MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yepitwas | 2025-09-14 19:13:58+00:00
It’s be really nice if they’d repudiated political violence by not electing Donald Trump president after he mused on stage about how his supporters could shoot Hillary if she won, in 2016.

That was the first big test of whether we were going to enter a new era of normalized political violence, and we (his voters, but collectively we as a country) flunked it. Wave of violence it is, I guess. Reckoned at the time it wouldn’t be much fun, and go figure, it ain’t.
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-09-14 19:14:18+00:00
> Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. Matthew 24:34–35

Of course when the prediction doesn't fit, the Cirque du Soleil level mental gymnastics come out to explain how "this generation" didn't actually mean that.

Meanwhile, scientists predict solar eclipses with 100% accuracy. Among many other physical phenomena. Much of that knowledge was ascertained despite religion relentlessly persecuting those seeking out answers about our universe.

> Unlike other religions, it said a lot of things that have come true...

I can promise you that followers of every religion have made this same claim and also have a list of "proof". They don't look at each other and go "darn, that Christianity keeps getting it right somehow!".

I highly recommend checking out The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan [0]. It is a great way to improve anyone's baloney-detector kit. We all want to understand our world, but some "answers" are pure Grade-A baloney.

---

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349.The_Demon_Haunted_...
by PhantomHour | 2025-09-14 19:14:54+00:00
> Well, all a judge can/should do is to apply current law to the case before them

This is true, and I do not mean to suggest it is bad. But rather, that it leaves uncertainty. These cases can all be struck down without reducing the possibility that if one does stick, the entire industry is at stake.

> Copyright infringment is all about having published something based on someone else's work - AFAIK it doesn't have anything to say about someone/something having the potential to infringe (e.g. training an AI) if they haven't actually done it. It has to be about the generated artifact.

A notable problem here is that AI models are not "standalone products" but tools provided as a service. This complicates the situation.

Take Disney/Universal's case against Midjourney, which is both about the models but also the provision of services.

Even if only the latter gets deemed illegal, that's ruinous for the big AI companies. What good is OpenAI if they can't provide ChatGPT? Who would license a LLM if the act of using it creates constant legal risks?
by quietbritishjim | 2025-09-14 19:15:02+00:00
Interesting, thanks. A few questions from a newbie:

* I hadn't heard of ProPlot before. I take it that it's no longer maintained? Is there an announcement, or is it just obvious from commits drying up (like with PIL which was forked into Pillow)?

* Is this a (friendly) fork (again, as with PIL/Pillow), or a reimplementation (in which case are there big differences or does it aim to match)?

* I hadn't of GeoAxes either and that looks pretty useful. The top web search results for that term are ProPlot and Cartopy. Is the Cartopy implementation related at all? Is this a bundling of that, or a similar reimplementation, or something fairly different?
by ufmace | 2025-09-14 19:15:05+00:00
Yes, I suppose it is a deep cultural difference.

My opinion on unions is mixed, I suppose. They may be necessary in some times, places, and industries to compel reasonable treatment of workers. If such things are necessary, they're probably better than government intervention due to being much closer to the actual workplace. Historically, they have been responsible for establishing some good practices as standard in the American workforce. But they also have their bad sides. They tend to encourage an excessively antagonistic relationship between workers and management, cause pay and promotions to depend only on seniority rather than skill and work ethic, make it impractical to terminate workers who are ridiculously lazy or toxic, force everyone to take the same benefits whether they want them or not, enforce ridiculous rules about who can do what when, and other such things. They probably deserve at least some of the blame for the fall from grace of American automobile manufacturing due to things like being unwilling to accept greater factory automation even if it may lead to fewer workers needed, thus making the whole company less competitive.

I suppose in my ideal economy, I'd expect around 10-30% unionization, with the rest of the workers treated reasonably well due to a combination of market forces and threat of unionization. That's decently close to what we have in the US right now.

I do find advocates of it in the US to be ridiculous at times. Like, okay maybe unions are necessary and beneficial sometimes, but I think software engineering is about the least in need of unionization of any career in the modern world. But still some people seem to be obsessed with the idea of it.

Anti-monopoly regulation seems to be a mixed bag to me too, particularly in today's economy. Only 20-25 years ago, Microsoft was the big bad monster company, enough so that the US Government did start to look at using monopoly regulation against them a little bit. But the internet world and Google took the wind out of their sails better and faster than the Government could, and I think the tech world is better for it. FANG occupy similar economic space now, and I think it's likely that changing technology and market forces will again do a better job of knocking them back down a peg than the Government would.

