MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rickdeckard | 2025-09-29 14:53:51+00:00
Ah ok.

I understand that you found your perfect trade-off for sorting based on longer considerations. But it will be difficult to communicate such a concept to a user.

Applying partial rules to improve sorting in one direction is not a lossless activity, it makes the UX actually worse in other scenarios as the user is first guided to assume a certain behavior, but then learns that his expectation is broken in adjacent scenarios (Which is more or less the bottom-line of that article to begin with).

In the end it'll be just "another standard" for sorting [0]

[0] https://xkcd.com/927/
by russfink | 2025-09-29 14:54:06+00:00
Liability that one of them will don a Robert De Niro grin and say, “hey kid, wanna get out of here?” and the youth will oblige by lowering the roof on the GT and cranking up Deep Purple’s Highway Star as they peel rubber from beneath the pastel peach awning, thousands of foot pounds of torque expressing a shared joy in a cloud of smoke and a squeal of delight.
by xnx | 2025-09-29 14:54:16+00:00
It's such an interesting optimization problem. Maximizing annual production isn't the only goal. It's also about: never running out of power, having surplus power when useful, minimizing installation cost, minimizing maintenance cost, guarding against dust and hail, minimizing use of land, etc.

Approaches range from straight vertical to flat on the ground: https://erthos.com/earth-mount-solar/
by IAmBroom | 2025-09-29 14:54:17+00:00
I can attest. I've personally been shut out of two positions because I didn't say the "magic word" that the interviewer was looking for. In one instance, I kept using laymen's terms to describe an optical engineering process, because I knew they weren't optical engineers (far from it). They wanted me to say the precise technical phrase, but wouldn't explicitly ask that; they just kept asking questions around that phrase.

In another job where I was hired, I was tortured for over 10 minutes as one interviewer tried to get me to say the magic word. Fortunately, his manager was present, and shut down the questioning at that point. I never did learn what word the subordinate was trying to get me to say, but I was fully qualified for the job, and hired.
by WCSTombs | 2025-09-29 14:54:43+00:00
This is pure misinformation. First, a post on a social media site by the President has no force of law and does not "impose" anything. Second, the President cannot invent a new law and can only apply authorities given to him by existing laws. Unless he's talking about DVDs that are manufactured in other countries and shipped to the US, it's extremely unclear to me how this would be implemented using legal mechanisms that actually exist, and it seems extremely unlikely that it would pass Congress.
by burkaman | 2025-09-29 14:54:47+00:00
They literally just killed another journalist after torturing him for seven years https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turki_bin_Abdulaziz_al-Jasse...

Another murder last month, this one they killed for the crimes of attending protests and funerals: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde23/0239/2025/en/

Two years ago they sentenced this man to death because he tweeted something they didn't like to less than ten followers: https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-v...
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-09-29 14:54:52+00:00
When I bought an ipad a few years back, it had been at least 10 years since I was on the ios ecosystem(last iphone was the 3gs). I was shocked how hard it was to find what I was looking for. Instead of the Playstore minefield of free spyware apps, you now have cheap knockoffs, likely still spyware, but now everything costs $5 dollars.

I think there's two different sets of perverse incentives. On the apple side, it's how to trick you into a "small" purchase of 5 dollars. It's just a cup of coffee man, c'mon just a coffee. Essentially banking on some user will just add it to their apple tab for convenience.

On the android side, the expectation is primarily free apps, with paid generally being a premium app. There are some free apps that just do what they say, typically small side hustles from solo devs banking on some add revenue with the option to upgrade(Shout out to GoneMadMusicPlayer, paid for it back in 2013 and the devi is still out there supporting and responding to emails). If they're not that, they'll be spyware infested trap holes.

Fdroid is typically where I go when I'm looking for an app with a unix philosophy. Just do one thing simply. Voice recorder, guitar tuner, etc.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-29 14:54:59+00:00
This is a popular misquote from the Zen of Python. The actual quote is “There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.”

