MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by manquer | 2025-09-23 00:06:11+00:00
Lets imagine it is 1990 and the tool is e-mail over snail mail. Would you want leadership of a company to allow every employee to find out on their own if email is better way to communicate despite the spam, impersonal nature, security and myriad other issues that patently exist to this day ? or allow exceptions if an employee insists (or even shows) how snail is better for them?

It is hardly feasible for an organization to budget time for replicating and validating results, form their own conclusions, for any employee form who wishes to question the effectiveness of the tool or the manner of deployment.

Presumably the organization has done that validation with reasonably sized sample of similar roles over significant period of time. It doesn't matter though, it would be also sound reasoning for leadership to take a strategic call even when such tests are not conducted or not applicable.

There are costs and time associated with accurate validation which they are unable / unwilling to wait or even pay for, even if they wish to. The competition is moving faster and not waiting, so deploying now rather than wait and validate is not necessarily even a poor decision.

---

Having said that, they can articulate their intent better than "write about how it made you more productive", by adding more description along the lines of "if not then explain all the things you have tried to try and adopt the tool and what and how it did not go well for you/ your role"

Typically well structured organizations with in-house I/O psychologists would add this kind of additional language in the feedback tooling, line managers may not be as well trained to articulate it in informal conversations, which is whole different kind of problem.
by zdw | 2025-09-23 00:06:11+00:00
Back around 2000, I bought a Honda Civic, and in buying insurance the VIN number was entered wrong by the insurance company employee - had a 1 instead of a 7 or something, due to the handwritten process in use at the time.

A few years later, after dutifully paying my insurance, but moving a few times for school the registration had lapsed and I got pulled over. They ended up taking the license plate because of this, that my car was "uninsured", and apparently I was paying for nothing for the last few years..

I cleared up the registration the next day and the insurance as well, but a few weeks later had to go to court to clear up the ticket. The judge asked me "Why didn't you check that the numbers matched on the insurance forms?", to which I replied "Did you check this with the last car you insured?". They let me off.

This is all to say, how is it possible that someone got $600k fine for a mistake that is obviously not the fault of the buyer?
by jacobr1 | 2025-09-23 00:06:44+00:00
On a related note, we have a bunch of replication failures in education for selection effects reasons. It turns if you have a highly motivated staff and engaged parents - pretty much every flavor of educational approach has a positive impact. When you try the same thing with an overworked and demotivated staff, unengaged parents, and with non-selective student populations that have behavior issues or other concerns ... most methods fall apart. And some of the approaches might even work, presuming similar conditions.

Getting policy right under adversarial conditions is really hard - even harder than the already hard problem of identifying and testing good policy.
by tempestn | 2025-09-23 00:06:53+00:00
Those are great points. As well as backing up facts with references, I would add, don't state an opinion without facts and reasoning to back it up.

And I agree that without doing these things, some opinions are more likely to draw down-votes than others. TBH I indeed probably am more likely to down-vote a badly made point if it's one with which I disagree. But really, everyone should be doing these things, regardless of karma concerns.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-23 00:07:11+00:00
I've never understood the not allowing felons to vote, even while incarcerated. Does serving time really mean you should not get the same say in leaders as everyone else? As if being incarcerated isn't punishment enough, but disenfranchising on top just seems over the top.

Many people live in an area, but keep their voting registration in another. They are even able to vote without having to return to their registered polling place. Allowing inmates to vote could just as easily be handled the same way.
by nradov | 2025-09-23 00:07:21+00:00
It's a sad situation and really shows our collective failure to build enough housing. But in articles about the financial struggles of single parents, why do journalists frequently not report anything about child support payments? The reader is left to wonder whether the father of the Stitt children is paying his share, or dead, or a deadbeat. In a number of cases I know about the custodial parent didn't even bother to pursue a legal support order. Even a few hundred dollars per month can make a huge difference in paying rent. I understand that navigating the legal system is difficult and many single parents are overwhelmed, but most counties have social workers or legal aid agencies that will help with court filings and collections.
by the_gastropod | 2025-09-23 00:07:30+00:00
Respectfully, I disagree. It's kind of funny. But it is frightening because a not insignificant number of people take him seriously. I know multiple people who took Ivermectin for Covid during his first presidency.

