MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kulahan | 2025-09-24 19:28:34+00:00
Sure: https://www.nagb.gov/naep/mathematics.html

Additionally: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/

22% of 12th graders are considered proficient in Math. This means:

NAEP Basic - Apply single-step percentages to solve real-world problems.

NAEP Proficient - Analyze information to solve real-world problems with proportional reasoning.

NAEP Advanced - Solve multi-step, real-world problems using percentages.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-09-24 19:28:47+00:00
This is the most accurate non-fiction ("best history book") I have ever read, and I consume 70+ books annually. It's only a few dozen pages long (see link above for PDF).

By my grandfather's reading (~80yo), he began adulting during the chapter titled "Age of the Welfare State" (60s/70s/nam/80s) — but us Millenials I believe are truly in the last chapter: "Age of Decadence" .

As the old saying goes: It may not be the end of times... but intermission was A. LONG. TIME. AGO...
by saghm | 2025-09-24 19:29:23+00:00
If we're willing optimize for aesthetic over ability to help understand, I'll nominate demonstration via Hungarian Folk Dance[1] as a candidate for the best medium to depict sorting algorithms, which I first saw during a lecture years ago when the professor pulled up on of the videos to show us in class

[1]: quicksort is shown here, but the channel has plenty of others https://youtu.be/3San3uKKHgg
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-09-24 19:29:27+00:00
And what percentage of people will take them to court just to get them to refund their ticket?

Airlines have full time lawyers with nothing to do but push paper around.

Why are we making it harder for the consumer to resolve an issue when the flight is clearly cancelled?

They just want to force you into weird store-credit style refunds so that you cannot go to a competitor or choose not to travel.
by softwaredoug | 2025-09-24 19:29:53+00:00
Is there data to back this up? I'm skeptical.

I see all kinds of "small organizations" forming in Slack communities, subreddits, and other online spaces. Some might be described as influencer driven communities like substack. Or audiences of a specific podcast. And so on. It's almost never been easier to participate in one of these "organizations".

Even locally, where I live, the school board, city council, local advocacy groups, etc are heavily attended. We have a local group advocating for immigrant rights. Another YIMBY group. Another group that argues against the YIMBYs. PTA meetings. Another group that advocates for the homeless.

I'd say its true that many are in the "universe" of one political sphere (in my case left-leaning). But that does not mean they have been wholly subsumed by "The Left", they often disagree and fight against "Left" politicians. And often "The Left" is not a uniform thing in a city with differing interests and stakeholders.
by westurner | 2025-09-24 19:29:58+00:00
Energy is conserved (locally (*) eventually), but is there symmetry in or conservation of information?

Wave your hand in the water: is the information about the temporary fluidic disturbance gone? Does information about the splash in the water displace other information?

...

Postulated years ago a fundamental gbit; but they decided there that there could be no simultaneous encoding in a fundamental gbit.

"Existence of an information unit as a postulate of quantum theory" (2013) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1304884110 :

> Also, our postulates unveil some connections between physics and information that remain hidden in the standard postulates, thus supporting Wheeler’s hypothesis “it from bit.”

The amplituhedron folks likely have insight on quantum geometry: spacetime (and gravity) as emergent, and you don't have to do so many Feynman diagrams because the amplituhedron describes those relations too.

I don't know how fairly recent rejections of definite causal order affect conceptions of fundamental quantum information? (Goëdel did point such out in regards to GR)
Ask HN: Would you watch this alternate history TV series for the new Commodore?
by amichail | 2025-09-24 19:30:18+00:00
What if the new Commodore made a TV series — something in the style of Halt and Catch Fire and For All Mankind — that tells the story of Commodore in an alternate history where the company never collapsed?

The show would start in the 1980s, following Jack Tramiel, engineers, rivals, and the drama of the personal computer wars. Each season could cover a few years, with IBM, Apple, Microsoft, and Atari all showing up as real competitors.

