MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by westurner | 2025-09-08 21:20:12+00:00
AI is probably more of an amplifier for technological change than fire or digital computers; but IDK why we would use a different model for this technology (and teams and coping with change).

Diffusion of innovations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations :

> The diffusion of an innovation typically follows an S-shaped curve which often resembles a logistic function.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42658336 :

> [ "From Comfort Zone to Performance Management" (2009) ] also suggests management styles for each stage (Commanding, Cooperative, Motivational, Directive, Collaborative); and suggests that team performance is described by chained power curves of re-progression through these stages

Transforming, Performing, Reforming, [Adjourning]

Carnal Coping Cycle: Denial, Defense, Discarding, Adaptation, and Internalization
by SwamyM | 2025-09-08 21:20:21+00:00
For anyone else that's not familiar, this is referring to https://molly.im/ which looks like it's a fork of Signal. And looks like it interops with Signal, so you can talk to your regular Signal contacts as well.

That's very interesting.

My only concern with it would be how sustainable it is in the long term. I am using Threema currently, which has a plan for enterprises, so that seems more reliable but it's lacking in features and usability.
by newpavlov | 2025-09-08 21:20:21+00:00
>RISC-V is a new-school hyper-academic hot mess.

Yeah... Previously I was a big fan of RISC-V, but after I had to dig slightly deeper into it as a software developer my enthusiasm for it has cooled down significantly.

It's still great that we got a mainstream open ISA, but now I view it as a Linux of the hardware world, i.e. a great achievement, with a big number of questionable choices baked in, which unfortunately stifles other open alternatives by the virtue of being "good enough".
by Yoric | 2025-09-08 21:20:21+00:00
My problem is not that they're going to fail, or even that they aren't going to learn much from their failure. It's that they're going to take many people down with them.

Just to take today's example: there's a npmjs supply chain attack. Dependabot & co are going to issue alerts. Most vibe coders aren't going to know what it's about, or even care. Which means that some of the users of vibe coded apps are going to lose their life savings over this ignorance.
by aequitas | 2025-09-08 21:20:26+00:00
It’s very simple: format code to a standard. Preferably the language default formatting. But it must be a standard that can be auto formatted to with a tool. Now when someone doesn’t like that standard, they can auto format from that standard to one of their liking for local development and back again to the project standard for pushing to the project. This can even be done automatically with gitattributes during checkout and commit. But without strictly enforcing a autoformatable standard this is not possible and you end up with bikeshedding.
by adrian_b | 2025-09-08 21:20:50+00:00
Flax was included in the first set of domesticated plants, together with the cereals barley, emmer wheat and einkorn wheat, and together with a few legumes, including lentils and peas.

This set of domesticated plants does not appear random, because any more restricted set would have made impossible the substitution of the animal food used previously with plant seeds.

The seeds of cereals and of legumes together could provide an acceptable protein source, while the flax seeds could add the alpha-linolenic acid, which can be transformed by humans, with modest efficiency, into the needed DHA and EPA.

We know that the first generations of people who had become dependent of agriculture had serious health problems in comparison with their ancestors, which have become less severe after many generations, presumably after they have learned to better balance their diet and when those who have survived might have been better adapted to eating such food.

Nevertheless, regardless where you are located you do not know the properties of your genes, unless you do some very expensive study, by using various diets and monitoring how they influence the content in your blood of various substances, e.g. of DHA and EPA when eating various sources of omega-3 fatty acids, of vegetable or of animal origin.

In the absence of such a study, the safer hypothesis is that you belong to the people who are not efficient at the elongation of ALA into DHA and EPA, so it is safer to eat food with enough DHA and EPA, instead of eating food with ALA, like flax seeds or oil, and hoping that you belong to the people for whom this is good enough.

