MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by its-kostya | 2025-09-07 02:53:23+00:00
Agency is a great observation. But also bring up these conversations with your direct management so they recognize the work you do. Employees with less responsibilities outside of work (no kids, no families, etc) might appear to be high-agency while in reality being less effective. When a senior eng with perceived "low-agency" suddenly takes a leave, those effects are felt way more than if a "high-agency" junior does. All's this to say, make your impact know with blunt discussions. Don't distract yourself with blog posts and dashboards solely to prove you have impact.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-09-07 02:54:46+00:00
I don’t think there so much conspiracy.

The big companies could just be a huge collection of disconnected small teams of 2nd rate developers who have little understanding of software licensing and are just trying to ship a product.

Not an excuse though.

Of course, it doesn’t help that annual training focuses on trade compliance and ethics with no mention of licensing.

Hell, I’ve never seen a policy on the use of commercial clip art…
by abustamam | 2025-09-07 02:55:52+00:00
As an American, it's funny how ahead and "first world" the US can be in some things, but how backwards and "developing country" the US can be in other things.

Medicine itself is very first-world. But medical insurance is one of those "worse than developing country" things. The fact that Americans need medical insurance at all is appalling to many countries, first world and otherwise.

And of course, by funny I mean "I can only laugh otherwise I'd cry"
by mrandish | 2025-09-07 02:56:50+00:00
> I've actually had someone tell me that no monitor during the XP era would've been a CRT

That person is incorrect. WinXP started selling at retail in Oct 2001. I started using it at work in early 2002 and as a senior employee in a tech company I had a pretty deluxe 21-inch Viewsonic CRT which ran at 2048 x 1536 resolution. That Viewsonic cost $1600 new in 2000 and looked great. The company didn't upgrade to flat screens until about 2006 when the Viewsonic was replaced with a 20-inch Dell 2005fpw with native 1680 x 1050 resolution for $800. That's the year Windows Vista came out.

Even in 2006 corporate priced LCDs at the 20-inch size didn't look quite as good as the high-quality CRT I switched from. In some ways (like sharpness) a good LCD could look better but in other ways (like contrast) it wasn't as good yet - so it was still a mixed bag. About 2004 the company started buying newly hired entry-level employees 15 or 17-inch LCDs but they were typically 1024 x 768 and the quality wasn't great. A designer like you would definitely have stuck with a CRT longer both for quality and screen size at a reasonable price.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-09-07 02:56:51+00:00
This isn't strictly true. If you can sign a did document (i.e. you've set up a recovery key), even if your old PDS refuses to cooperate (or disappears entirely) you can still move to a new PDS and deactivate your account on the old PDS (as this is done via your did document)[1]. It's not exactly trivial to do currently but tools are being developed that automate the process and render all this down into easy to use apps.

> or if you get banned from the PLC directory

This is technically true (for did:plc users) but this isn't a thing that's happened in the past and in the event it happens in the future (or even is seriously discussed in the future), did:plc will be in a substantially different situation than it is currently and the community should be situated by then to handle a federated or coordinated PLC directory.

1. https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/adversarial-pds-migrat...
by JohnBooty | 2025-09-07 02:58:03+00:00
yeah by 2000ish I really didn't see egregious opsec violations at all as a rule. the world described by the linked article doesn't really match my experiences.

if you were tech-savvy enough to blog, you were tech-savvy enough to have some clue about that stuff.

also, people weren't like, "liveblogging." they didn't have personal internet devices in their pockets. typical personal noncommercial blogging was people talking about stuff they did days or weeks ago. and even early platforms like Livejournal had visibility filters on posts; people kept the personal stuff friends-only

that was just my personal experience. i guess the author had a different one
by danaris | 2025-09-07 02:58:49+00:00
> where is the accountability for all those CEOs and managers who pushed for deep investment based on FOMO, bolstered by wishful thinking and a willing ignorance of the technical details?