The “terrorist” designation of drug cartels is the excuse they’re using (and currently getting away with) for the 4 boats they’ve bombed into oblivion in the Caribbean.

It’s kind of funny in its stupidity. But it’s also frightening how impactful that stupidity has been.
by 999900000999 | 2025-09-23 00:07:36+00:00
>She house sat for a family member to get her finances back in order, but she found it difficult to afford a rental apartment on the $58,000 a year she gets in disability and Social Security payments.

It's not for everyone, but that's more than enough to retire in much of the world. You can get a very nice apartment in much of Seoul for around 700$.

Food and healthcare is going to be better too.
by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | 2025-09-23 00:07:46+00:00
Do we have conclusive evidence that causality isn’t actually reversed here in a large percentage of cases?

As in, a certain % of the population is, very unfortunately and not of their own volition, born with innate antisocial traits. They just happened to roll a 1 at birth on many attributes at once, and are stuck with it for life. Assuming humans are not a blank slate, many said humans will not be re-trainable to be pro-social. They will cause mayhem and misery to those around them unless isolated, humanely, with dignity and compassion, from the rest of society. Given a large enough of a denominator, that’s potentially millions of people.

And fair point around social ties being important here, I wonder what percentage of imprisonment that would prevent.
by carlosjobim | 2025-09-23 00:08:18+00:00
A question: Why do musicians put their music on Spotify if they make so little of it.

If the answer is that it's the labels who owns the rights and puts the music there, then the next question is why do the labels do it if Spotify pays so little.

If the answer is that Spotify pays decently to the labels, then isn't all of this just the labels exploiting the artists as usual?
by snailmailman | 2025-09-23 00:09:28+00:00
I don’t have prime, but will occasionally make a purchase on Amazon. Any time I do, I have to both click past a “no, I don’t want to start a prime trial, I just want to purchase something” and down in shipping options, mixed in with the shipping options is a “tomorrow+start a prime trial” option that will sign you up for a subscription. There’s also sometimes a “sign up for an Amazon credit card” promo mixed in, so you have to click past several unwanted things to get to the cart.

Although the default shipping is so bad sometimes I’m tempted to start the trial. I have something in my cart right now that has a shipping window a full month out. But if I start my prime trial they claim it gets here tomorrow? That has to just straight up be a lie right? With shipping that late I assume they don’t have the product locally- Or do non-prime members actually get that screwed on shipping?
by jacobr1 | 2025-09-23 00:10:02+00:00
There seems to be a presumption that private prisons are widespread. And while not rare, they are only 8% of prisons. There is widespread use of profit-seeking vendors like food suppliers or phone companies though.

I only bring this up because it seems like the mental model most people have is that 50--90% of prisons are private - mainly because it gets discussed so much. But the problems with prisons by-and-large involve government administration, not for-profit companies running the amok (despite that also happening in a much smaller number of cases).
by k33n | 2025-09-23 00:10:03+00:00
1. Domestic terrorist organization specifically is not a thing under US law, that is true. But domestic terrorism is, and we do have RICO statutes. (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47885)

2. Not incoherent. Seems pretty specific: All relevant executive departments and agencies shall utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations — especially those involving terrorist actions — conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa, or for which Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa provided material support, including necessary investigatory and prosecutorial actions against those who fund such operations.
by 827a | 2025-09-23 00:10:07+00:00
As someone who grew up in northern Indiana; 100%. Northern and middle-Indiana are pretty culturally identical, alongside southern Michigan, most of illinois, western Ohio, then extending further into e.g. southern Wisconsin and Iowa.

