MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DoctorOW | 2025-09-25 00:23:34+00:00
Let's start with the simplest definition I could find, just to walk you through it.

> "(n) an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization."

Is this what DHH is advocating for? Absolutely. I'll skip past right wing because that part is obvious. Nationalistic in terms of "non-Londoners" being used interchangeably with immigrants, a person from Birmingham meets his "Native London" criteria, and using that criteria for social organization.

Pretty cut and dry for anyone using just the basic dictionary definition. Obviously, there's a version with more stipulations and exceptions you'd rather use but those can be safely filled under "overly esoteric".
by rtpg | 2025-09-25 00:23:42+00:00
I mean I don't think it's easy to conclude much here, because economics research is the act of trying to figure out how to look at two different points in time in some way and try as hard as possible to ignore every other of the billions of inputs when looking at a single input.

Dumb example: foreign company wants to start a branch office in the US, by sending in a bunch of people from its head office to spin it up. The branch office will be in a new building, and the branch office needs a janitor. Visa shenanigans mean the foreign company decides against doing this. Branch office is shut down, one less janitorial job.

Silly but I think it's very easy to concoct these kinds of qualitative stories to infer the theoretical possibility of some quantitative result. Probably why so many of these discussions go in circles!

The easy counter to the above is to say that the foreign company wanted to start a branch office for reasons, and that those reasons remain true with our without H-1B. My impression is that lots of company decision making is of two varieties:

- If you are ginormous: sometimes you are big enough to where you really can't find 500 IT people for your office in some mid-sized market no matter how much money you throw at the problem, so you try to hire from other places. If you aren't able to find 500 people "quickly" the idea stops being interesting

- If you are smaller than ginormous: almost every decision about hiring is actually extremely personal. New offices get opened because you have a handful of people linked to an interesting opportunity, and its through those people that it will happen or not. Denying access to even a couple of them just denies the whole opportunity.

This is just my own view of the world though
by xormapmap | 2025-09-25 00:24:21+00:00
Exactly this. I remember when it was just a couple small links in a yellow banner you could scroll past. Same with YouTube, the ads used to just be a banner under or beside the video but didn't interfere with the main content. Once the ads got invasive, I installed ublock and haven't looked back. I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about that.
by jimmyl02 | 2025-09-25 00:24:37+00:00
Cannot +1 this enough! Joining a team you respect and seeing how they operate gives you a really good baseline to work off of and take what you like and modify what you disagreed with.

You'd be surprised how many times you can "iterate and fail quickly" only to end up at an established practice some other shop has been doing for years. It is important however to understand the why behind the decisions as otherwise you're no better than just figuring it out yourself
by mkfs | 2025-09-25 00:24:50+00:00
> Here’s what I think is going to happen. The next ACIP meeting is scheduled for late October. A few days before the meeting, the agenda will be posted. MMR will be on the agenda. They will request that CDC scientists present on febrile seizures caused by MMR. The MMR has been administered to millions of kids since it came on the market in 1971, so the CDC scientists will have mountains of data to present. It won’t matter. The risk of febrile seizure is not zero, so the MMR will be recommended only for kids over aged 4, when the risk subsides.

> There is a way to reduce the risk of febrile seizure, by the way. Reducing fever prevents febrile seizures. You know how you safely reduce fever in babies? Tylenol. Which has now been designated by Trump and Kennedy’s entire HHS as the cause of autism, despite having no evidence to support that claim.

I doubt the administration is this devious or thinking as far ahead as she thinks. Her reasoning is ironically similar to Trump supporters, who rebrand every flub, fumble, and gaffe as some form of "5D chess" that normies just don't understand. But it's evident form the tariff policy that much what the administration does is just shot straight from the hip.
by fn-mote | 2025-09-25 00:24:50+00:00
This would be a better comment if it asserted what the poster believed entrepreneurship IS rather than what it is not.

FWIW, to me entrepreneurship is an amazing path, but starting a company right out of college?? There’s a LOT of skills to develop. Have someone to copy. Make sure you draw enough salary. Keep an identity outside of your company (networking!) so you can pick yourself up if (when) it crashes.
by smcin | 2025-09-25 00:24:53+00:00
Argument-by-consequences that because a small fraction of human drivers are bad, reckless or criminally irresponsible, that all the rest of us should accept autonomous cars without restrictions, and totally not even discuss the boatload of obvious negative (and permanent) socieoeconomic consequences that creates.

We could make the same argument about trucks, or phones, or computers, or knives.

