MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dijit | 2025-09-10 11:52:58+00:00
> This goes especially true for Microsoft where lots of people put in far less than a 40hr workweek.

No offence, but this shows in the products.

It's a standard expectation for managers to see you physically located in the office for 40hrs per week in semi-flexible arrangements (if you're lucky).

You may forget that as tech workers we are incredibly privileged with the way our office life is compared to others typically, that we can sometimes come in late and leave early: may be another "perk" (like remote work) which goes away in time or during the next squeeze.

So it's a poor defense, as it's not reflected in other similar industries, nor is it relevant when we're discussing flexibility being reduced by the same company doing the flexibility reduction.

You are definitely paid for the "hours" in your contract and not the output, if you were paid for output some workers would be able to work harder to make more money by creating more things; as it stands you get the same money if you do 80hrs or 40hrs or 20hrs at any level of effort. You're not paid for time or output, you're paid to be "of service".

Maybe you get more money at promotion time (maybe), but pay is certainly *not* linked to compensation.
by satisfice | 2025-09-10 11:53:25+00:00
1% AI for productive work. My work is training, developing training, experimental testing and writing experimental test tools that become part of my training. The training is all about software testing.

I find that it’s easier to write code than to write English statements describing code I want written.

I can’t phone this work in. It has to be creative and also precise.

I know no way to design useful training experiences using AI. It just comes out as slop.

When I am coding, I use Warp. It often suggests bug fixes, ajd I do find that these are worth accepting, generally speaking.
by growingkittens | 2025-09-10 11:53:29+00:00
Accelerated tracks would produce the top tier, which begin in elementary school - so it's a matter of how much your parents invested in your education before school. Any child can technically enter the accelerated track at any grade. The later they join, the more untaught expectations there are. The other students went over these things already in previous accelerated classes. There's no on-ramp.

In the normal track, you don't eventually take calculus in math, learn much about labwork in science, or even learn how to write a research paper until the last year of classes at 18. (Source: class of 2005, USA)
by dilap | 2025-09-10 11:54:11+00:00
YouTube is incredible, YouTube is poorly run. If I were making the laws, I'd do something similar to mandatory licensing of songs for radio: mandate that YouTube, as a sort de-facto content monopilist, provide third-party access to its database (upload, discovery, view counts, recommendations, etc). Devil is in the details, but well-done it would strictly improve the world.

Independent competitive companies are great, but things tend to devolve into de-facto mini-governments once things stabilize, and from there I think the (real) government using its power to force a little more competition could really improve things.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-10 11:54:20+00:00
I agree with all this and will just add. CSV is slow. Like really slow.

Partially due to the bloat, but also partially because the format doesn't allow for speed.

And because CSV is untyped, you have to either trust the producer or put in mountains of guards to ensure you can handle the weird garbage that might come through.

My company deals with a lot of CSV and we literally built tools and hire multiple full time employees whose entire job is handling CSV sucking in new and interesting ways.

Parquet literally eliminates 1/2 of our our data ingestion pipeline simply by being typed, consistent, and fast to query.

One example of a problem we constantly run into is that nobody likes to format numbers the same way. Scientific notation, no scientific notation, commas or periods, sometimes mixed formats (scientific notation when a number is big enough, for example).

Escaping is also all over the board.

CSV SEEMS simple, but the lack of a real standard means it's anything but.

I'd take xml over CSV.
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-10 11:54:22+00:00
Of course science can happen elsewhere, but science is struggling to get enough funding already. With a major rich country pulling funds, cancer research worldwide is affected.

This particular study was funded in part by an NIH grant: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/3JOZ-0aY0EOBJOb7uLdbzA/proje... and https://reporter.nih.gov/search/3_aBusrtpki2R0Moj7ntjg/proje...

Part of the research was also funded by this grant: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/lW12o2Q2CEe6M9PKMITWWQ/proje... and seemingly this grant: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/gjjBtikE4Uuyy875NUyiog/proje...