But southern Indiana is very different. Definitely more similar to Kentucky & Cincinatti-area southern Ohio. You start to get "twangs" of Southern Americana as you approach the Ohio River Valley, which are basically non-existent in northern Indiana. Something about the air is different.

The biggest cultural shock people not from the midwest, and even people from the midwest, often experience about the area is IME northern mainland/non-UP Michigan. Its a truly unique region that is dissimilar to almost anywhere else I've visited; like mixing the cultures of the New England coast with rural farms.
by gus_massa | 2025-09-23 00:10:18+00:00
> The post appears to be signed as "MINASWAN", a well know pseudonym for Yukihiro Matsumoto, the chief designer of the Ruby programming language.

From https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN

> Initialism of Matz is nice and so we are nice: a motto of the Ruby programming language community, in reference to the demeanor of Yukihiro Matsumoto (nicknamed Matz) [...].
by nice_byte | 2025-09-23 00:10:28+00:00
it is not edgy whatsoever. it reflects the actual reality on the ground.

nobody goes to school to learn how to use git or how to write unit tests. it's not something that needs to be actively "learned", you'll just absorb it eventually because you can't escape it.

The more interesting and important things you will never "just absorb", you actually have to make a conscious effort to engage with them.
by BjoernKW | 2025-09-23 00:10:47+00:00
> "This person must have extraordinary grit and determination!" Because when a criminal gets out of prison, the entire system and the entire society is set up to try to oppose his rehabilitation and get him back into prison. Overcoming this active hostility must take a remarkable person.

This is precisely the story of Les Misérables - that remarkable person being Jean Valjean.
by nessus42 | 2025-09-23 00:11:03+00:00
> At which point the computer dutifully saved as much as it could, before running out of disk space, informed via a text response of my poor choice in the real world, and left me with nothing.

Wow, that sucks!

When I was a kid, I had an 8k Commodore PET. I wrote a text adventure game for it, but I ran out of RAM after implementing the parser, inventory, and three rooms.

Well, it worked, but there wasn't much to do, other than follow the Wumpus around....
by Smeevy | 2025-09-23 00:12:04+00:00
1-2 billion dollars? Over 2 weeks across 20 states? That's horrible.

January 6th damage was estimated at $2.7 billion dollars by the GAO. That riot (more of an attempted coup) actually was coordinated by actual, tangible right wing extremist groups rather than the shadowy "Antifa" fiction that hides underneath all of your beds.

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-106625.pdf

>It is riots like those mentioned that I presume this executive order is targeting.

You presume? This administration has lost the benefit of any doubt. This is a cabal of shameless liars and they should be denounced at every turn.

This is yet another transparent attempt to circumvent basic American rights and you're defending it like I said something mean about your local sports team.
by hbn | 2025-09-23 00:12:17+00:00
You can also just tell them to get an M2 MacBook Air for $800. You'll have to do near zero troubleshooting, it'll last them the better part of a decade, they get unmatched battery life and hardware reliability, and if they do run into issues they'll have top-of-its-class support from Apple.

I know Linux guys don't mind putting up with the Linux experience but if your family is trusting you as "the techie," you'd be doing them a huge favor by not making them put up with that stuff.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-23 00:12:28+00:00
> Lenses: solve a problem elegantly (if you can hide the boilerplate) but inefficiently. A self caused problem by having extremely nested records. How did you get to a point where you have a structure that's hard to play with?

I see the value of lenses from a different perspective, in that they can generalize algorithms by abstracting property position within an AST such that manipulation does not require ad hoc polymorphism. For example, if there exists an algorithm which calculates the subtotal of a collection of product line items, lenses can be used to enable its use with both a "wish list" and a "purchase order."

Another thing they cleanly solve is properly representing a property value change with copy-on-write types. This can get really ugly without lenses in some languages.