There's never any accountability for the bad—sometimes destructively, catastrophically bad—decisions of managers and executives. And frankly, this is part of what is causing serious problems for our society.

It breeds a class of people who genuinely believe that either a) they are truly always right, always the smartest ones around, and any mistakes or failures are because of all the people around them, or b) it doesn't matter how often they're wrong; they're entitled to always be taken seriously and get their full bonuses, no matter how badly things are falling apart because of their decisions.

Now, part of this is because our corporate world is really really bad at assessing the outcomes of decisions like these (and this is not wholly unrelated to the fact that proper assessment would reveal the levels of incompetence in many C-suites). But part of it is simply because we have built a culture that says these people are never to be questioned.

And that's toxic to any attempts to actually build something better.
by pabs3 | 2025-09-07 02:59:32+00:00
GPLv2 has the same requirements as GPLv3 around installation of modifications. The GPLv3 also doesn't prevent what TiVo did; breaking the proprietary software when run on modified GPLed software. TiVo didn't prevent installation of modified GPLed software, and didn't think it was legal to do that.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...

Linus doesn't want people to enforce the GPL in general, not just the lockdown case, he has been arguing against that for a long time.

IIRC SFC has a contract option to enforce your copyrights without being the owner of them, I've seen that contract on paper at conferences. They also have limited resources, so can't take on every case.
by neilv | 2025-09-07 02:59:43+00:00
For formatting code blocks on HN, prefixing each line with 4+ leading spaces works:

(define sum-tree (lam/anon (t) (cond ((mt? t) 0) ((node? t) (+ (node-v t) ($MyInvocation (node-l t)) ($MyInvocation (node-r t)))))))
by user5994461 | 2025-09-07 03:01:56+00:00
> It's DMCA abuse because that process is only legal to use in case of actual copyright infringement, not just any content you might have a moral claim over.

I will reply to this comment because it's the easier to address, you're really hitting on the main misconception :D

It is incorrect to think that the DMCA form is only valid for copyright.

You need to contact the other party to start a legal dispute, you can do so by any available communication channels. The website is hidden behind cloudflare which purposefully hides the identity of the author and prevents any contact, except via a DMCA form. Burger King filled the DMCA form to get in touch with the author. It's merely a mean to legally contact the author and start a dispute, in the absence of better options.

It worked, cloudflare forwarded the form to the author (and the author decided to take down the article on their own). I really can't think of any reason why it would not be considered a reasonable and legitimate use of the form. All the better because it's an official legal form.
by jaredklewis | 2025-09-07 03:04:06+00:00
"Writing" here probably doesn't refer to writing things by hand with a pen, but rather the act of composing emails, text messages, essays and so on.

Even just forgetting about Kanji for a moment, just like in other languages, written Japanese is not identical to spoken Japanese and requires practice if you want to be able to compose natural sounding texts, emails, letters, and so on.
by chmod775 | 2025-09-07 03:04:42+00:00
It should not, but they still don't owe it to you or anyone to change anything.

You're not paying them. There's no transaction. They're not even giving the software specifically to you, rather they're saying "this is free for anyone to pick up" - with no warranty of any kind.

When you pick up some free furniture from the roadside, it's on you to determine whether it meets your safety standards. If the free table you picked up has some defect, you most certainly don't ring someone's doorbell and demand rectification.
by MangoToupe | 2025-09-07 03:04:50+00:00
Mineral sunscreen works very intuitively, and feeling that grime makes sense. If you have dark skin, many if not most mineral sunscreens will be quite visible. You're trying to literally cover your skin with a screen and you should be able to feel it and probably see it. You can also wash it off quite easily (to the extent it's a problem at the beach).

Chemical sunscreen that avoids this is designed to sink into the skin like lotion. So there's something literally in your skin blocking uv or it won't work very well. I'd say this increases the odds of circulating something carcinogenic or otherwise toxic into your bloodstream.
by minhaz23 | 2025-09-07 03:05:19+00:00
I have very little formal education in advanced maths, but I’m highly motivated to learn the math needed to understand AI. Should i take a stab at parsing through and trying to understand this paper (maybe even using AI to help, heh) or would that be counter-productive from the get-go and I'm better off spending my time following some structured courses in pre-requisite maths before trying to understand these research papers?

