MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gs17 | 2025-09-28 22:19:32+00:00
I also have first-hand experience, albeit a decade-plus in the past now, but that matches how it was at my school. They only got involved when there was violence, and a "zero-tolerance" policy meant they punished you for getting assaulted even if you didn't fight back (fortunately, no one at my school realized you could get someone you didn't like suspended by doing a hit and run and turning yourself in).
by IgorPartola | 2025-09-28 22:19:35+00:00
During the past 15 years I have been using Postgres quite a bit. I have also almost exclusively have been accessing databases using an ORM. Love them or hate them, they do provide value for a lot of common cases and speed up development and debugability, or at least they did for me and I know they remain very popular.

This all meant that as databases like Postgres keep adding cool new features they mostly go unused because an ORM just doesn’t let you pierce that layer of abstraction except dropping to pure SQL which is typically seen as a code smell and an annoyance to everyone involved.

So on the one hand I love that Postgres is getting amazing new features, not to mention all the cool extensions. On the other hand I and I suspect many others are essentially locked out of them and since most ORMa try to serve multiple databases they typically only include the most common denominator features. As I get more experienced I both see why RDBMS is the right choice most times AND see the appeal of an object store instead of a row store.
by userbinator | 2025-09-28 22:20:30+00:00
Fortunately copper and aluminium, the two most common metals for cables, have resistance that increases with temperature.

Ultimately what I'm saying is that the endpoints have or can measure all the information they need to adapt, and this is even more accurate than requiring a cable to self-identify which is worthless if it's lying (and that can happen unintentionally if it's damaged or the connector is worn.)
by thisislife2 | 2025-09-28 22:21:09+00:00
I wish people who write such stuff would first work in a political system and understand what politicians actually do, and the constraints of their political systems they work in. No, America's problem isn't because of lawyers in power or lack of engineers in power. It's simply about the political system - the US is a federal democracy and the Chinese an authoritarian one-party State. An authoritarian state that isn't answerable to the people can do a lot of things that a democratic one simply cannot (at the same pace) because a democratic country first has to reach a consensus with all the stake holders involved.

Chinese leaders can allocate whatever money they want to a project. They can order their citizens, in mass, to move away from an area. They can ignore labour rights and force workers to work in hostile conditions. They can ignore their own laws, or quickly change it when they want, if it impedes some project they have deemed important. They can ignore any ecological concerns. And so on ... India and the USA cannot do all this, because of the constraints their democratic system places on their governing leaders.

This is why Rahul Gandhi (India's current opposition leader) says that the biggest challenge that both the US and India face today is to figure out how to revive domestic manufacturing without sacrificing our democratic values.
by mothballed | 2025-09-28 22:21:34+00:00
The only "known" solution is to privatize the commons. One way to do that in this example is to use a toll road.

It seems bizarre to damn some methods of private roads for not solving something you claim has no solution, then just glance over the ones that mitigate it.

You've shown no reason why you can't "get around government" but rather just dismiss the ways that just did.
by lxgr | 2025-09-28 22:22:54+00:00
Ah, so maybe DisplayPort has mandatory link training then, which would indeed allow unmarked cables.

But to GPs point, there still needs to be a way to tell the source that a given cable is a USB-C-to-DisplayPort one in the first place. So why not include the metadata on what signal grades it’s rated for in that same indicator? That’s exactly what e-markers are.
by wgjordan | 2025-09-28 22:24:18+00:00
It's a legal requirement for most US non-profits to file public and accurate accounting of their funds and expenses, Ruby Together is no exception and all the info is publicly available [1].

Having previously worked as a software engineer at an ed-tech non-profit, I found nothing nefarious or unusual in Andre receiving compensation for his work or in the anecdotes around expensing business-related technology purchases or meals to his employer, this is all standard industry practice.

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/473...
by bsder | 2025-09-28 22:24:28+00:00
I would amend that to "Pay a local knife nerd that you trust". Most "sharpening services" use some kind of grinder and they can damage the edge temper as well as do other stupid things.

Funny story time ... my problem with learning to sharpen with whetstones was due to taking my knives to a local sharpener.

I could sharpen two of my knives with a whetstone just fine but could never figure out why. But they were my two smallest knives, so I assumed that it was skill issue when I was handling the bigger knives.

It turns out the local sharpener that I used ground an absolutely absurd angle into the cutting edge on my big kitchen knives--something like 30+ degrees. Given that they did cut for a while, I presume that they also had something like a "microbevel" on them. Of course, the problem is that I am never going to be able to put a "microbevel" back on them with a whetstone.

However, an amateur with a whetstone like me is going to have difficulty figuring all this out because they are always going to suspect their own skill.