I respect your take on them though and agree their definitions can be cumbersome if having to be done manually.
by nilkn | 2025-09-23 00:13:22+00:00
I know you don't want to hear this, but I also know you know this is true: you would genuinely need to look at the full dataset that team collected to draw any meaningful conclusion here. Your single example means pretty much nothing in terms of whether the tool makes sense at large scale. Not a single tool or technology exists in this entire field that never fails or has issues. You could just as well argue that because you read something wrong on Google or Stack Overflow that those tools should be banned or discouraged, yet that is clearly false.

That said, I don't agree with or advocate the specific rollout methodology your company is using and agree that it feels more abusive and adversarial than helpful. That approach will certainly risk backfiring, even if they aren't wrong about the large-scale usefulness of the tools.

What you're experiencing is perhaps more poor change management than it is a fundamentally bad call about a toolset or technology. They are almost certainly right at scale more than they are wrong; what they're struggling with is how to rapidly re-skill their employee population when it contains many people resistant to change at this scale and pace.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-23 00:13:46+00:00
That's what I don't understand. How can a high-up executive at Facebook be living paycheck-to-paycheck?

If I made, say, $300K/yr and was living paycheck-to-paycheck with zero savings after many years with the company, I'd say I was making highly irresponsible spending choices.

And she had a husband too, who sounds like he was working.

So something's just not adding up. It doesn't make any sense that a director-level executive at Facebook is 1-3 months away from "poverty".
by jacobr1 | 2025-09-23 00:14:08+00:00
The prison could, for grift reasons. They can undercut competition because their costs are lower. If a union, or even a market-rate shop needs to pay, say, $20-hour for labor, and the prison can pay $1-hour (or day) they can charge much less, and then pocket the difference. Their advantage isn't a higher quality product just a cheaper one.
by defatigable | 2025-09-23 00:15:10+00:00
This matches my experience exactly. #3 is the one I've found most surprising, and it can work outside the context of just analyzing your own code. For example I found a case where an automated system we use started failing due to syntax changes, despite no code changes on our part. I gave Claude the error message and the context that we had made no code changes, and it immediately and correctly identified the root cause as a version bump from an unpinned dependency (whoops) that introduced breaking syntax changes. The version bump had happened four hours prior.

Could I have found this bug as quickly as Claude? Sure, in retrospect the cause seems quite obvious. But I could just as easily rabbit holed myself looking somewhere else, or taken a while to figure out exactly which dependency caused the issue.

It's definitely the case that you cannot blindly accept the LLM's output, you have to treat it as a partner and often guide it towards better solutions. But it absolutely can improve your productivity.
by cyberax | 2025-09-23 00:16:20+00:00
We have a local-first app. Our approach?

Just ignore the conflicts. The last change wins.

No, really. In practice for most cases the conflicts are either trivial, or impossible. Trivial conflicts like two people modifying the same note are trivial for users, once you have a simple audit log.

And impossible conflicts are impossible to solve automatically anyway and require business processes around them. Example: two people starting to work on the same task in an offline-enabled task tracker.
by privatelypublic | 2025-09-23 00:16:26+00:00
And the inexperienced. I got hyped over golang a while back because of go routines. Then I discovered any remotely recent .net version already had what I needed. (I'm a c# dev by default)

Python makes me want to pull my hair out though. Full blown virtual machines make running it tolerable, but the language's inconsistencies... though, I keep trying because I'm hoping theres patterns I don't see.
by srameshc | 2025-09-23 00:17:17+00:00
If you have ever had to use gRPC & web, then you will know how painful Protobuf is to make it work on the web. I love the simplicity of Cap'n Web https://capnproto.org/language.html , hopefully this will lead us to better and easier RPC.

Update: Unlike Cap'n Proto, Cap'n Web has no schemas. In fact, it has almost no boilerplate whatsoever. This means it works more like the JavaScript-native RPC system in Cloudflare Workers. https://github.com/cloudflare/capnweb
by chrisoconnell | 2025-09-23 00:17:58+00:00
I had considered doing this about 3 years ago. I purchased a 1986 Vixen 21TD (a BMW diesel powered, 5 speed motorhome, build specifically as a motorhome, and gets 30mpg).