Thank you for sharing this paper!
by Aurornis | 2025-09-07 03:06:16+00:00
Many people don't burn so quickly.

They could also have a lot of short exposures, like someone who is only outside for 5-10 minutes at a time but 2-3 times per hour every day, as was the case with one of my early jobs that involved walking between buildings a lot.

A common mistake to make is believing that if you're not burning, you're not accumulating damage.
by mitchivin | 2025-09-07 03:08:30+00:00
just like the site itself, I'm slowly trying to piece something together in a coherent way when the process itself was the complete opposite. When I do figure it out I'll do a post/series of posts on LinkedIn most likely. there's a few posts already on there about it, but nothing super in-depth

im open to all connections btw :) i'm just getting started!
by II2II | 2025-09-07 03:08:33+00:00
I don't think those points have to be interpreted as promotion-seeking advice. Even once you have attained a position of where you are doing work with impact, that you find meaningful, work that you love, or whatever else it is that motivates you, you still have to maintain that position. In some ways, that is harder to do than seeking out a promotion since the person who replaces your boss may not understand your role or may not even understand why you are not seeking a promotion. Even if the people around you remain the same, they may take you for granted.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-09-07 03:09:23+00:00
About Iran & GitHub:

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/g...

> GitHub now has a license from OFAC to provide cloud services to developers located or otherwise resident in Iran. This includes all public and private services for individuals and organizations, both free and paid. > GitHub cloud services, both free and paid, are also generally available to developers located in Cuba.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-07 03:10:03+00:00
I think we have very different concepts of what counts as evidence or proof.

At any rate I see your point. People have used snarkiness in the past and it does drive engagement, which is what I said above.

The disconnect is that that engagement has not improved society in any way. It feeds the anger junky and helps them feel smug and righteous. But it doesn't drive change.

Nothing personal, but I find this conversation dreadfully tedious. I've had it almost word for word with probably dozens of people with anger issues now. Every one of them feels their anger is righteous and good. The few I've known well spiralled into increasingly unhappy lives as their anger became the only way they could socialize.

Anger prevents you from thinking clearly. That's why people who crave power like to make others angry. It's also why you should be deeply skeptical of anyone promoting anger or hate as a solution to anything.
by dwood_dev | 2025-09-07 03:10:07+00:00
Elastic might be fine in the long run. But everyone I know(sample size <20 orgs) migrated to OpenSearch and never looked back. They were never interested in running Elastic in a separate cloud or running it themselves, and that's what a lot of these DbaaS providers have to overcome.

It's already annoying to create your first terraform module for a new AWS managed service, but they then want the users to have the extra complexity of VPC peering/privatelink/vpn and then manage that lifecycle as well.
by ZeroSolstice | 2025-09-07 03:11:05+00:00
I agree it would be great to get some of the vendor pushed / common domains put into an accepted standard.

In my interaction with IETF standards they are created / implemented in two ways:

1. They set the forward direction for a new technology before it is wide spread. 2. They wait for a technology to become popular / accepted and start to set standards from that baseline.

Both are reasonable paths of implementation given how the pace of changes in technology.

I doubt .lan, .local, .home, etc will either become public or a standard just based on existing devices that default to these domains and documentation or books that might reference them as example domains.
by m463 | 2025-09-07 03:11:51+00:00
This kind of stuff is what makes me appreciate python's argparse.

It's a genuine pleasure to use, and I use it often.

If you dig a little deeper into it, it does all the type and value validation, file validation, it does required and mutually exclusive args, it does subargs. And it lets you do special cases of just about anything.

And of course it does the "normal" stuff like short + long args, boolean args, args that are lists, default values, and help strings.
by jaredklewis | 2025-09-07 03:12:35+00:00
What's ridiculous about it? Long before AJATT was a site, I think most people would've told you that immersion is a good way to learn a second language.