Of course, as soon as I put them on the fixed angle sharpener, the fact that the edges had an absurd angle was immediately obvious. And the fact that, yes, it is going to take a while to correct this also became obvious. So, I sat down and stoned the edge with a 100 grit(!) diamond stone for 45 minutes until I got the angle back to something reasonable. And then went up the grits to sharpen it.

Just for giggles, on my last kitchen knife, I used the system to fix the angle, and then I used whetstones. Funnily enough, it sharpened just fine. I'll still use the fixed angle system in the future though.
by derektank | 2025-09-28 22:24:34+00:00
How does having a net worth of $1M or an annual income of over $200K inure you to being scammed by complex financial instruments?

Also, we already let people engage in sports gambling (which is guaranteed to result in a net loss) and cryptocurrency speculation, (which is a zero sum game). I'd rather give people more options to invest in financial instruments that at least in theory have the potential to be positive sum, since we're not going to ban either of the other two any time soon.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-09-28 22:25:22+00:00
> Instead of spending taxpayer money it would be better to seize all assets held by Russian entities (including private citizens) in NATO and other allied countries. Just steal it all.

So basically just like Israel in Gaza. What will be left from EU if it cannot stick to its own charter, which rejects collective responsibility?

That amount of money is barely enough for Ukraine anyway. European defense will cost much more.
by Narciss | 2025-09-28 22:25:27+00:00
It is always very humbling to read such notes - the self-written post passing away letters. There have been others in hacker news, and they always make me think about life, about what matters to me the most and of course, what matters to others.

What struck me most about this one is that it spoke much more about the professional life then about the personal one. I would imagine that if I were to ever write one (which I won’t, cause I’ll live forever) it will be more on the side of outside work experiences.

Life is a beautiful gift, and it’s worth remembering that every day. Do what you love, do a lot of it, be kind to others, hug your cherished people, laugh, enjoy, smile…breathe.

I love you all, and hope you’re enjoying every moment of this incredible journey through the Universe on this floating space rock.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-09-28 22:25:31+00:00
I will add that I'm plenty "smart" enough to understand that "10" comes before "9" in a strictly alphabetical sense, and I still want my file managers to sort "9" before "10".

I don't want to put leading zeroes before every all the single digit numbers in my file names. (And then potentially go come back later and add even more leading zeroes once the maximum number reaches three digits.)

---

I split all of my audiobooks into chapters. I use the format "Chapter 01.mp3" (or "Chapter 001.mp3" when there are > 99 chapters) because some (all?) MP3 players are too stupid to sort numbers properly and I want my audiobooks to work everywhere.

This works, but it looks kind of ugly and creates extra work—yes I have scripts to automate it, it's still an extra step—and it would be great if I could just trust that every device will understand numbers.
by dangle1 | 2025-09-28 22:25:54+00:00
The article does describe some of the subject's tormentors eventually apologizing to him, possibly more out of reflection and genuine remorse as opposed to being told to "Tell him you're sorry."

There should be consequences for bad behavior all around, but if one of the consequences is that a bully increases their level of compassion and self-regulation, it could allow the system to skip the punishment phase of creating consequences and still serve the goals of justice.

Also, while suspension for the subject sounds like a punitive and one-sided approach, he dreaded going to school and the suspension provided a mechanism to create an approach that would thoughtfully allow him and his tormentors to develop better behaviors.
by jdietrich | 2025-09-28 22:26:02+00:00
A number of people have been arrested, charged and convicted for things that were very obviously jokes - tasteless jokes, offensive jokes, but still just jokes.

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

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

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/glasgow-bin...
by HPMOR | 2025-09-28 22:26:03+00:00
Actually, this is wrong. The point of being a contractor is to __not__ give somebody an options package, or full-time employee benefits. My friends who are resident researchers at OAI do not get any option packages.

Regardless, his financial considerations are secondary to the fact, AI has rapidly saturated most if not all benchmarks associated with high human intelligence, and are now on the precipice of making significant advances in scientific fields. This post comes after a sequence of the ICPC and IMO both falling to AI.

You are hoping to minimize these advancements because it gives solace to you (us) as humans. If these are "trivial" advancements then perhaps everything will be alright. But frankly, we must be intellectually honest here. AI is soon to be, significantly smarter than even the smartest humans. And we must grapple with those consequences.
by lamontcg | 2025-09-28 22:26:36+00:00
Yeah, you can total up all the things he's said about Andre Arko, and even just accepting all of his spin and framing, I don't understand how it adds up to Shopify's actions being legitimate.

And I was part of the Ruby community for the period being addressed in the blog post, and I interacted with him back then, and he was certainly at a minimum difficult to deal with. None of it seems to be relevant at all to what just happened. Whatever Andre did or didn't do with Ruby Together funds, that organization no longer exists.