And the comment "But I can’t help but think that if all of the cars involved had been driven by Waymos, none of these collisions would have occurred." isn't as profound as it wants to be, because there won't be one autonomous car manufacturer, there'll be N, and thus at minimum N*(N-1) ways any 2-car interaction could happen that can't be designed for, before we even factor in other road users.

Agreed, the insurer data show Waymos are safer than Teslas or autonomous Ubers.

Anyway, in reality we'll end up somewhere between the extremes of Hawley's proposed total ban or zero restrictions. Hawley is negotiating.

Read the Hawley bill as a split in MAGA between corporatist and populist factions.

Remember also how the Biden admin banned the 2022 freight rail strike [0] protesting safety and staffing cuts in favor of profitability, which then gave us the 2023 Ohio train derailment.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_la...
by beligum | 2025-09-25 00:24:59+00:00
I can't speak for other brands, but I started this project by digging into the LCD menu of my camera, discovering "auth", "user", "pass" and wanted to know what protocol they used to authenticate remote logins. That's when I discovered the camera just uses ssh-style auth. As a part time sysadmin, it gave me the idea to try to "log into" the camera and here we are.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-09-25 00:25:23+00:00
People are really starting to notice the sharp decline of Google search. I blogged[0] of a very similar experience a few months ago.

I don't even mind the AI Overview (too much) but the search results themselves are noticeably worse. In my example, the best search result and the one that the AI summary is clearly based on is the 6th ranked result.

Is Google doing this deliberately to make the AI Overview seem better?

In an ideal world, Google would use AI to provide better search results. Something like: "Here are the results for your search term A, which was slightly ambiguous. I suggest added term B or C depending on what you meant". It seems like that is not going to happen.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2025/4/yo_google%2C_thanks_for_the_ai_ov...
by drooby | 2025-09-25 00:25:24+00:00
His comments... if you actually read them.. remain reasonable.

The article itself clarifies..

> Baccarelli’s published statement to the White House only referred to the “possibility of a causal relationship” between acetaminophen and autism. In both his statement and the August paper, Baccarelli called for further study.

...

"Possibility"

See also

https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2025/mount-sinai-s...
by godelski | 2025-09-25 00:26:01+00:00
> That's what they're directly or indirectly being graded on.

I think you'd agree that this should have never been the case. Engineering managers or project managers, sure. But engineers? That's just silly.

We need firewalls. One group's primary concern needs to be on the product. Another group's primary concern needs to be on keeping the business alive and profitable.

Too much of the former and you fail to prioritize the right work. Too much of the latter and you build vaporware. The downsides of biasing in one direction is certainly worse than the other...

> my wife hates that I see this in everything, but - hidden inflation is a thing.

Lol, your wife might have a field day with mine...

I have a fundamental belief that there's far more complexity than we let on. That as we advance complexity only increases. What was once rounding errors end up becoming major roadblocks. It's the double edged nature of success: the more you improve the harder it is to improve. I truly will never understand how everyone (including niche experts) thinks things are so simple.

But my partner is doing her PhD in economics, so she also thinks about opportunity costs quite a lot but I think she (and a lot of her friends) were quite unaware of how a lot of stuff operates in tech[0].

Probably doesn't help that, as you know, I'm not great at brevity :/

[0] My favorite thing to at her department get togethers (alcohol is always involved) is to introduce them to open source software. Quite a number of them find it difficult to understand how much of the world is based on this type of work and how little money it makes. Not to mention the motivations behind it. The xz hack led to some interesting discussions...
by rossy | 2025-09-25 00:26:26+00:00
I got a ChromeOS device a few years ago and it was great. I think they get an underserved bad reputation from being the locked-down devices you're forced to use in schools, but a personal ChromeOS device is a capable computer that can run any Android app or desktop Linux app.

Though having said that, in the past year I've replaced ChromeOS with desktop Linux (postmarketOS) and I love it even more now. 4GB of RAM was a bit slim for running everything in micro-VMs for "security," which is what ChromeOS does. I've had no trouble with battery life or Android emulation (Waydroid) since switching.
by kentonv | 2025-09-25 00:26:35+00:00
You're simultaneously being pedantic and at the same time anti-pedantic here.

Sure, you can kinda-sorta argue that HTTP is an RPC protocol, insofar as it is request/response oriented, and so is RPC. But obviously I was describing RPC systems that model programming language APIs more closely than HTTP does.