You mention "result to efforts ratio," but I'm not sure I understand what this could me. In language learning, "results" and "efforts" are more or less the same thing. If you read a lot of books, you'll be good at reading books. It's not like there's some reading that is "effort" reading and other reading that is "results" reading; it's all just reading. For most people, the goal of learning Japanese is to be able to use Japanese in the real world. In which case I don’t see why any amount of time spent using Japanese should count as effort (but not results), since that’s the whole point.

I never paid any money to AJATT nor agree with everything on the site, but did find it inspirational in various ways early on in my studies. I'm fluent in written and spoken Japanese, and I do think living in Japan as well as immersing myself in Japanese media was a big part of that. I studied French in high school and college using traditional courses and I was never a great French speaker, I think in large part because I didn't do much with French outside the classroom.
by dwattttt | 2025-09-07 03:14:01+00:00
Sibling says this with code, but to distil the advice: reflect the result of your validation in the type system.

Then instead of validating a loose type & still using the loose type, you're parsing it from a loose type into a strict type.

The key point is you never need to look at a loose type and think "I don't need to check this is valid, because it was checked before"; the type system tracks that for you.
by naikrovek | 2025-09-07 03:14:50+00:00
TLV style binary formats are all you need. The “Type” in that acronym is a 32-bit number which you can use to version all of your stuff so that files are backwards compatible. Software that reads these should read all versions of a particular type and write only the latest version.

Code for TLV is easy to write and to read, which makes viewing programs easy. TLV data is fast for computers to write and to read.

Protobuf is overused because people are fucking scared to death to write binary data. They don’t trust themselves to do it, which is just nonsense to me. It’s easy. It’s reliable. It’s fast.
by cryptonector | 2025-09-07 03:15:57+00:00
Because say you fire a photon from an emitter to some target and you want to know how much time elapsed for that flight, but how would you find out? The target will have to communicate to the observer (you in this case) when it received the photon, but that communication will require.. more photons, and a trip back to you. If you're colocated with the emitter then it's a round-trip, else you need a photon from the emitter and the target, as well as the one from the emitter to the target, and this amounts to a round-trip anyways.

Therefore you can't measure the speed of light in any one direction. You can only measure the round-trip time of flight (e.g., if you have the detector at the emitter and use a mirror).
by Fade_Dance | 2025-09-07 03:17:12+00:00
5-10%, definitely not. Wrong tire size will do that though.

Have had a GPS speedo on the dash for a good dozen cars through the years and never seen more than a few mph off on a flat surface. That's something I actually noticed and looked for, for some reason. A few mph over speed is fairly common, but we're talking 1-2% at most. (confirmed with Tesla Model 3, Corolla, Fusion, Prius, Elantra, Mirage, etc etc).
by mattnewton | 2025-09-07 03:19:35+00:00
I can call a cab or get a replacement car from my insurance to drive around in, and I understand my body a whole lot less than my car. Demand for a car mechanic is nowhere near as inelastic as most of healthcare, so I don’t think this analogy really fits. At most it suggests that private markets can handle ambulances as well as we handle roadside towing.
by Sophira | 2025-09-07 03:20:24+00:00
One thing that I wonder about is that even with Fisher-Yates, a PRNG relies on a seed value. Assuming that this seed is going to be a 64-bit value, that seed value can only go up to a maximum of 2^64-1 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,615.000, which is still less than 52!.

I know that modern operating systems use an entropy pool. Does this mean that the PRNG is re-seeded for every random number generated, thus making this a non-issue? Or does it just take from this entropy pool once?
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-07 03:20:40+00:00
You can follow my development if you want, I'm developing a lot of stuff in public, https://sibylline.dev/products/ or https://github.org/sibyllinesoft/, I haven't done real releases on anything because it's all alpha and I'm iterating on it rapidly so I don't want to rug pull anyone, but if you want to try something out and hack on it I'm happy to have collaborators!
by kstrauser | 2025-09-07 03:20:43+00:00
That’s a bad analogy. If my brakes fail, once I come to a stop there’s no urgency in getting them fixed. I can abandon the care if it’s a lemon. I can have it towed home. I can use Yelp to find a reasonable mechanic. I can rent another car until this one’s fixed. It’s the opposite of “every second counts”.