Also, in not into the faux shock at him paying himself $200-$250/hr as his rate for RT. He's presumably paying his own health care and living in SF so that actually seems pretty reasonable. If he was employed at a tech company earning that much, nobody would bat an eyelash.
by thrance | 2025-09-28 22:26:39+00:00
Indeed. Progressives are an existential threat to the current geriatric establishment owning the party, and they recognize them as such. They would sooner see the country in the hands of fascists than enact a single left-wing policy. Just look at Schumer, Kamala and their pals still refusing to endorse Mamdani, the one Democrat that has been able to generate any amount of momentum in years.

To the Republicans, Progressives are a political force they might actually have to try winning elections against, if the latters are ever able to muster a modicum of power inside of the party that is supposed to house them. A progressive Democratic party with populist messaging would certainly mean they can't rely on the absolute ineptitude of their opponents campaigning anymore.
by dbrgn | 2025-09-28 22:27:33+00:00
Fair, this may be a legal option for ordering alcohol. I really don't see the pure cryptographic hash "is older than 18y" as a big privacy issue though, as long as it is properly salted, does not provide other information on my identity and is unlinkable (i.e. multiple such signed claims are different).

The last time I opened an account for a financial service, as well as when creating an account with a service for digital document signatures, I had to do a video ident process with a private third party company. There was no other option, and I felt quite uneasy about it. I would have preferred the E-ID by far in both cases.

Both companies will inevitably store information about me to provide their service, independently of the identity verification. That is legitimate and inevitable for their service. That other, third party company storing a video of me holding my ID and my face into the camera is now not inevitable anymore.
by calvinmorrison | 2025-09-28 22:27:47+00:00
yet - you still have to learn opaque crap. example

echo kill > /proc/123/ctl

Sure, that works if you know kill, but you cannot inspect ctl and understand the interface, its a write interface. so you can certainly RTFM, read the dev proc list, etc. it's not discoverable

so like /proc/net/stat or whatever, it means nothing to me... its gonna just be a TSV of bytes that mean something, unless you know it.

so for all the simplicity, it's what i would call, not very usable.
by Jensson | 2025-09-28 22:27:50+00:00
> Why?

Because small programs are really quick and easy to write, there was never a bottleneck making them and the demand for people to write small programs is very small.

The difficulty of writing a program scales super linearly with size, an experienced programmer in his current environment easily writes a 500 line program in a day, but writing 500 meaningful lines to an existing 100k line codebase in a day is not easy at all. So almost all developer time in the world is spent making large programs, small programs is a drop in an ocean and automating that doesn't make a big difference overall.

Small programs can help you a lot, but that doesn't replace programmers since almost no programmers are hired to write small programs, instead automatically making such small programs mostly helps replace other tasks like regular white collar workers etc whose jobs are now easier to automate.
by iamnothere | 2025-09-28 22:28:12+00:00
Yes, governments do need a centralized common identity if they intend to build something like a social credit system. Those without adequate experience dealing with the US system, for instance, may assume that the government already has your info and thus such a system is redundant. However, this is simply not the case. US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier). Many are plagued with duplicate records, data problems, and other issues that prevent easy correlation of records without human verification. Talk to some people in the IRS or Social Security and you’ll quickly get a sense of how many problems this can create! Maybe it’s improved since I last talked to people about it, but I doubt it.

A central ID enforced on all systems by statute would significantly reduce the barrier to creating “airtight” oppressive systems. While the inefficiencies in the US system have a cost, certainly preventing the implementation of more efficient social benefit programs, they also provide a barrier against more efficient social repression. Given the political animosity present in the country right now, it’s probably good that we don’t have the ability to create a turnkey totalitarian system. Things are bad enough as is!

More generally, in nations where the population feels suspicion towards their politicians and bureaucrats, the people may prefer to leave inefficiencies baked into the system in order to hamper potential oppression. Those social tensions and trust deficits should be resolved before proceeding with any ambitious central ID schemes.
by Barbing | 2025-09-28 22:29:00+00:00
Reminds me of the potential low value of say a 5-star review for a restaurant from an out-of-towner. Was that phở soup really that good or just the one they happened to have, and it’s trounced by any other Vietnamese spot?

Lead to ideas of (certain-to-fail) locals-only review websites (that might even enlist folks to do potentially-compensated exit interviews with diners leaving restaurants).
by wkat4242 | 2025-09-28 22:29:33+00:00
> Because the alternative is that we provide our passport to every online service that 'needs' to verify our identity.

I really really really don't want to 'verify my identity' everywhere. Why the F is that normalised these days?? If I buy something online my payment and delivery address is all they should need. And all they've had to have for the last 30 years

> I'd much rather the government, who already know everything about me because may I remind you they issued the documents, had some way of that company querying my 'verified identity'.

Um yeah but right now they don't know what you do with your life all the time. Anna have absolutely no business to.
"AI-Powered" Is a Red Flag. Here's a Dev's Guide to Calling Bullshit
by barnir | 2025-09-28 22:30:05+00:00
"AI-Powered" Is a Red Flag. Here's a Dev's Guide to Calling Bullshit.