Here’s the twist: whenever Commodore in the show launches a new computer in its alternate timeline, the real Commodore in 2025+ would actually release that same machine in real life. The fictional product launches and the real-world launches would line up, blurring the lines between story and reality.

It’d be both entertainment and branding — letting fans get emotionally invested in Commodore’s saga while also making the company’s real machines feel like artifacts from another timeline.

Would you watch a show like this?
by themafia | 2025-09-24 19:30:21+00:00
Their own words.

"Secret Service officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity"

Their only stated source is "USSS officials" who bafflingly demand "anonymity." I would expect the reporter to tell those /officials/ they need to allow a direct quote or to provide another source; otherwise, their information simply won't be printed.

It's the difference between being a blind mouthpiece and being a reporter.
by itsnowandnever | 2025-09-24 19:30:34+00:00
This blog was essentially my exact strategy over the last few turbulent years. I know it helped my people and I don't regret it. but, man, did it take a lot out of me. I've seen a quip out there before about the perfect recipe for burnout being the combination of high expectations with minimal empowerment to achieve those expectations. and this current market is burning leaders in this industry out like I haven't seen in 15 years.
by f_devd | 2025-09-24 19:30:42+00:00
> Anyone of age can make an anonymous age attribute faucet [1] for anyone to use. That it's not technically a bug doesn't make it any less trivial to circumvent. I wouldn't expect the public or even the Commission to make such a distinction. They'll clamor that the solution is broken and that it must be fixed, and at that point I expect the obfuscation and weakening of privacy features to start.

I can see this argument, but it has a few caveats:

- The 'faucet', providing infinite key material in an open proxy is also very vulnerable

- If the only attribute is age verification then uniqueness is not required; i.e. you can borrow the key of someone you trust and that should be fine.

- The unlinkability is a requirement from the law itself, i.e. the current implementation cannot be executed upon assuming rule of law holds
by roto | 2025-09-24 19:30:58+00:00
I have always found sublime to be the best at large files, well over 1gb. Since you mention bbedit, maybe this is some mac specific issue? I really don't know. But at least among people i know, opening large files has effectively become its main USP.

Should be noted that the linked post is almost 15 years old at this point too, so perhaps not the most up to date either.
by Lramseyer | 2025-09-24 19:31:00+00:00
Dating apps are a Skinner Box by nature. They give randomized reward in the form of likes and matches. If you're attractive, you're the product because you don't need premium service to get more dates.

Give me Yelp for date spots and take a cut of the ad revenue. That way, there's at least an incentive to get people to not ghost each other long enough to actually meet up for a date. Hopefully that will do some level of incentivizing human connection.
by superasn | 2025-09-24 19:31:56+00:00
I agree with this take, Product Hunt felt like it was chasing short term goals instead of building something sustainable They also allowed and sometimes encouraged behavior that undermined the quality of the site

The last time I used it one of the common hacks was adding 50 makers to a single app launch PH also openly condoned mass email blasts and tweets to drive votes which just rewarded whoever could push the hardest on promotion

In contrast Hacker News discourages asking people for upvotes and even treats it as a negative if you do That longterm focus on signal over hype is probably why HN still feels useful today while PH lost its way
by fxtentacle | 2025-09-24 19:32:01+00:00
This is massively counterproductive!

They add to the robots.txt file:

"As a condition of accessing this website, you agree to abide by the following content signals ..."

which means robot operators are now better off if they never download the robots.txt file, because then you know for sure that you won't accidentally encounter these conditions.

This creates a legal risk if you try to adhere to the robots.txt, so it'll make future AI bots less controllable and less restricted.
by coderintherye | 2025-09-24 19:32:44+00:00
Admittedly, more detail would be better, but this high-level stuff is mostly the level that engineering leaders are discussing this topic currently (and it is by far the most discussed topic).

They actually revelead an interesting tidbit where they are with AI adoption and how they are positioning it now to new hires, e.g. "we made AI fluency a baseline expectation for engineers by adding it to job descriptions and hiring expectations".