Yes, technically the P in RPC stands for "procedure", and procedural programming vs. object-oriented programming are different things. If you're really calling methods on objects then "procedure" is a misnomer. Maybe you could call it RMI (remote method invocation), except that that's a Java-specific term. Another term you could use -- and which, obviously, I did use, repeatedly -- is "object-capability model", but that is actually a bit more specific than just being object-oriented. There's no well-known term for "RPC except objects". Well, actually there is: it's just "RPC". People have been calling this "RPC" for decades, even though it's "technically wrong".

> more akin to CORBA, which we well know now is not sound...

The point of this text was to contest this notion, but here you haven't really made a counter-argument, you've just asserted that we "know" it is "not sound".

> Promises and async/await are language-level concepts, completely orthogonal to "RPC" which is a transport/wire-level concept

The argument here is that the reason CORBA failed is because it lacked the language-level concepts to make it work well, in particular strong asynchronous programming primitives and promise pipelining.

> i do not think RPC means what this author thinks that it means

lol yeah what do I know about RPC.
by resoluteteeth | 2025-09-25 00:26:57+00:00
I don't think there's any specific reason for people to want the reason to be tylenol specifically, but RFK had announced that he was going to solve autism by September and it seems like he really just wanted to come up with an explanation for autism that blames it on some sort of medicine that people can simply choose not to use. Tylenol is something that people have considered as a possible cause of autism, although the best/biggest study seems to have pretty clearly proven that use of tylenol doesn't actually cause autism, so it's a fairly obvious thing to pull out if you just want to come up with some medicine to blame for autism.

Perhaps the better question is why he isn't blaming vaccines, which is what many people expected him to do, but maybe there was too much pushback from the rest of the administration on that.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-09-25 00:27:23+00:00
> I remember a company saying its most effective ads were search ads for their own name

I don't have the full context, but this is almost a tautology. Of course you get the highest click-through-rate and highest conversion for searches that are your own name. You usually also get a relatively cheap bid, because most search engines prefer to prioritize relevant results, and you will be very relevant for your own name. But you would have gotten most of those clicks and conversion _for free_ even if you didn't advertise on your name, because the searcher would see your organic result. Advertising on your own name is defensive, not offensive -- you protect customers that are already yours, you don't get new ones.

source: I run marketing for a small business, we advertise on our own name too, and of course it is also the most effective if you calculate it naively.
by somethingsome | 2025-09-25 00:27:43+00:00
Totally agree, in my experience we are far from having reliable research code based on prompts.

We are clearly not there yet, but I feel that the article is pushing in that direction, maybe to push research in that direction.

There was a long time ago an article from the creators of Mathematica or maple, I don't remember that said something similar. The question was: why do we learn about matrix operations at school, when (modern) tools are able to perform everything. We should teach at school matrix algebra and let students use the software (a little bit like using calculators). This would allow to make children learn more abstract thinking and test way more interesting ideas. (if someone has the reference I'm interested)

I feel the article follow the same lines. But with current tools.

(of course I'm skipping the fact that Mathematica is deterministic in doing algebra, and LLMs are far from it)
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-09-25 00:28:48+00:00
Not at the very beginning. But when they first added ads, they were clearly marked in the top with a yellow background (and they didn't take over the whole page), and on the righthand column (and they were clearly marked as sponsored links).

I'd have to dredge it up but someone put up a site that showed the visual changes to ads over the past 15 years, and they've become more and more indistinguishable from organic search results, and they've taken over more of the page.

A great visual history of enshittification, and also how "growth at all costs" capitalism leads to that enshittification. Google was still taking in money hand over fist in the mid 00s when they had a few, clearly marked ads, but capitalism demands the line arcs upwards no matter what.
by rchaud | 2025-09-25 00:29:08+00:00
Everyone posts to centralized RSS feeds these days. The company that owns the feed creates duplicates of the uploaded file, inserts ads into them, and serves a version of the file containing ads localized to the downloader's country.

If the same podcast is uploaded to Youtube through the uploader's official channel, it won't contain those ads and you're better off downloading that.
by neilv | 2025-09-25 00:29:14+00:00
I just got good first page hits and ranking for a search for "midjourney", but it looks like Midjourney is paying for 2 Sponsored spots on the first page, even though the user searched exactly for Midjourney's well-known brand name.

https://i.imgur.com/u025ZaU.png

On a search for exactly this particular well-known and fairly unique brand name, I think probably midjourney.com should've been the first hit, as a freebie, without needing to buy ads. (Either that, or the second hit, and the Wikipedia entry as the first.)

(Incidentally, it felt a bit retro not to get the usual clutter of AI/infoboxes/etc. at the top of the page this time.)
by onetimepass3 | 2025-09-25 00:29:46+00:00
It’s 2025 and it’s concerning that we are still trying to cancel and silence people for opining.