This is similar for a few other conditionally-essential nutrients, which can be produced by humans, but in most cases only in too small quantities compared to necessities, so it is safer to ensure that they are present in food, e.g. vitamin K2, choline, taurine, creatine.
by andrewaylett | 2025-09-08 21:21:12+00:00
As others have said, a limit not a target. But also, how fast you can travel along a road sensibly very much depends on conditions. If you do let people think of the limit as a target, you'd better set the limit low enough that it's still appropriate in terrible conditions.

As a specific (and horrific) example, this doctor was found to be mostly liable for a collision that happened due to her speed, while still under the speed limit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-66121540

My general take is that I try to drive as if a maniac (meaning anyone who might think it's reasonable to drive faster than I do) is about to come the other way along the road. I should be able to stop within my sight-lines if the road is wide enough to take evasive action, and well within half that distance if the road is narrow.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-08 21:21:23+00:00
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...

> When the authors look only at the preferences of average citizens, it appears that they do have a pretty big effect on policy change. But when they add the preferences of economic elites and interest groups to the analysis, the impact of average citizens vanishes entirely. Basically, average citizens only get what they want if economic elites or interest groups also want it.
by tavavex | 2025-09-08 21:21:30+00:00
What makes you so confident that this alternate path is actually real and as good as you describe it? You say that the additional market coverage they would've gotten by not being abusive could've easily made up for the profit that they otherwise would've lost, but what makes you think that? The thing here is that any of these megacorporations has hundreds of people dedicated solely to exploring every conceivable strategy they have to making as much money as possible. So why hasn't even one of them from any company thought of what you said? And why did no one try?

Can you name one gigantic, publicly-traded company that made a choice similar to what you described and reaped the rewards on that scale?

The fact that these services need to be not just profitable, but also sustain indefinite growth makes them desperate. All of them start squeezing their customers for cash, be it directly (predatory pricing, subscription services, segmenting their services, raising prices) or indirectly (selling user data, integrating everything they know into their ad services, using harmful techniques to maximize engagement). Personal attitudes just dictate whether it happens earlier or later, but they all will have to do it.

Tech companies seem to have converged on the idea that providing a compromised, but free service is usually superior to anything paid. And it seems to have paid off, Facebook has billions of users to this day. Most people don't care or don't like to think about it. The fix for this would need to be systemic.
by WorldMaker | 2025-09-08 21:22:12+00:00
The 2026 Bolt moving to the Ultium platform may also improve some of the interior quality (because the battery platform will be cheaper again). It is probably a couple months still before we can easily test drive one to get a good feel, but I am curious to see what they do with the new model, especially because GM is especially returning it to be their cheapest EV.
by kiitos | 2025-09-08 21:22:12+00:00
when you said "crypto won" you weren't talking about a regulation war, you were talking about a war between crypto and banking in general, in that war crypto has obviously not won, or even really entered the fight

trump coin is obviously illegal, it has no bearing on any discussion of policy

but you're obviously fully bought-in to the hype, so, you do you my dude
by Humorist2290 | 2025-09-08 21:22:23+00:00
That's exactly my point though. Google, AWS, Meta etc all stand to gain from this. But plenty of middle tier providers are entirely silent even if it poses a potentially existential threat. Some people are going to get rich from this of course, but many will be ruined.

And that's before even accounting for the lives to be destroyed by a blurry photo of a tree being classified as abuse material.
by gambiting | 2025-09-08 21:22:28+00:00
I've lived in the UK for over 15 years now and I still can't get over people's general allergy for using indicators. And I know the test and training specifically tell you that you must use indicators when changing lanes and turning, but if I had a penny for every time I see someone on the motorway changing lanes without indicating I'd make a very good middle class salary from that alone.

But yes, other than this people do generally drive really safely. I especially like how people mostly keep to the 30mph limit in towns(but then again, people get literally offended when you say you keep to the 20mph limit, like you're some kind of idiot for doing so).
by bsder | 2025-09-08 21:23:07+00:00
> If it is that easy to compete with Nvidia, why don't we already have those cards?