The misquote shifts the emphasis to uniqueness rather than having an obvious way to accomplish goals, and is probably a result of people disliking the “There is more than one way to do it” adage of Perl (and embraced by the Ruby community) looking to the Zen to find a banner for their opposing camp.
by dcminter | 2025-09-29 14:55:20+00:00
> Using its influence for political power, that gave it short term power but destroyed it long term.

I'm no fan of organised religion, but this is a pretty wild take to me. "The church" has been around for the best part of 2000 years. It's been wildly political for most if not all of that. It doesn't show much sign of disappearing any time soon.
by chpatrick | 2025-09-29 14:55:31+00:00
For the kind of work I'm using Python for (computer vision, ML), not really. The ecosystem isn't there and even when it's possible it would be much less productive for very little gain. Typed Python actually works quite well in my experience. We do use C++ for some hand-written things that need to be fast or use libraries like CGAL, but it has a lot of disadvantages like the lack of a REPL, slow compile times and bad error messages.
by _kidlike | 2025-09-29 14:55:46+00:00
your way of thinking shows clearly your lack of comprehension on the subject... you didn't experience the world before the internet, so you think that the internet is "part of life". Let me tell you as someone that helped build it, that it isn't part of life. It's something that we made up, like our ancestors build the railways. Those were neither part of life. Unike the addiction to social media that was carefully engineered by top class psychologists, without anyone realizing. That shouldn't be part of life, but here we are :(
by klustregrif | 2025-09-29 14:56:33+00:00
I honestly don’t know if you are trying to bait or just completely missed the context of that part of TFA. But in either case here is the rest of TFA on that point:

To pay our team … which initially linked to a list of the board members without any explanation of how the money was being allocated. This resulted in a nonzero number of donors believing they were funding the work of people like Steve Klabnik, Aaron Patterson, and Sarah Mei, when in fact only Andre was being paid at the time.
by GratiaTerra | 2025-09-29 14:56:33+00:00
Attending church can have negative consequences because religion promotes belief in unprovable claims, building life on a false premise: since the central claim isn’t true, the practices and rules around it may seem hollow or misleading.

Religion discourages critical thinking, consumes time and money, enforces conformity through social pressure, and expose individuals to guilt, shame, or manipulation by institutions with histories of abuse or corruption.
by no_wizard | 2025-09-29 14:56:49+00:00
We have a vendors package in our monorepo to centralize both tracking and versioning of our production dependencies on the frontend.

We pre build the dependencies and upload them to a CDN as well, which we can then at build replace the import URLs with the stable CDN ones, it works really well. We have thin wrappers around each dependency to give a stable interface as well.

For what backend TypeScript projects we do have we created typed wrappers around the server framework instead of pre-building because those both deploy differently and have different constraints but this still lets us track and upgrade versions centrally while keeping APIs stable.

Using this approach has had a positive impact on performance across the board as we naturally strive to keep our dependency count low because the maintenance burden is more obvious
by wat10000 | 2025-09-29 14:56:51+00:00
"Why does everybody have such a low opinion of this oppressive theocracy?" Gee, it's such a mystery.

Remember when the current leader of Saudi Arabia lured a Washington Post journalist into a Saudi consulate, had him tortured to death, and cut into pieces to dispose of the evidence? What a bunch of merry pranksters. We really should lighten up.
by blackhaj7 | 2025-09-29 14:57:17+00:00
I was hesitant to use Grok but have actually found it to be excellent and it has totally replaced ChatGPT for me now.