It seems inevitable now that engineering teams will demand AI fluency when hiring, cuious though what they are doing with their existing staff who refuse to adopt AI into their workflow. Curious also if they mandated it or relied solely on incentives to adopt.
by jama211 | 2025-09-24 19:33:08+00:00
This is entirely slack’s fault and this is awful and I do NOT give this advice with any intent to blame the victim, but in future information critical to your company or even just useful such as guides or documentation or anything are things you should store outside of slack or other saas. Even if they don’t rug pull you, they could go bankrupt as a company and shut down or something. You should always have a backup.
by Uehreka | 2025-09-24 19:33:24+00:00
That’s exactly what those guidelines say: https://www.nytimes.com/article/why-new-york-times-anonymous...

> What we consider before using anonymous sources:

> How do they know the information?

> What’s their motivation for telling us?

> Have they proved reliable in the past?

> Can we corroborate the information they provide?

> Because using anonymous sources puts great strain on our most valuable asset: our readers’ trust, the reporter and at least one editor is required to know the identity of the source. A senior newsroom editor must also approve the use of the information the source provides.

Is there a particular change you’re proposing?
by arbll | 2025-09-24 19:33:25+00:00
Chrome does not rely exclusively on V8's security or else it would routinely get exploited (See v8 CVEs if you don't believe me). The hard part of browser exploitation today is escaping from the os-level sandbox put on the processes that run each of your tabs.

Trusting Deno's sandboxing by itself isn't a great idea. An attacker only has to wait for the next V8 exploit to drop, probably a question of a few months at worse.

Now like I mentioned above it's probably ok in yt-dlp context, Google isn't going to target it with an exploit. It's still important that folks reading this don't takeaway "deno sandbox safe" and use it the next time they need to run user-supplied JS.
by jsheard | 2025-09-24 19:33:48+00:00
If nothing else, it might provide a more consistent way to signal to the crawlers which do respect robots.txt. For example Google, Bing and Apple already offer ways to signal that your site approves of search indexing but not training, but they each require a different non-standard signal for the same thing.

For the crawlers that ignore robots.txt nothing changes of course, and for the ones which claim to support a training opt-out you just have to take them at their word that it actually does anything.
by __float | 2025-09-24 19:34:09+00:00
That makes sense as a long-term goal, but if you're still in the earlier stages it's much more fun to learn a variety of words and focus on the most common ones. Get depth at first, and later you can fill in the holes with e.g. a cookbook.

I know you consider it pseudoscience to force creating your own cards, but I do find premade decks result in a lot more leeches. How do you avoid them when relying on these thousands of auto-generated cards?
by 0x457 | 2025-09-24 19:34:12+00:00
My homelab servers all have raidz out of 3 nvme drives for this reason: higher parallelism without loosing redundancy.

> I would have naively guessed an interesting caching system, and to some degree tiers of storage for hot vs cold objects.

Caching in this scenario usually done outside of S3 in something like Cloudfront
by graemep | 2025-09-24 19:34:13+00:00
Lots of countries have has similar goals and lofty promises in its constitution.

I take your argument at face value (in that I take it that you believe the EU has that goal at some level). I just to not expect it, as an organisation, to consistently promote that goal (for much the same reasons lots of countries fail to serve their citizens).

Profit making businesses have the explicit goal of making shareholders better off. Management usually choose to balance this against other goals (ethics, the good of wider society, their own interests...), just as the EU has the explicit aim you state, but, similarly, has other conflicting aims.
by juliobbv | 2025-09-24 19:34:56+00:00
> AVIF is better at low to medium quality, and JXL is better at medium to high quality.

BTW, this is no longer true. With the introduction of tune IQ (Image Quality) to libaom and SVT-AV1, AVIF can be competitive with (and oftentimes beat) JXL at the medium to high quality range (up to SSIMULACRA2 85). AVIF is also better than JPEG independently of the quality parameter.