Businesswise? Because Intel management are morons. And because AMD, like Nvidia, don't want to cannibalize their high end.

Technically? "Double the RAM" is the most straightforward (that doesn't make it easy, necessarily ...) way to differentiate as it means that training sets you couldn't run yesterday because it wouldn't fit on the card can now be run today. It also takes a direct shot at how Nvidia is doing market segmentation with RAM sizes.

Note that "double the RAM" is necessary but not sufficient.

You need to get people to port all the software to your cards to make them useful. To do that, you need to have something compelling about the card. These Intel cards have nothing compelling about them.

Intel could also make these cards compelling by cutting the price in half or dropping two dozen of these cards on every single AI department in the US for free. Suddenly, every single grad student in AI will know everything about your cards.

The problem is that Intel institutionally sees zero value in software and is incapable of making the moves they need to compete in this market. Since software isn't worth anything to Intel, there is no way to justify any business action isn't just "sell (kinda shitty) chip".
by pixl97 | 2025-09-08 21:24:27+00:00
I mean the statement is pretty clear

>Any computer that has this package installed or running should be considered fully compromised. All secrets and keys stored on that computer should be rotated immediately from a different computer. The package should be removed, but as full control of the computer may have been given to an outside entity, there is no guarantee that removing the package will remove all malicious software resulting from installing it.

It sounds like the package then somehow executes and invites other software onto the machine. If something else has executed then anything the executing user has access to is now compromised.
by ajross | 2025-09-08 21:25:07+00:00
It was a riff on the AFLAC duck from a few decades back, a similarly hated campaign that played everywhere and that we all survived just fine.

Maybe the humor was bad. But the point stands: advertising has been with us since the dawn of "media" and no one cares outside our oddball bubble. People sat through ads on their sitcoms in the 70's and they sit through the annoying insurance birds, and... who cares?

It's only here that people somehow believe that contra all evidence, somehow advertising on the internet is a unique affront to all that is holy. When... it's just ads!
by estimator7292 | 2025-09-08 21:25:09+00:00
The Egyptian alien engineer thing is mostly a meme, but it stems from the fact that Western Egyptologists can't get their heads out of their asses long enough to agree on how it was done. Plus the Egyptian government won't allow any kind of physical or non-physical investigations because it would conflict with Zahi Hawass's personal pet theories.

No technology was really lost, we just can't agree on how they stacked the stones into pyramids. The stonecutting technology they used is very well understood and we even have real actual tools used by the actual ancient Egyptian stonecutters and some of the tools used to manipulate and place stones.

There's also several incredibly solid theories on pyramid construction, but to verify them would require investigating the actual pyramids, which Hawass will not allow.
by kelnos | 2025-09-08 21:25:10+00:00
I don't have kids of my own, but I'm generally concerned about some of the advertising kids are exposed to these days (as seen through friends and family with kids). At the risk of viewing my own childhood with rose-tinted glasses, it seems much worse today. The main source of ads back then were TV and newspaper, and while neither were "perfect" at this, they both seemed to have much higher standards for what kinds of ads to allow than platforms do today.

Whenever I see my (9-year-old) nephew watching YouTube on their TV at home, I get a little horrified at some of the ads he's exposed to. But this has been normalized throughout his childhood, so it seems unremarkable to him, and his parents seem to be desensitized to it as well. I suppose some of this is bias on my part: I aggressively avoid exposing myself to advertising, using in-browser ad blocking, network-level ad-blocking, and OS-level DNS VPN-based ad-blocking on my phone. Whenever offered, I always pay for the service tier (like YouTube Premium) that removes ads. I get that this could get expensive real fast for a lot of people, and isn't feasible. (But I know a lot of people who don't even install browser ad-blockers, which is just baffling to me.)

