, but consequences for saying things that harm or offend.

If you say "Democrats suck", don't expect them to buy your product. If you say "God doesn't exist," don't expect Christians to come to your business. If you say "I hate gays", expect to get fired from your medical clinic job.

Have free speech, but use it wisely.

Having free speech serves to diffuse social tension. It ensures we don't wind up as cattle, like in 1984. Just don't expect that you can praise the death of certain people and expect everyone to love you for it.

Maybe above all you should be kind. Regardless of your politics. Articulate what you don't like with your free speech, but don't be an asshole.

Unfortunately social media encourages fast engagement with little nuance, so we see a sewer instead of a noble land of open thought and debate.

But we shouldn't throw free speech out with the bath water.
by RobRivera | 2025-09-13 18:01:18+00:00
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

But honestly these sentiments reflect my experience. When I bulk for muscle I will still get 5 miles of walking in daily on top of a cardio/strength workout and manage to still grow.

I've yet to hit a hiking season and gain weight tho, and those are the more interesting data points. Imagine eating 4k calories daily and still losing weight. 8 hours of trotting through mountain passes is a vibe
by pengaru | 2025-09-13 18:01:45+00:00
I too have self-hosted for decades, there was a brief period of annoyance where I had to set up SPF records long ago, but since then it hasn't been problematic AFAIK (not that I'm in constant contact with people on all the major providers).

However, a close friend and fellow ex-sysadmin who also has self-hosted since the 90s, has had some headaches in recent years. He upgraded his dedicated server at the same US provider I use, without attempting to preserve his original IP addresses.

He hosts email for his wife's small business, and with the new IP addresses has come a lot of problems. Her billing is performed primarily via email, when the emails get blocked, her income is directly affected. It's so bad sometimes I'd say it's straining their marriage.

This isn't at a disreputable hosting company. It's simply the reality of provisioning new systems receiving new ipv4 addresses inherently from a pool outside the pre-spamers-and-scammers-everywhere era, these addresses have passed through a dumpster fire of abusers.

At this point I'll never retire my dedicated server just to hang onto its IP address with a clean history I've controlled since the 1990s. Even if the machine becomes nothing more than an overpriced reverse proxy to somewhere else I run the real back-end on... the address has become the primary value.

So when advising people begin self-hosting, at least consider the reality of available ipv4 addresses they're likely to end up with. Even the reputable vendors have been used by malicious actors buying hosting with stolen credit cards and fake identities. We can't have nice things.
by wkat4242 | 2025-09-13 18:02:11+00:00
> Either he was upset with charlie not being far right enough, or somehow he was influences by the far left.

I don't think you can get much further right than he was though. When I hear of all the stuff he was saying. I don't think even Trump has ever said some of that stuff. Like that women should be secondary to men.

Apparently he also said that "a few deaths a year are a small price to pay for access to weapons". I wonder if he still felt that way knowing what was coming. I don't have the source link to hand though. News goes so fast now and I don't archive everything.

Personally I'd never heard of the guy but I'm not in the US (and very glad about that right now, the country seems to be tearing itself apart)

PS Also I'm not trying to defend the far right, I'm very left (especially by US standards which doesn't really have a 'left' compared to Europe, liberalism here is a moderate right-wing thing). But murder is definitely not ok in my book, of course. I would grin when I see a tesla dealership graffiti'd or a "swasticar" or "from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds" poster at a bus stop. but that's about as far as it goes. You don't touch people ever. Or really destroy stuff of value.
by YZF | 2025-09-13 18:02:16+00:00
That is the wrong question to ask and.

"The wealthy are hiding their wealth" sounds like a conspiracy theory. I think we have pretty good visibility into the really wealthy (e.g. we know pretty well who is on the short list of billionaires in Canada and more or less what they own). Banks report any movement of money >$10k, real estate is tracked, company ownership is tracked. That there is some large number of really wealthy people hiding in plain sight doesn't compute. We can't disprove the idea that some person living on the streets in East Vancouver is actually a billionaire hiding their wealth but even if so that percentage of those people in the total population isn't going to move the needle vs. all the known rich people who can't really "hide". If there are ways to legally not pay taxes then we'd hear about them and use them. Billionaires do have some options most of us can't pursue but I think the idea that the rich hide their wealth and don't pay taxes is mostly a myth. Prove me wrong...