JXL is still better for lossless and very-high quality lossy though (SSIMULACRA2 >90).
by CM30 | 2025-09-24 19:35:16+00:00
Let's not forget the frustrations of an online system disabling the ability to select anything other than 'all' the text in a paragraph/text area/whatever.

So many times I've needed simplify the data provided by an embed code or share link for some reason (usually a third party integration or API development), only to have found the site forcefully making me select way more than I ever needed to. It doesn't really change anything in the long run (since you can just copy it into any other text editor and get what you need there), but it's still an annoying extra step that shouldn't be needed nonetheless.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-24 19:35:27+00:00
I guess by "legacy public transportation systems" you're thinking buses?

GoA 4 trains exist today. GoA 3 is usually more practical and is widely used today. So Waymo would be very late to that and have all the wrong technology stack. But sure, there could be room for the Waymo Driver driving a bus, that may not make as much sense as you imagine but anything is possible.
by emeryberger | 2025-09-24 19:35:29+00:00
The Tor Project web site makes a bold claim to its users: "Tor Browser prevents someone watching your connection from knowing what websites you visit. All anyone monitoring your browsing habits can see is that you're using Tor." Don't misinterpret this claim. It's not true that Tor protects you against "anyone monitoring your browsing". On this web page, I provide you with the critical information missing from the Tor Project's website: if you estimate your adversary's resources in dollars, I'll estimated the probability that Tor will fail to protect you.

(web site by Brian Levine, Professor at UMass Amherst <https://www.cics.umass.edu/about/directory/brian-levine> and director of Rescue Lab <https://www.rescue-lab.org/>)
by sapphicsnail | 2025-09-24 19:35:50+00:00
> There are enough brain damaged people out there (and definitely on dating apps) that would file a baseless rape report for being stood up or lied to, so the bar should at least be with letting the police handle it.

Rape is underreported because this attitude is so prevalent. Reporting a rape is incredibly difficult and traumatizing and rarely leads to a conviction. It also exposes you to violence and harassment to the person who raped you in the first place.
by mothballed | 2025-09-24 19:36:06+00:00
You don't even have to be attractive. There is some dude in a slum in Manilla right now smoking a hand rolled cigarette between his unkept bearded lips, using his wrinkled face and cataract ridden eyes to squint at a screen to scam the next guy with his keyboard propped up on his oversized tummy. Meanwhile he has an image of a beautiful 20 year old Texas country girl on his profile and maybe even a Russian hooker on call for when he needs to make bait videos. And he probably gets 100x the interest of your 'legitimate' average male user.
by vrmiguel | 2025-09-24 19:36:27+00:00
> The attitude of Rust being bug-free is _insaaaane_.

Funny, because that's not anywhere close to what the comment you're replying to states.

They said `"Safety" is just a shorthand for "my program means what I say"`. That's a reasonable explanation: the code you wrote is not working exactly as you intended, due to some sort of unknown behavior.

The "bug" you're talking about would be the program doing exactly what you implemented, but what you implemented is wrong. The difference is so obvious that it's hard to think that you're engaging in a good faith argument.
by thegrimmest | 2025-09-24 19:36:30+00:00
> The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors

I'm not sure this is a universal definition. Some of us just want a state that maintains a monopoly on violence, and otherwise does not constrain peaceful actors. An administration of peaceful coexistence rather than a mandate for cooperation. While administrating the peace does require some absolute power, it is required narrowly, to prosecute true crime, defend from outside threats, and resolve disputes.
by marris | 2025-09-24 19:36:40+00:00
Not sure why this obvious fact is being down-voted. The comments above don't mention that the killer feature of private orgs is the ease of exit, and therefore, the enormous risk of failure. This remains the dominant feature of private orgs, even if we can argue about certain orgs on the margin. For every example of "users are locked into either the Apple or the Android phone platform", I can think of several crappy Google and Apple products which failed and were withdrawn from the market (e.g. Google Wave).