I count $3,043,276 in funding from the first NIH grant plus $10,515,749 from the second. I don't know how where the funds for the "Robertson Therapeutic Development Fund Early Clinical Development Award" and "The V Foundation for Cancer Research" came from and how much of the broader grants were spent on this research, but this particular research seems to have been funded mostly by the USA.
by palata | 2025-09-10 11:54:26+00:00
> They could’ve done this same backup with a 64 character recovery key and

Again: they could have, but it would have taken time and resources. The complaint here is not that Signal doesn't want to allow backups: they are just announcing a secure backup feature.

The complaint is that Signal did not do it earlier, and instead decided to prevent what they considered an insufficient solution.

> Putting iCloud alone in a separate bucket doesn’t make sense.

Of course it makes sense. What you say is akin to saying "end to end encryption makes no sense, because if you have to trust iOS anyway, you may as well trust the server".

Because I trust Android and run Signal there does not mean that I want it to auto-upload my messages to Google Drive. I don't see what makes it so hard to understand.

> One can only hope that the point about supporting other backup endpoints/storage gets implemented sooner rather than having to wait several more years.

Yes, I hope that too. On top of hoping, one could donate, to slightly contribute to paying the developers that work on it.
by _heimdall | 2025-09-10 11:54:34+00:00
I always assume a different option, though (3) is likely part of it for Microsoft right now as well.

When leadership decides their velocity is too slow for whatever reason, they look for deck chairs to move. RTO is one big deck chair they can move and many will assume it will improve performance and velocity.

The problem is that I've never seen anyone actually prove that out for RTO with solid data. And that goes both ways, I haven't seen anything to prove that remote-first is universally better for performance.
Show HN: React Kickstart – Interactive CLI for pre-configured React projects
by gavb | 2025-09-10 11:55:00+00:00
Built a CLI tool out of curiosity (and boredom) to generate React projects. It guides you through prompts for options like state management, TypeScript, linting, routing, api clients, deployment, testing, etc.

It even auto-opens your IDE with the generated project (only VS Code and Cursor supported at the moment).

I started this around the time create-react-app was officially deprecated earlier in 2025 and wondered "what if there was a similar tool but on steroids?" So I kept at it for a few months.

It'll be interesting to maintain this project in the future with so many options baked in, i.e managing dependencies, different React versions, etc. But let's see! I tried my very best to make the code as maintainable and robust as possible. Any contributions welcome if you feel the itch to do so.

Thanks!
by ta1243 | 2025-09-10 11:56:50+00:00
If people can't afford the rents then they'll just cram more people in. Currently have a "Joey/Chandler" style apartment form friends with 2 people in for $4k/month? Now you get 4. Or 6. Price increases to $6k/month but it's down on a per-person basis.

In some cities you get time-sharing beds. In 2003 I lived (for 3 weeks) in a house in London, I had my own room - the largest in the house. A smaller room had a couple with a baby, the loft had 3 mattresses in it but 4 people living there, time-sharing with the mattresses like you have in a nuclear submarine.

There's plenty of opportunity for landlords to increases costs even if peoples incomes can't support an increase.
by password54321 | 2025-09-10 11:57:09+00:00
Every teaching method you can think of has been tried. What you are describing is called scaffolding with manipulatives which you can find dozens of for maths. Schools have also tried making worksheets catered to multiple skill levels within the same classroom.

The harsh reality: most children infamously still have a hard time even being able to tell the time on an analogue clock. You can try every method under the sun but if a child has a hard time understanding a system with two different base numbers it is usually because they just don't have the capacity. All the handholding in the world isn't going to change that.
by 916c0553e164269 | 2025-09-10 11:57:25+00:00
from the blog: "The patent is intended as a shield, not a sword, to protect Open Source from hostile IP claims."

vs. the current license:

"IF ANY LITIGATION IS INSTITUTED AGAINST SUPABASE, INC. BY A LICENSEE OF THIS SOFTWARE, THEN THE LICENSE GRANTED TO SAID LICENSEE SHALL TERMINATE AS OF THE DATE SUCH LITIGATION IS FILED."