Meanwhile, this is the only heart I have, and if it’s in danger of stopping, I have approximately seconds to call 911 to get someone to come take me to the repair shop of their choosing.
by petralithic | 2025-09-07 03:21:26+00:00
> The issue is pirating books, using them as inputs to math which is then resold as an LLM without compensation to the authors who have clearly copyrighted material.

No one seems to be able to explain what exactly the issue is here. How are authors harmed by LLMs (where such harm is often used to understand the range of copyright in lawsuits)? I don't see anyone replacing authors and their works, such as JK Rowling being harmed just because people can output Harry Potter esque texts. And if that's the case, well, fan fiction has been around for a long time, with no LLMs in its writing.
by hexpeek | 2025-09-07 03:22:42+00:00
Motivation:

Beyond prompts or .cursorrules, I explored whether code structure itself can serve as context an AI can understand. Most models’ context windows are small and hinder free-form exploratory coding; if structure can act as additional context, it could be a big win.

Test:

Two codebases implement the same behavior but differ in structure.

Code A: goal-driven, structure-agnostic.

Code B: lightly refactored with some structural improvements.

Both were 100% AI-written. I fed the same model the two bases separately and issued the same modification request.

Results:

On Code A, the AI grafted features onto a structureless base; subsequent edits easily broke existing behavior.

On Code B, the AI respected the existing composition/structure/pattern; follow-up edits were far less likely to cause regressions.

Conclusion:

The AI does leverage existing code structure; on a good structure, it tends to produce sturdier, higher-quality code.

Personal note:

This is an interesting direction for AI-assisted development. The write-up is short but setup-heavy; to really grasp the test, hands-on is needed. A tighter focus on the test, results, and implications would make it stronger.
by neilv | 2025-09-07 03:22:53+00:00
Yesterday's HN post on the story, with some discussion, but was flagged:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45143759

[flagged] US special forces killed North Korean civilians in botched 2019 mission (reuters.com) 68 points by hnlurker22 1 day ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments
by Aurornis | 2025-09-07 03:23:36+00:00
> The only career advice is - if you want to get promoted understand the motivations of those who can promote and try to make it in their self-interest to promote you.

It's true that you need to understand the motivations of people in charge and align your output with that.

However, these overly reductive approaches to the workplace can easily backfire. A lot of the go-getter juniors I've had to work with in my career approached the workplace like a game of 4D chess to unlock, where they just need to identify what matters to their skip level boss and hyperfocus on that. Some times it works for a little while, but in my experience many employees underestimate how blatantly obvious these games are to any experienced manager.

From a management perspective, you can notice when someone is a hyper-responder to perceived incentives and trying to people-please you into rewarding them. Good managers learn to be careful about what's said, even in passing, and to carefully call out the behaviors they want to see to keep them on track.

Evil managers see this incentive-reward hyper response and use it against the employee. I've worked with some managers who will spot these go-getters early and then dangle carrots in front of them every time they want to get something done. The employee will chase every carrot aggressively, thinking it's their ticket to getting ahead. In reality, the manager isn't interested in promoting them out of that role because they can so reliably extract extra work by dangling another carrot.
by dwattttt | 2025-09-07 03:25:22+00:00
> options that depend on options

What would you do for "top level option, which can be modified in two other ways"?

(--option | --option-with-flag1 | --option-with-flag2 | --option-with-flag1-and-flag2)

would solve invalid representation, but is unwieldy.

Something that results in the usage string

[--option [--flag1 --flag2]]

doesn't seem so bad at that point.