It is much easier to exit from or steer a private org. For example, it is very possible to run a company which caters to 10 percent of a consumer base by providing niche products which may be slightly more expensive. Those 10 percent will simply consume less of some other good. It is very difficult to do an analogous thing at the state level, because we generally don't get individual "ticket books" which we can "spend" on more of one state service vs. another. The democratic model is that you first get 50+ percent support and then your coalition decides how resources are allocated for almost everyone.
by chermi | 2025-09-24 19:38:15+00:00
Fair point, the first few gens weren't that expensive. And like I said I'm certain the scaling would've been discovered soon with some time lag. But the transformer paper was 2017, right? Just from a benefit -to- society perspective, assuming LLMs are a net positive in terms of productivity, perhaps reducing time to drug approval or improving government efficiency (1).. Isn't getting there just one year earlier worth it, if the gains really are that big? We could be talking lives saved via faster approvals or more efficient spending. My point is that a private company made it happen faster, as evidenced by them doing it first. A good thing sooner is valuable.

(1) I'm convinced at the very least LLMs can feasibly speed up paperwork.
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-24 19:38:51+00:00
Being unable to select text out of a link is absolutely infuriating when you want to just copy a piece of it, either because it's a reference number or something, or you want to translate it. Mobile is nearly impossible, and desktop is also fiddly in many cases.

Often when translating it's easier to just OCR the area with the dictionary app, which is madness when it started as text.
by 9rx | 2025-09-24 19:39:05+00:00
> But looking at reality, it seems like that limit is very high!

Is it? 40hrs is quite low by historical standards. 100 hours per week was the norm in the pre-industrial era, and 60+ hours per week was still typical during the Industrial Revolution.

Labour advocacy groups were promoting 40hrs, much like the four day workweek is today, for a long time, but 40hrs didn't actually became the norm until the Great Depression, where capping hours was a tool used to try and spread the work out amongst more workers to try and resolve the high unemployment problem.

> But if you go down to the lower rungs, people are more inclined to compare themselves with peers and tradeoff double hours for the next rung

While that certainly happens, it seems most people in the lower rungs are quite content to work 40 hours per week, even though working more would put them in a much better position. I dare say you even alluded to that when you chose 40 hours in your example.

It is not like 40hrs is the perfect tradeoff or something. As mentioned before, labour advocacy groups have already decided that 32hrs is even better. I expect many people end up working 40 hours just because "that's what you do" and never give it another thought.

> the reason you have dual income households is that they are richer than single income ones.

If we assume both participants work 40 hours per week then it is true that the same household would have less income if one party stopped accruing an income and all else remained equal. But that doesn't necessarily hold true once you start playing with other variables. A higher income party, for example, may enable the household to have a higher income if they work 60 hours per week while the other party takes care of other life responsibilities to enable those longer hours.

A dual income household isn't necessarily the most fruitful option. In fact, marriage — which, while declining, is still the case in most non-single households — assumes that a single income is the ideal option. It seems that "that's what you do" without any further thought is still the primary driving force.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-24 19:39:28+00:00
https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/the-walt-disney-company-rep...

Surely they can spend out of their $90B/year in annual profits. Certainly, companies need revenue to make new content, but they're also squeezing consumers for as much profit as possible.

Subscription Prices Gone Wild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45364292 - September 2025
by bdcravens | 2025-09-24 19:39:29+00:00
If you had told me Product Hunt was actually dead, I wouldn't know if the top of my head if you were telling the truth. I haven't paid attention to it in 6 or 7 years. At one point, I'd visit to find something new, useful, or cool. Over time I started seeing little more than tiny iterations on the trend of the moment, and never really found anything worth visiting.
by cyphar | 2025-09-24 19:39:32+00:00
TSAN is not perfect but Go has had built-in TSAN support for a very long time (go build -race).

Also, strictly speaking all Go programs are multithreaded. The inability to spawn a single-threaded Go program is actually a huge issue in some system tools like container runtimes and requires truly awful hacks to work around. (Before you ask, GOMAXPROCS=1 doesn't work.)