( https://github.com/orioledb/orioledb/blob/main/LICENSE )

imho: the current wording might discourage state organisations, since even a trivial lawsuit (e.g. a minor tax delay) could terminate the licence - perhaps a narrower patent-focused clause would work better (or an OSI-approved licence?).
by e40 | 2025-09-10 11:57:34+00:00
Not t true. I don’t have the reference, but I read 10 or more years ago about an affluent community in the midwest whose black students greatly underperformed their white counterparts. The parents hired a black researcher and his final report said exactly that, that many black students didn’t want to appear white and also there were negative consequences for trying to do well. The parents thought it had to be racism and wouldn’t accept the results. The guy was a sociology professor at a college in CA.

For more annectdata, this same thing was happening at Berkeley High School around the same time. First hand knowledge from parents of students.
by blacklion | 2025-09-10 11:57:53+00:00
Open space is PURE EVIL. Don't have fixed working place where you could leave your headphones (and external DAC in my case), cup, charging wires for your gadgets (not everything is USB-C still), some papers, etc is PURE EVIL too. Combined together it is ninth circle of hell.

Never worked in open space and refused (otherwise good) offers twice due to open space in office.

Culture in which everybody can ping anybody at any time is bad too. It is why I speak about cooler chat (when person already distracted), not any chat :-)
by bpt3 | 2025-09-10 11:58:00+00:00
In my kids' schools, the textbooks haven't been removed due to cost, they have been replaced with even more expensive online material that no one properly consumes.

Educators have been brainwashed into believing "computers are the future!" and don't seem to be able to even contemplate that reading something on a screen is a poor substitute for physically interacting with something (a pen and paper, a book, or the actual thing being described in a video).

I regularly have to tell my kids to stop doing math and science problems on their computer and get out a pencil and paper to do the work so they can organize it and understand it. They argue at first because their teachers tell them not to (so they say), but stop when they actually see it working.
by wccrawford | 2025-09-10 11:58:17+00:00
What does "they read something daily in their free time in 2025" actually mean?

I think it means actual books.

I think it excludes forums, discord chats, and general online stuff.

Kids are forced to read more than ever before to interact with their peers. The rise of sites like Web Novel and Royal Road are inspirational. I would guess that there are more "writers" than ever before in history.
by palata | 2025-09-10 11:58:23+00:00
"I consider it a bug because I really want this feature" does not change the fact that it is a feature.

> As an example, a piece of code sending authentication credentials in plain text across the internet might in isolation be considered free of bugs.

This is not a good example. It's almost certainly a security issue. Unless you have a threat model where you absolutely don't give a shit about it, but we're not in 2010 anymore. Let me try to make another one:

As an example, a messenging app sending encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted messages over a server may be considered free of bugs. Adding end-to-end encryption to it would be a new feature, and it may well be out of scope for that particular app (ever heard of Telegram?).

Because you really want it doesn't make it a bug.
by nerdjon | 2025-09-10 11:58:44+00:00
I find myself somewhere in the middle. I think for the vast majority of games this would largely be a negative. Anything heavily story driven this would just cause issues and I think would largely ruin the experience.

I think sandbox games like animal crossing are the exception, if it ever becomes reliable enough to put in anything other than an M rated game.

Animal Crossing, the Sims, Cult of the Lamb, and similar games would infinitely extend the life of the game. But I am sure we can all already imagine the headlines when these "family" games start saying things that they really should not be... especially given recent issues.

For the record, not dismissing the person who did this work. But doing this commercially has its risks.
by layer8 | 2025-09-10 11:59:10+00:00
The main reason I use semantic line breaks, not explicitly mentioned in this article, is that it minimizes reformatting when editing. Only the subclause being edited is reformatted, while the rest of the paragraph remains as-is. This also minimizes the changes in line-oriented diffs.