But that's the big problem... people are being forced to choose between an uncomfortable level of financial expense, and paying for things with their attention, where that attention is being exploited with deeper and deeper psychological manipulation that has been fine-tuned over the span of decades. On the occasion I do see an ad (especially a video ad), my reaction to it is so viscerally negative that I mute audio and look away, even sometimes shutting it down entirely.
by brailsafe | 2025-09-08 21:25:51+00:00
> This has cost me a relationship. (it was long distance to be fair).

Tbh, (imho, having tried it) in normal circumstances it would be a miracle to make anything really work like that, but at present you're just fighting a losing, nearly irreconcilable battle, unless you're both wholly on the same page about infrequent synchronous communication.

If a relationship relies on immediate responses to async, unpredictable, text-based communication, and what you want is a sane lifestyle, it's going to be a tough situation.

I just tell people that need my attention how to get it. Call me if it's important and/or time sensitive, otherwise I'll just check when I check based on the implied nature of the platform. Instagram is super casual unimportant brainrot usually, Messenger for coordinating plans with older millennials and Gen X family, Whatsapp for younger millennials sometimes, SMS or RCS is slightly more important and I'll get visual but not physical or audible notifications. I make it clear that if it's a group chat, I'll turn notifications off unless I'm specifically tagged, or maybe check in once a week if it's for a specific purpose, but otherwise I hate them. Signal for some things that aren't time sensitive, no notifications, no read receipts on any platform.
by crabmusket | 2025-09-08 21:26:01+00:00
Glad to see someone else identify the anxiety at the root of the culture.

After an npm incident in 2020 I wrote up my thoughts. I argue that this anxiety is actually somewhat unique to JS which is why we don't see a similar culture in other languages ecosystems

https://crabmusket.net/java-scripts-ecosystem-is-uniquely-pa...

Basically, the sources of paranoia in the ecosystem are

1. Weak dynamic typing

2. Runtime (browser engineers) diversity and compatibility issues

3. Bundle size (the "physics" of code on a website)

In combination these three things have made JS's ecosystem really psychologically reliant on other people's code.
by macNchz | 2025-09-08 21:26:03+00:00
I find that regular wilderness backpacking trips in places without cell service accomplish this kind of reset in a fun, social (bring friends!) way that provides plenty of exercise and fresh air, with the added bonus of being a reasonably "normal" explanation/antidote to the social pressure of those "you're doing what??? I need to be able to reach you!"-type conversations.

There's the added bonus that being fully out of cell service effectively removes the ability to cheat altogether, though it seems inevitable at this point that satellite data will be invading the backcountry before long.
by eesmith | 2025-09-08 21:27:16+00:00
That's because I was primarily responding to your statement "I can see an unpopular recommendation for child clothing at around that time". I don't believe there is a strong basis for that statement.

> None of your quotes are about masculinity

Not even "Pink, being most closely associated with bold, daring red, was considered more masculine, while blue (always an easier color to achieve in dyes) was softer and more subdued. Too, blue is the color associated with the Virgin Mary, and, in the Middle ages, the color of true lovers and faithful servants."?

It even uses the word "masculine".

frumplestlatz earlier wrote 'while women consistently express a preference for colors near pink' but as a counter-example, here's a report of a survey of criminal prostitutes in the late 1800s, at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/210911

"I asked them to name the color they preferred for gowns and trimmings. The result shows the following selections: blue, 23; pink, 8; red, 5; yellow, 5; lavender, 3; black, purple, and green, 2 each."

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/122241/1/Chelsea%2... informs me "Up until the mid-1700’s men and women shared the same color palette for clothing. At which point, men began wearing more subdued and darker colors, while women wore brighter, lighter, and clearer colors such as yellow shades", citing https://archive.org/details/evolutionoffashi0000hill/page/12... .

That links also points out, at https://archive.org/details/evolutionoffashi0000hill/page/74... that in the late 1500s, blue was "relegated to servants and the lower classes." Over the centuries the popular colors change. For example, https://archive.org/details/evolutionoffashi0000hill/page/14... says "Women universally wear white", 1805 George III.