The term "AI-Powered" has become the new "cloud-based"—a meaningless marketing term often used to justify a price hike for a feature that is, at best, a glorified if/else statement. As engineers and technical buyers, our job is to look past the buzzwords and systematically dismantle the vendor's claims.

Having evaluated dozens of so-called "AI" tools, I've developed a simple framework for spotting the AI-washing. Here are the red flags to look for.

Red Flag #1: They Can't Explain the "How" If a vendor uses terms like "intelligent algorithms" but can't articulate whether they are using NLP topic modeling, a forecasting model, or a simple heuristic, it's a major red flag. Real AI applications are built on specific methodologies. A vague explanation often masks a superficial implementation or a complete lack of in-house expertise.

Red Flag #2: They Pitch Features, Not Outcomes A demo that is a whirlwind tour of flashy "AI features" without a clear connection to a measurable outcome (e.g., reduced latency, lower error rates, improved conversion) is a sign of tech for tech's sake. Transformative AI doesn't just add features; it solves a quantifiable problem.

Red Flag #3: The "Magic Black Box" Defense When you ask about the data model, training requirements, or how they measure accuracy, and the answer is "it's proprietary" or "it just works," be wary. This lack of transparency is a massive governance and risk issue. It raises immediate concerns about hidden biases, data privacy, and simple ineffectiveness. A real AI vendor can discuss their conceptual approach to model training and explainability without giving away their IP.

Red Flag #4: The "AI Island" Architecture An AI solution that doesn't have a clear, robust integration strategy with your existing systems is a recipe for data silos and manual workarounds. AI rarely delivers value in isolation; it needs to consume data from and feed insights back into your core operational workflows via well-documented APIs.

Red Flag #5: They Have No Real-World Proof Grandiose claims of near-perfect accuracy and universal applicability are easy to make on a marketing slide. The ultimate proof is in the implementation. If a vendor cannot provide you with detailed, relevant case studies with measurable results from a company of a similar scale and complexity to yours, they are likely selling a promise, not a product.

Conclusion: Demand Proof, Not Promises The potential of AI is real, but the current vendor landscape is rife with hype. Approach it with the same critical thinking you would apply to a code review. Ask the hard questions, demand transparency, and focus relentlessly on tangible, measurable outcomes.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-09-28 22:30:44+00:00
> Weak players come into the chess.com pool faster than they leave.

By definition, someone entering the pool enters with the average elo (for a closed system). The rate of entry and exit doesn't affect the direction of average (open system) elo. (It does affect the rate of divergence; the faster entry is, the longer it will take for the open average to diverge from the closed average.) What matters to the direction is the elo players have when they leave, not how long they take to leave.

Consider what happens if people enter with 1000 elo at a rate of 10 per day, and leave with 800 elo at a rate of 3 per day:

+-----+---------+-----------+-------------+ | day | players | total elo | average elo | +-----+---------+-----------+-------------+ | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.0 | +-----+---------+-----------+-------------+ | 1 | 10 | 10000 | 1000.0 | +-----+---------+-----------+-------------+ | 2 | 17 | 17600 | 1035.3 | +-----+---------+-----------+-------------+ | 5 | 38 | 40400 | 1063.2 | +-----+---------+-----------+-------------+ | 10 | 73 | 78400 | 1074.0 | +-----+---------+-----------+-------------+ | 20 | 143 | 154400 | 1079.7 | +-----+---------+-----------+-------------+

> Because the average chess.com player is considerably weaker than the average FIDE player.

This... is nonsense. That has nothing to do with the average elo.

The situation you describe is mathematically impossible. Please consider that before you repeat the claim.
by Nevermark | 2025-09-28 22:32:16+00:00
My arguments are very strong.

Information technology does not operate by the rules of any other technology. It is a technology of math and organization, not particular materials.

The unique value of information technology is that it compounds the value of other information and technology, including its own, and lowers the bar for its own further progress.

And we know with absolute certainty we have barely scratched the computing capacity of matter. Bremermann’s limit : 10^47 operations per second, per gram. See my other comment for other relevant limits.

Do you also expect a wall in mathematics?

And yes, an unbroken historical record of 4.5 billions years of information systems becoming more sophisticated with an exponential speed increase over time, is in fact a very strong argument. Changes that took a billion years initially, now happen in very short times in today's evolution, and essentially instantly in technological time. The path is long, with significant acceleration milestones at whatever scale of time you want to look at.

Your argument, on the other hand, is indistinguishable from cynical AI opinions going back decades. It could be made any time. Zero new insight. Zero predictive capacity.

Substantive negative arguments about AI progress have been made. See "Perceptrons" by Marvin Minksy and Seymour Papert, for an example of what a solid negative argument looks like. It delivered insights. It made some sense at the time.