The biggest difference is that it isn’t sycophantic and will often tell me I am wrong when I am. This makes way more of a difference than I thought it would as I feel I can trust the results more (perhaps naively)
by dylan604 | 2025-09-29 14:57:39+00:00
If bifacial panels are made so each side is the same making orientation not an issue, then sure, hahahaha (not really. it's a lame joke). If there is a back side, then you absolutely need to reverse the orientation depending on hemisphere. It would be better stated that they need to be pointed towards the equator. If these are literally reversible, it seems like wasted money to me as one side will never produce as much as the reverse does.
by ascendantlogic | 2025-09-29 14:57:48+00:00
Sure, everyone ends up having a dim perspective on what they manage usually. But this was especially noticeable as he explained to me how many incidents they'd have daily, what their on-call was like, etc. In an world full of castles built with toothpicks and elmers glue this came off like it was built with wet cardboard and chewing gum.
by hk1337 | 2025-09-29 14:57:59+00:00
There's several caveats to this but generally it seems silly to me to worry about people posting pictures with you in it. It seems a bit selfish to me to be concerned about "your image" being out in public instead of living in the moment.

I think though, with the internet and social media came 2-3 generations that really wanted to share what was going on in their lives with other people and with that came harsh resistance to even being in the background of someone's picture.

I thought this post was going to be about not wanting to share their hobby in a blog, pictures, or video form. This is something I have struggled with, because I would like to get started with blogging and a podcast but I have held back because a lot of people are so mean and harsh with their replies and I tend to take things so personally that it really hurts and keeps me from doing it.
by jader201 | 2025-09-29 14:58:14+00:00
> I may spend more time playing something with Atari 2600 graphics, and enticing gameplay than caring about latest COD.

The first good console for me was the NES. I enjoyed the Atari 2600, but only because it was the best at that time. But I can still enjoy a good NES game.

There aren’t many games on the Atari 2600 that I would still consider fun today. Maybe not necessarily because of graphics, but the graphics were pretty bad too.

It’s interesting that most modern retro-style games seem to keep a higher color and resolution than even the last great 2D generation (SNES/Genesis).

There are some games that hold try to that generation’s specs, though, but I don’t see many go as far back as the NES (and especially not the 2600).

There’s a small niche of people that make/have made modern NES games (actual cartridges for the actual console or remakes of the console), and those that play them, but I’m not aware of any super popular ones. If anybody’s aware of any, let me know!
by meowface | 2025-09-29 14:58:26+00:00
For what it's worth, barring that week or two where it parroted Nazi talking points, after community notes Grok may be the best thing to happen to the Twitter information ecosystem. The majority of its use in ideological contexts is effective debunking of right-wing conspiracy theories. Trumpists and neo-Nazis constantly argue with it and say it's compromised, and I have seen it sway some conspiracy theorists. You can see many examples here: https://reddit.com/r/grokvsmaga/

I detest Elon and the fact that Twitter is now teeming with neo-Nazis and other nutjobs, but contrary to popular belief Grok has actually been an incredible counterweight to both.
by bilbo0s | 2025-09-29 14:58:53+00:00
Fees mean very little.

Go for the jugular. Impact the career of people putting out substandard papers.

Come up with a score for "citation strength" or something.

Any given bad actor with too many substandard papers to his/her credit begins to negatively impact the "citation strength" of any paper on which they are a co-author. Maybe even negatively impacting the "citation strength" of papers that even cite papers authored or co-authored by the bad actor in question?

If, say, the major journals had a system like this in place, you'd see everyone perk up and get a whole lot less careless.
by k1rd | 2025-09-29 14:58:55+00:00
I started dabbling in web game design as a fun project when all the LLM assisted tools came out because the friction in not knowing threejs and JavaScript was mostly gone. I built a small sailing game called vibesail.com that works on the browser for free.

This project with this tiny planet is amazing. So well designed, such a nice cute little world. Makes me want to cry.

I am so far away...
by elevation | 2025-09-29 14:59:00+00:00
Several FS problems that are difficult to fix with incremental changes to legacy code bases:

* inotify implementation is insufficiently atomic, so event subscribers can fail to receive notifications under certain conditions.

* License/patent encumbrance prevents modern operating systems from implementing/distributing a common next-gen FS.

* ZFS has native encryption in theory but it was bolted on later and has numerous buggy interactions the powerful zfs send/recv.

* ZFS native encryption is architecturally incapable of protecting metadata like filenames.