While one could rely on automated line-wrapping instead of using hard line breaks that require reformatting, it isn’t usefully available in all environments, in particular for indented paragraphs and when having elements like ASCII art or code that shouldn’t be word-wrapped, and it makes plain-text diffs larger than necessary when whole paragraphs are on a single source line.
by BozeWolf | 2025-09-10 11:59:15+00:00
Oh, I agree fully. I enjoy going to office. I also enjoy WFH. But after two days of WFH I am so bored.

Like many above like to call managers 'managers' I like to call developers/devopsengineers/* 'IT people'. Office is not a 'manager' or 'c-suite' thing. Put it differently: not going to office is an 'IT people' thing.

Being productive is not only the number of lines of code you crank out. Being productive is cranking out the right lines of code. You need to communicate for that. Casually joining a few colleagues talking about work delivers so much value. Maybe make a few decisions without planning a meeting. That is productive!

It is also not only about being productive, It is also about having fun with my team or colleagues. But I also like to sense how my team members are behaving, are people super tired? Are they happy? Etc etc.

Oh and the good old whiteboard sessions, I love them and I miss them.

If I tell my non 'it people' friends my colleagues only want to go to office max 1 time a week... or not at all, most friends call it crazy.

Tomorrow to the office again, yes! 45 minute lunch walk through the city... Close the door at 17:00 and call it a day! Love it!
by everdrive | 2025-09-10 11:59:24+00:00
You're correct, but I'm sure his boss feels differently. In my experience businesses really care very little for precision and excellence in your work product. I don't just mean they cannot recognize excellence (although this is true as well) but that they actively dislike precision and would lump a lot of that sort of effort all into one bucket they might describe as "being too pedantic," or "not seeing the bigger picture," or some other epithet which _could_ be true, but in practice just means "I just want stuff done quickly and don't care if it's half-assed. We just need to report success to management which will never know or care about the truth."
by laurels-marts | 2025-09-10 11:59:45+00:00
You’re not alone. I absolutely love going to office every day but also love the flexibility to occasionally wfh if needed. I just feel like when I enter the office and put on my “unreachable” focus mode on I’m in the zone and very productive. At home there’s endless distractions (my cats make sure to check in with me every time get too focused). Also I do like interacting with colleagues. I think I started liking going to office even more once I broke up with my gf that was living with me for 4 years. Something about working the entire day from my apartment completely alone is… not appealing to my social side of the brain.
by Loughla | 2025-09-10 11:59:46+00:00
>management refused because it improve any of their metrics

This is what everyone in the United States asked for. You wanted data driven decision making. Do not be surprised when the measure becomes the goal.

Sorry if this sounds bitter, but I spent all day yesterday arguing with administration at a college that data driven decision making is only as good as the data you feed the system, and that specifically targeting metric improvement for its own sake is step one in the road to mind death.
by k3vinw | 2025-09-10 11:59:47+00:00
I disagree. The BLS head was either incompetent or corrupt. The two are not mutually exclusive so they easily could have been both. Firing the BLS head was the obvious choice and it sends the right message to all involved that we will not accept this margin of inaccuracy when it impacts our economy. We need a BLS head with the balls to raise hell when the numbers are not reflecting reality.
by 542354234235 | 2025-09-10 11:59:55+00:00
>This argument can be used to justify whatever actions you want

Yes, which is why I wrote more than 3 words. It is why I used the cancer analogy. This generation is left holding the bag, and it has to be dealt with. Stomping your foot and saying it's not fair does nothing to cancer, nor does it do anything to climate change. I’m not saying a specific policy decision is right or wrong. I’m saying this generation has to deal with it, regardless of fairness.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-09-10 12:00:03+00:00
My completely unfounded theory about why education is declining: Teachers don't get to beat kids anymore. (I'm not saying they ought to). If it's one mentally completely exhausted adult doing nothing but "use their words" against 25 kids/teenagers with nothing but energy, and a feeling that the system, which the teacher is the agent of, is their enemy, the power balance flips radically.