I can find examples of men wearing pink, like George IV's "pink suits and white silk waistcoats" at https://archive.org/details/lordbeaconsfield0000geor/page/48... , but nothing pre-20th century which ties color choice to masculinity.

Nor anything which supports frumplestlatz' assertion that "men consistently express a preference for colors near blue, while women consistently express a preference for colors near pink", in anything predating the 20th century.
by riazrizvi | 2025-09-08 21:27:22+00:00
LLMs are trained to write out sequences of words by mapping previous writing. So it’s recycling prior statements. There is no process/tech/innovation to train a system to engage in the world and figure out how things work.

So AI is not yet coming for good writers, performers, journalists, programmers. It’s only lifting up the bottom rungs and giving them the ability to recycle, in the way that all the bad writers, performers, programmers do. That’s why it’s so tiring to consume - it’s the automation of hacks (in the writer, journalist sense).

It also has the side-effect of preventing AI users from improving their skills. At least prolific hacks eventually got good in the past. Instead with vibe coding, your skills atrophy, with prolonged use it turns you back into a hack. So no. Coding is not going to get automated. We’re at the point where a critical mass of people are beginning to see that AI is falling short of the promise.
by tonymet | 2025-09-08 21:27:30+00:00
once you understand git's data model (objects, refs, log + reflog) -- it becomes very intuitive.

git stores a snapshot of every commit along with the history (the DAG / log) of where that snapshot came from.

Merges are just tree traversals from one branch to another.

Once you understand the data model, the clumsy commands become a bit more intuitive.

Get really confident with stash, reset, reflog & rebase . Those commands let you revert and reassemble the log easily.

nuking .git and starting fresh is why people struggle with git. All of the power is in the reflog and the ability to manipulate & restore a healthy state at any time.
by themagician | 2025-09-08 21:27:31+00:00
Monopoly in charge of the world's video content shows users what is most profitable instead of what they want to see. "Content creators" suffer as a result. Brain rot content is real, it's profitable, and it's only going to get "worse".

Does anyone remember the internet before pop-up blockers? Like, right before. It felt like the same thing to me. The internet was infested with pop-ups and becoming borderline unusable, and then comes along the pop-up blocker (and other things, but I'm simplifying here) and there was a "golden age" which is now giving way to a new wave of advertising-based atrophy. Not sure what happens next.
by gingerBill | 2025-09-08 21:27:50+00:00
The title of the article comes from the direct words I said in the video, of which the article is effectively a polished transcription of.

Your "more balanced title" isn't even close to what I am saying. I am saying that Package Managers are just bad and should not be used. Not "remember to consider the costs". The net cost is bad for everyone, that's why I said "evil".
by michaelt | 2025-09-08 21:27:55+00:00
You make it sound like motorbike riders are practically unregulated, but in a sense it's the opposite.

A few decades ago, 125cc bikes were mostly for learners practising before taking their test. But successive governments have made it harder and harder to get a full license - so loads of riders just stay on learner bikes forever.

So the status quo is, in a sense, the result of very strict regulation.
by yibg | 2025-09-08 21:28:43+00:00
> Most people don't see themselves as destructive, they just have a very different view of what the right rules are and what ought to be done to progress things. That can appear destructive from the outside.

I think that's partly true. e.g. pro life vs pro choice I can see both sides pushing for what they think is right.

Some people though do bad things, knowing those things are bad. But they do it anyways because it benefits them. So maybe it's not seeing themselves as being "destructive" per se, but at least not caring about the negative consequences to others.
by mabster | 2025-09-08 21:28:43+00:00
Nice write up!

I've got a soroban but never got around to learning it. Definitely should pick that up again.

When I was at Uni (electrical engineering) I noticed that the Chinese students would reach for their calculator way less than western students and assumed that was because of the abacus.

Side note: they tried to shape a control theory subject (everyone was getting 100%) by disallowing calculators in tests. It was rough having to do things like long division for the first time in decades. Still everyone got 100% haha.