Europe certainly doesn't lack smart and ambitious people, but I think those attitudes of who is allowed to be "on top" in society and what a good company looks like holds them back. That's a legitimate tradeoff that the people of Europe are free to make of course, but I disagree that it's the ideal way to organize a society.
by cxr | 2025-09-14 19:15:17+00:00
Yes. Questions like, "Should I work to 'do little things' intended to put a given coworker 'on an upward spiral'?" versus, "Should I insulate myself from or minimize blowback where any action is going to be received poorly because my incompetence is considered a foregone conclusion?" and, "How long should I remain at an organization where such things occur?" are all things that relate to decisions that are in your control—or at least might be, with enough of a forward-looking defense early on (if you fall into the group of those unlucky enough to need to ponder them).

Really, though, my comment was rather more intended to prompt introspective questions like, "Even if I'm personally on safe footing at my company, is it afflicted by this sort of thing in a way that impacts people who aren't me? And what can I do to either neutralize or minimize the negative consequences those people might experience?" (Readers who are paying attention will notice that this is a form of creating spirals of success for others, as the person I responded to recommended, but an emphasis on the fact that the targets of those actions can be people who have a lesser standing, rather that aiming laterally or upwards.)
by gamblor956 | 2025-09-14 19:15:18+00:00
Target's urban stores deal with this by locking up the merchandise and recommending that people order online for pickup, so the employees do most of the work and your goods are ready about the same time as you would have been leaving the store anyways.

It's annoying if you don't know exactly what you want to buy, but it works well if you do.
by msm_ | 2025-09-14 19:16:03+00:00
>it's too easy

To be honest, in my country I can also transfer all my liquid money (not countings stocks etc) with just my phone. The difference is that i'm not afraid of being kidnapped (it's safe here). And anyway, how much does normal person hold in the cash account? People living month-to-month don't have much anyway, while people with savings usually keep them in stocks/bonds/etc.
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-09-14 19:16:38+00:00
In general it seems like you should assume the outcome you want, so you behave in a way that's conducive to that outcome manifesting itself. If you always assume the worst, then you might protect yourself from rejection but you end up pushing people away.

So assuming someone is friendly even if they aren't is a better strategy than assuming everyone dislikes you.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-09-14 19:18:27+00:00
> How can you learn to learn if you don't know how to learn?

Obviously, first you need to learn how to learn how to learn. I believe that this will be the most important skill in the future. Once you have mastered it, you can easily learn how to learn. And then you are ready to learn.

It's incredible how many people try to learn how to learn these days, without spending some time learning how to learn how to learn first. Our education is failing.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-09-14 19:19:01+00:00
If 30% more voted in Alabama , Mississippi, Texas or Florida, do you think they would have voted democratic? Do you have any evidence that the demographics of people who don’t vote are disproportionate to the people who do in any of those states?

If you know anything about American history, despite what Michelle Obama says “this is exactly who this country is”
by me-vs-cat | 2025-09-14 19:20:02+00:00
Thank you for sharing your experience.

I cannot see how to justify H-1B as a benefit the employer provides for the worker, because it just sounds exploitive, like the comment above.

I can see justification only as a benefit to the employer (and the society allowing the immigration) when there are truly not enough acceptable candidates. I'm left wondering how that can be true when so many employers routinely hide postings.
by epcoa | 2025-09-14 19:20:22+00:00
> Crucially we can assume that if you don't get infected with HPV this wouldn't happen. So HPV was still causal.

Nope. This is literally “correlation does not equal causation” 101. Based on the 0.3% I’m gonna guess you’re (either directly or indirectly) citing a famous, 1999 paper in J Pathology (Walboomers et al). It’s outdated, missing a control *, and it’s pretty well accepted that just finding a bystander HPV DNA fragment around somewhere is not conclusive of causality. We have much more sophisticated assays of gene expression. Try looking for review articles in the last 3 to 4 years rather than 30, the prevalence of truly HPV independent cervical cancer is not precisely characterized but it’s almost certain much greater than 0.3%.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0817/14/7/668

https://journals.lww.com/md-journal/fulltext/2024/10110/rese.... (3% to 8%)
by msm_ | 2025-09-14 19:21:12+00:00
What is the threshold?