Forcing kids to go to school only works as long as you actually have any force at your disposal.

(And convincing them that going to school is in their best interest similarly requires that to actually be the case. Kids who start off bright-eyed and bushy-tailed will quickly reverse their position when they're either below or above the bell curve and their educational needs/welfare are being completely and obviously disregarded.)
by graemep | 2025-09-10 12:01:07+00:00
> And yes, skin color itself is irrelevant, it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences

No, its a terrible identifier.

If you group people by genetic similarity (which is of dubious usefulness) you essentially end up with three different black African races, one Australian, Pacific and Native American, and one everyone else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering
by fidotron | 2025-09-10 12:01:28+00:00
TBH had I known too many of the specifics of the platform by now they would be forgotten or I wouldn't be able to mention them!

These games were largely heavily derived from their Brew/WinMo/Symbian versions, which were (subset of) C++ games developed on PCs and then retargeted to embedded devices using compilers with annoying licensing servers. Almost everyone that did this enough had their own PC runtime, and would barely touch any device/platform specific emulator even if it existed, a situation that remained the case until Unreal/Unity took over.

> There seems to be no privilege separation between the app and the rest of the OS, as is the case for the iPod software in general.

This was/is common for most RTOS type environments where MMUs were not a thing. For example, the whole point of Brew and J2ME was to provide some level of separation prior to the later Symbians and then Android/iOS etc.
by yepitwas | 2025-09-10 12:03:09+00:00
I once moved to a company that still mandated relatively formal work clothes—suit and tie no longer required, but still seen fairly often.

The first casual Friday I was struck now how energized I felt as soon as I walked in (and I didn’t participate, I wore slacks and a blazer that day).

Reflecting on that, I realized that I actually associate jeans and such with “professional office that gets shit done”. Because that’s how it’d been everywhere else I’d worked.

The “professional” dress code was having exactly the opposite effect on me, from what it was supposed to.
by seanhunter | 2025-09-10 12:03:40+00:00
If you read the copyright text on the back of the title page of a book, buying it doesn’t give you the right to “mechanically reproduce” the book. I would be very surprised if there was a court ruling that didn’t either A)completely strike that notice and say it’s fair game to photocopy or scan books you have bought for any purpose (which is not what courts have held in the past, so it would be a big shift) or B)uphold it and say it also applies to scraping the content of a book for training.

…especially given the US “fair use” doctrine takes into account the effect that a particular use might have on the market for similar works, so the authors are bound to argue that the existence of AI that can reproduce fanfiction-like facsimiles of works at scale is going to poison the well and reduce the market for people spending actual money on future works (whether or not that’s true is another question).

So in my view the court is going to say that buying a book doesn’t give them the right to train on the contents because that is mechanical reproduction which is explicitly disallowed by the copyright notice and they don’t fall under the “fair use” carveout because they affect the future market. There isn’t anywhere else where they were granted the right to use the authors’ works so the work is disallowed. Obviously no court finding is ever 100% guaranteed but that really seems the only logically-consistent conclusion they could come to.
by poszlem | 2025-09-10 12:04:14+00:00
You’re speaking from a very privileged position. A 15–20 minute commute and an office with a canteen is not the reality for most workers. Many spend 1–3 hours daily stuck in traffic or on crowded trains, which is pure wasted time. Add in rising transport costs, pollution, and the fact that not everyone can afford to live near their workplace, and commuting becomes one of the biggest drains on productivity and well-being.

So while it’s great that the office works for you, dismissing WFH as “less productive” ignores the fact that for many people, it’s the only way they can actually be productive, stay healthy, and remain in the workforce at all.