People have a right to voice unpopular opinions. And programming communities have to stop pretending like they are some self-righteous above-everyone morally-superior folks.

It’s incredibly lazy as well to label someone as racist, whatever-ist by quoting what they say as if a quote can encapsulate a person’s whole life and meaning.

What DHH says is actually the majority opinion of the world. I am an immigrant and do not find his thoughts controversial. I might disagree on some points but it is rather dismissive and tone deaf to ignore a majority opinion and silence it as if the programming enclaves of $100k compensated individuals somehow are superior to or worse, represent the majority population who may not have the same opportunities and thinking patterns.

It’s also tiring to see these write ups to portray to the world how good and liberal you are and to show which party one is aligned with (your tent is getting smaller even though you originally thought it included everyone) - groupthink masquerading as original free thought. I am actually not (no longer) part of your tent as I find it repulsive and lazy.

Programmers should program and not limit programming communities from people they somehow think are morally inferior.

Just realize that you are just as shitty as the person you think you are superior too.

It’s all code at the end of the day.
by catigula | 2025-09-25 00:30:06+00:00
We live in the age of AI, it takes approximately 2-3 minutes to get a condensed report on why your paper is misleading or incorrect:

Control group mismatch: Treats non-profits as a clean counterfactual for for-profits, but the sectors have very different occupational mixes and shocks—so the triple-diff can pick up sectoral composition, not policy.

Short pre-trend: Only a tiny non-binding window to test parallel trends → weak pre-trend evidence.

Approvals ≠ demand: Uses approved H-1Bs (not applications), so results reflect rationed outcomes and USCIS processing quirks, not employer demand.

Strong wage-equalization assumption: Identification leans on wages equalizing across very different employers; if sector premia move (e.g., recession), estimates drift.

Relative, not absolute, effect: The estimate is “for-profit vs. non-profit”; if non-profits expand (cap-exempt), the “effect” can be reallocation, not a true for-profit decline.

Recession confound: Lottery years coincide with 2008–09; macro shocks can differentially hit new vs. established hires across sectors.

Noisy worker/firm measures: Experience is imputed (age minus stylized schooling ages); employer names are inconsistently harmonized → concentration trends may be artifacts; “large firm” cutoff is arbitrary.

Wage results are shaky: Based on offer wages (not realized), trimmed, and imprecise—tail stories are fragile.

Placebo underpowered/misaligned: Native “no effect” test is noisy and not analogous to “new vs. established” H-1Bs, so it’s weak evidence on substitutability.

Ignores geography: Cells are national; regional wage floors and local cycles could drive composition shifts.

Net: clever design but brittle; treat findings as suggestive reallocation under approvals data, not clean causal effects on demand, wages, or “top talent.”
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-09-25 00:30:08+00:00
There is some evidence of fraud, substitution of native workers with H-1Bs, power imbalances and more playing a part in the labor market. A lot of Americans, including in tech seem to be clamoring for less H-1Bs and immigrants, let them have it and see how it goes. Maybe it really will be better. It should be a win-win where India gets to keep more of its best talent and the US native population has less competition.
by bruckie | 2025-09-25 00:30:27+00:00
Nope, there were no ads at the beginning. It was a big deal when they announced AdWords. And the ads were unobtrusive and often quite useful at the beginning.

Google was quite vocal about clearly marking ads, in contrast to Overture, Yahoo, and others who mixed ads into search results in the late 90s / early 2000s. I think the period when Google lightened, then entirely removed the colored background that made it easy to identify ads was an inflection point in their fall from being a company that genuinely focused on users towards becoming just another megacorp run by profit-maximizing MBAs.
by userbinator | 2025-09-25 00:31:24+00:00
I stopped using Google when it started discriminating against browsers without JS recently, and it looks like I'm not missing much. Is stuffing ads in your face this "better experience" that sites are always trying to beg you to enable JS for?

Incidentally, Bing's first two results for "midjourney" are the official site, followed by the Wikipedia page.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2025-09-25 00:32:12+00:00
the point is to have everyone "collared" and traceable. The conspiracy guys all worry about getting micro-chipped but that's far too invasive and obvious for modern society. the new Control gives the illusion of endless opportunities and freedom while also being the very method of limiting that freedom. It is the leverage through which control is exerted.

to quote Gilles Deleuze's Postscript on Societies of Control(1992):

>The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's...electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position-licit or illicit...

https://faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Spinoza/Texts/Pos...