There is lots of room for innovation, and with modern tools it shouldn't take decades to build a production-ready driver for any one ISA (presumable x86_64.) If this project wants to pilot a superior option, I'm all for it!
Show HN: AI News app to fight misinformation
by Swapnil019 | 2025-09-29 14:59:03+00:00
The Problem:

Social media platforms such as X, Facebook, and Reddit have become the primary news sources for most individuals. These platforms are designed to maximize engagement and provide information that reinforces existing biases. The mass adoption of these platforms has contributed to highly polarized societies and widespread misinformation and hate.

Drooid’s Approach:

Drooid tackles misinformation and bias by providing all sides of news stories. It gathers articles from various journalistic sources, processes them, and then generates short news summaries, around 60 words, which cover all sides, left, right, and center. Whenever possible, Drooid provides a short historical context with them.

To give the complete picture faster, Drooid avoids overwhelming with excessive information. However, there is an In-depth news analysis feature to help you understand in detail "what exactly happened," "how different stakeholders are affected," "how they reacted," and "how various news reports contradict each other," and a lot more.

On Drooid, you’re not just a passive reader; you can comment, share how you feel, and add context. Every comment appears in a community feed. You can read others' comments on news stories. With this, news becomes humane, not just facts and reports.

For full transparency, every summary links back to the original articles. Making it easy to read and share original articles. It serves two purposes: readers get to know where the information is coming from, and publishers receive the traffic.
by card_zero | 2025-09-29 14:59:23+00:00
Or look at newsreels, or news reports from ... any time up to the 2010s. Obviously people's faces weren't blurred before we had the tech to do it. It's some entirely new, modern prissiness. It screws up the documenting of social history when you can't see any faces. There's been an internet fad for restored film of street scenes from 1915 or so: imagine if all the faces were blurred to protect the privacy of people who no longer care, that would suck.
by chubot | 2025-09-29 14:59:28+00:00
I worked there too (2002-2004), but didn't that all happen when the founder Trip Hawkins was there? It looks like he left in 1991

I don't think you can meaningfully call EA the same company -- it's more like a different company with the same name, and doesn't deserve respect for its past achievements

By the time I was there, over 20 years ago now, the management was already shitty. The people were great, but the management took advantage of employees' love for games. (I was part of the "EA Spouse" settlement)

---

In fact I now remember an utterly bizarre experience when I was an intern at EA. The CFO spoke in front of 20 interns, and reminded us that our jobs was to make the stock price go up. Like whenever you do anything, you should think about the stock price as your ultimate goal. So the company isn't really about making games?

I mean I can appreciate his honesty, compared to later big tech "make the world a better place" slogans, while also just trying to make the number go up

But it's a weird thing to say to a bunch of 22 year olds, since they have little influence on the stock price, other than trying to increase their knowledge of the craft

There were a number of other shady characters in EA management. They were often brought in from outside

Even though I criticized "don't be evil", I have to say that by and large Google management was much more competent, and they came off as kinder, even though the company changed eventually too

---

I do think it has to do with whether the founder still leads the company -- there has to be someone mission-driven, not just money-driven

I think Trip Hawkins was mission-driven. Larry Page was to an extent, but I think he got sick of managing the company, so he let the optimizers take over

And private equity are almost universally short-term optimizers, in favor of themselves and against customers, which tends to ruin the company in the long term. So I see this as a continuation of a multi-decade trend with EA.

Though I'd be interested in any counterexamples, i.e. private equity that actually made the company better in the long term
by lkey | 2025-09-29 14:59:41+00:00
You've identified the problem, but not the solution. We must make it illegal for corpos to do labour exploitation in this way and then enforce that law for immigrants and native workers alike. Immigration is good. Creating a two-tiered job market is not. If you just end H1Bs, then many of these jobs will move permanently overseas, there won't be a magical moment of restitution for the aggrieved American tech worker. Unionize if you want to actually make things change for the better for all workers in your industry. You can't post your way out of this.
by superkuh | 2025-09-29 14:59:43+00:00
Self signed certs are the standard for mailservers and work just fine as they have for the last 25 years.