Ultimately, my goals ended up changing. I did a bit of modifications (modern brakes, improved electrical, upgraded alternator, 300aH 12v Lithium, and more), but I ended up only doing a couple trips in it.

It was really incredible, being able to have enough space to work, traveling anytime I want without worrying about crashing at a friend's place, or paying for a hotel or being stuck in a boring part of a city where the hotel is, etc.

I did a ton of research before purchasing, and loved the fact that it was fully built from the ground up to be a motorhome, rather than how modern conversions or RVs are built. It has a full queen size bed, and a wet bath, and I could comfortably stand when the roof is up.

Alas, the home life ended up being for me.

P.S. It's for sale.
by ompogUe | 2025-09-23 00:18:22+00:00
At the SIGGRAPH '96, where they launched the N64, SGI had an awesome stage show: there was an MC and a user with a VR setup on, some Onyx refrigerators behind them, and a big screen showing the VR view.

It was awesome - they were basically building New Orleans with legos: open a toolbox filing cabinet, choose a brick, run it all the way down the block, run that line of bricks up 200 feet to create the side of a building, rinse repeat.

Would love to see that one again.
by snozolli | 2025-09-23 00:18:32+00:00
You think when people see you get your laptop from a "paper bag" that doesn't create an impression?

You think that "creates an impression" is linguistically identical to "designed to impress"?

im·press verb 1. make (someone) feel admiration and respect.

Your solution just makes you seem like you go out of your way to be special.

This is pure projection.

I saw a homeless guy on the sidewalk today. Can you believe that? Such an ostentatious display of freedom from responsibilities.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-23 00:20:21+00:00
That's what confuses me about this whole topic. If you want a local app, make one. Nothing "requires" online if the features don't drive it.

We drove everything online for logistics and financial reasons. Not because the tech requires online connections for everything. it isn't changing because people don't see always-online as a big enough deterrent to change their habits.
by thethimble | 2025-09-23 00:20:32+00:00
I'm curious about two things:

1. What's the best way to do app deploys that update the RPC semantics? In other words how do you ensure that the client and server are speaking the same version of the RPC? This is a challenge that protos/grpc/avro explicitly sought to solve.

2. Relatedly, what's the best way to handle flaky connections? It seems that the export/import table is attached directly to a stateful WS connection such that if the connection breaks you'd lose the state. In principle there should be nothing preventing a client/server caching this state and reinstantiating it on reconnect. That said, given these tables can contain closures, they're not exactly serializable so you could run into memory issues. Curious if the team has thought about this.

Absolutely mind blowing work!
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-23 00:21:03+00:00
> has the US approach to education kept up or prioritized?

"The PISA results are also a reminder of something that I think many Americans don’t know: America’s overall educational performance is above average for a rich country.

Our PISA reading scores were worse than Canada, Ireland, Estonia, and the rich Asian countries, but higher than everyone else in Europe. You used to be able to break out PISA scores by state, which would typically show things like Massachusetts doing better than any European country. But that breakdown is no longer available."

> Students getting "dumber" implies something about the students

A tree stunted by being grown in poor soil is still stunted.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-23 00:21:06+00:00
> I've never understood the not allowing felons to vote, even while incarcerated.

The bulk of felony-disenfranchisement laws have a clear causal connection to preventing newly-freed slaves from voting, as they were enacted alongside terrible laws ("Black codes") which did a lot of blatantly-evil stuff to force former slaves either into a shadow of their old servitude or into jail.

The problem is some people imaging voting is a prize you get for making the government happy, which can be clawed-back.

Instead, votes in a democracy are something we are owed due to the control that government exercises over our lives. If the government exerts extra control to lock you in a cage, that increases the moral necessity of a vote, rather than decreasing it.