Here's some data to try and support my claim:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/467384/percentage-of-pop...

The % of the population in low income families has been declining. Here's a broader time horizon:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/467276/number-of-persons...

We'd need to plot that against income/wealth inequality but I expect that has increased over this period.

This isn't consistent across Canada, for example in Alberta: https://www.statista.com/statistics/583120/low-income-popula...

There's virtually no movement since 1976 (the percentage is somewhat lower today).

I'm assuming the threshold for low income represents some more or less equal standard of living.

We can look at some other metrics like life expectancy:

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/can/can...

This has consistently improved since the 1950's which doesn't seem to support the theory that the broad population is doing worse.

If you think you have a better metric that shows that most people are worse off due to the increasing wealth/income gap then let's see it.

Random by the way is that I just saw an article today about the wealth distribution in Canada and the data point there was that the top percentiles wealth has declined since 2019. Obviously the top 0.1%/1%/10% still own a lot of the total wealth (I think the figure was something like 56% of the wealth in the top 10%) but that's what you'd expect in a free capitalist system.

( I think the article was related to this report: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/13-605-x/2025001/article... )

Another random by the way observation is that I think the ability of some random person to get ahead is probably unprecedented. Never has knowledge been so accessible (Internet) and various means of production be so accessible and cheap (content creators, apps, prototyping equipment, etc.).
by skybrian | 2025-09-13 18:03:22+00:00
> Users accustomed to receiving confident answers to virtually any question would likely abandon such systems rapidly.

Or maybe they would learn from feedback to use the system for some kinds of questions but not others? It depends on how easy it is to learn the pattern. This is a matter of user education.

Saying "I don't know" is sort of like an error message. Clear error messages make systems easier to use. If the system can give accurate advice about its own expertise, that's even better.
by frugalmail | 2025-09-13 18:03:50+00:00
Do you think the same thing about "give me liberty or give me death?"

"...cost of unfortunately..." Is that not clear? The context was he was responding about a question about the 2nd amendment. clearly the first order thinking would make it clear it's not the rule, it's the purpose of the rule that's important.

The purpose is so you don't get arrested for some social media comment or other rights, like what is happening in the UK right now.
by imiric | 2025-09-13 18:04:10+00:00
This looks very slick and polished. Nice work!

I'm used to drun/rofi and enjoy their simplicity, but have also secretly envied the out-of-the-box experience of more fully featured launchers on macOS. I remember using Spotlight and Alfred many years ago, and being impressed by the experience.

I like that you chose to make it compatible with Raycast, and how easy it is to extend, based on a quick look at the docs.

I'll definitely keep an eye on your project, and give it a try. Thanks for sharing!
by ojosilva | 2025-09-13 18:04:30+00:00
Python is a front-end for C, like Perl, PHP and Ruby. Its environment configuration is a mess, specially if you need to recompile libraries with different python versions.

Java may have a long history of compatibility issues between the compiler, tooling and libraries, but it's all reasonably delimited to the Java language, so, if anything, a `nvm` equivalent such as sdkman.io should suffice.
by margalabargala | 2025-09-13 18:04:36+00:00
It is a matter of public record that he encouraged his followers to pay the bail of the man who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer. He fought for that man's freedom, because of the violence he committed.

Kirk did not stand for or promote nonviolence; quite the opposite. To suggest as much is to forget the things the man did in life.

In much the same manner, he would not want his death used to weaken 2nd amendment protections.
by pton_xd | 2025-09-13 18:06:57+00:00
> Saying "I don't know" is sort of like an error message. Clear error messages make systems easier to use.

"I don't know" is not a good error message. "Here's what I know: ..." and "here's why I'm not confident about the answer ..." would be a helpful error message.

Then the question is, when it says "here's what I know, and here's why I'm not confident" -- is it telling the truth, or is that another layer of hallucination? If so, you're back to square one.