Just like self-signed certs worked for 20 years until the megacorps decided to break people's browsers because only their for-profit use cases matter. You might not remember, but random self signed certs worked for a long, long time. I use them. And their purpose is as a speed bump against massive passive surveillance, something that still works. TOFU works. ID isn't actually needed for most personal use cases on the web. That's a corporate thing. HTTP+HTTPS (self signed) is the perfect combo for human person use cases. And much more robust than HTTPS only which will break within a year or two left unwatched by human eyes.

The misunderstanding Chrome and it's followers (like firefox) removed was that they were for anything except corporate use cases.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-29 14:59:45+00:00
You could port as much as what was already on Plan 9, so same restrictions apply as UNIX to Plan 9.

The C compiler is there, the same way as in Plan 9, Inferno is the evolution of Plan 9, in one way it was Bell Labs response to Java, in other way it was another take to what went wrong in Plan 9 like the failure to design Alef to be usable.

Naturally Limbo was prefered as the main userspace language, from safety and usability point of view.
by griffzhowl | 2025-09-29 14:59:48+00:00
Nice observation but it just illustrates what the GP is saying: the basic grammar is English while a huge proportion of the vocabulary comes from French. If you remove the grammatical words from the English selection you made, there's hardly anything left.

> If you're listening to someone speak English, knowing French is unlikely to be worth much.

It can help a lot when learning because of the huge vocabulary overlap, e.g. more or less every word ending with -tion, you just learn to pronounce it differently
by Herring | 2025-09-29 15:00:08+00:00
It's quite a rare thing to die by choking. It just doesn't feel like it, which is where mindfulness can help. You do more dangerous things every day like walking (falls) and driving, eating (obesity), and brushing your teeth (gum disease), so if you want to work on prevention it's better to have a head that correctly assesses risk and spends your limited time/money/effort optimally.
by throwaway894345 | 2025-09-29 15:01:12+00:00
> Kinda like how expensive healthcare is since it is paid for by insurance.

This seems different. A healthcare consumer (in the US) is overpaying in large part because (1) they need the coverage (2) they lack the expertise to distinguish between offerings and (3) there simply aren't more affordable offerings.

Single payer healthcare systems feature significantly lower costs and better quality despite that the payer is not the consumer.
by byronic | 2025-09-29 15:01:23+00:00
Not referencing the Saudi Arabia portion here specifically but LBOs as documented in the book Barbarians at the Gate (covers Nabisco/RJR tobacco) gives me basically zero hope for the future of EA. EA was already rabid cost-cutters and RIF specialists, and they won the most hated company award for however many consecutive years for a reason. Giving them crushing debt to go along with their propensity to give large executive bonuses and stomp their workforce is not a good recipe long-term
by damnesian | 2025-09-29 15:02:09+00:00
I am attracted to the design of books' covers, first, in used bookstores. I recently picked up an anthology of short stories by Bernard Malamoud (if his name sounds vaguely familiar, he wrote the story upon which the Robert Redford film "The Natural" was based), in a simply but beautifully bound book published in 1953. His works were published in the Atlantic and New Yorker and muliple other periodicals I'd never heard of or had forgotten. His language is absolutely beautiful. Expressive, yet economical. Malamoud was a man who thought about every word (as one would anyway, writing for periodicals), and at every phrase and clause, his work shows it. Reading this collection of short stories, unlike a lot of the mangled prose that passes for fiction nowadays, my mind felt like a hot knife slicing through butter. It has been years since I devoured a book in a single evening.

I mourn the death of this kind of writing. It's utterly unique but very accessible, though recognizing the economy and perfection of certain word choices requires some prior experience with reading truly good material. That is in shorter and shorter supply as time goes by.

And now I fear it will not only disappear altogether, cleverness of the ideas will fall out of fashion in favor of the mediocre sameness that will plague all writing soon.