If two people accounts were unjustly frozen (and they have to do some work to unlock them), and at the same time two hundred people life savings were saved, would that be OK with you?

I don't know about them, but there are plenty of ways for law enforcement to get mule account numbers. After all that's the whole point - actual criminals don't have to reveal their own identity, instead they convince a "mule" to (knowingly or not) participate in a crime.
by spankibalt | 2025-09-14 19:22:02+00:00
> https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel.jpg

Thanks for posting this; never seen that particular model before. It looks like one of those kitschy, pad-supplied coffee or soda makers. I find the urge, very prevalent from the mid-90s to the mid-Aughts, to entomb even professional-grade electronics in cases that look like cheap toys or other household appliances both bizarre and fascinating, analog to the 70s trend of styling (especially home) computing devices as faux-wooden furniture pieces, et cetera.
by PhantomHour | 2025-09-14 19:22:28+00:00
This is a baseless assertion of emergent behaviour.

> Every time a bot searches

We are talking about LLMs by themselves, not larger systems using them.

> LLMs ability to separate facts from expression is quite well developed

It is not. Whether you ask an LLM for an excerpt of the bible, or an excerpt of The Lord of the Rings, the LLM does not distinguish. It has no concept of what is, and what is not, under copyright.
by godelski | 2025-09-14 19:22:49+00:00
I think I wouldn't be so quick to conclude ADHD or suggest stimulants. I have ADHD too, and I know exactly what you're talking about. Those alarms in your head going off. Where everything is an emergency so nothing is. I'm not so sure it is being "scatterbrained" as much as it is over-parallelism.

But the OP's points have more complexity than they think (in my main comment[0] I mention depth being missing). Let's take the quick math one for example. They made the assumption that a calculation was being made. This seems reasonable, but if you're doing a lot of those calculations you'll memorize them. I interestingly have experimental data on this. After my undergrad I had to get an EKG done and the tech asked me to do some basic math questions to get some readings. Problem is, I could answer her questions but she got almost no signal. They were just too easy for me because I was so familiar with them. You don't need to calculate what's in the cache. So we moved to 2 digit multiplications and signal was mixed. Good correlation with being able to leverage previous calculations. So then I had her and my dad pick 3 random numbers and I would multiply those in my head. That did the trick and she said it light up like a Christmas tree (I do this visually, so it really was using more parts of the brain than she was likely used to seeing).

My point is, there's more nuance to this. Your brain isn't just a computation unit, it has various levels of storage with different speeds and capacities, it has different accelerators and processing units that can be leveraged if programmed in the right way. The problem with the OP's assessment is they've measured output speed and assumed this is enough information to calculate FLOPS, but a slower processor can win that race if it just is pulling from cache. A slower processor can win in aggregate if it has more parallelism. The problem is that they're measuring something different than what they think they're measuring, even if it is right up to a first order approximation.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45242293
by atm3ga | 2025-09-14 19:23:07+00:00
Does detectability matter? Are we now entering an era of forced browser compliance? That is, if I use Comet exclusively as my browser; is my bank, insurance company, or news site going to force me to stop and use a "normal" browser and what will that look like as every browser also has AI capabilities? Maybe certain resources will only be available via apps? Seems like a very slippery slope and very user hostile.
by ericpauley | 2025-09-14 19:23:24+00:00
Sure, interviews go both ways, but there’s a major difference in what each side wants from the other. The company wants someone who can deliver software and architecture, which requires substantial vetting. The main thing the employee wants (in most cases) is money, which is far easier to determine the value of (I’d consider “what’s the position pay?” a perfectly reasonable question when interviewing someone).
by collingreen | 2025-09-14 19:23:30+00:00
"Hive mind" conjures ideas of an omnipresent, all-controlling intelligence to me like startrek's borg, but I think this is more about the idea of a "superorganism" [0] like some bees and most ants where the group exhibits traits and "behavior" and "decisions" as a whole, beyond the ability of any single, specialized individual. Less superintelligence and more emergent behavior and complexity.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism
by rvba | 2025-09-14 19:23:30+00:00
If you actually would read the discourse more than a google search it was that:

Cosmic ray black holes are likely to have a momentum and would probably fly out to outer space. While LHC micro black holes would stay on Earth and the potential LHC black hole could eat it. (Assuming Hawking radiation does not exist)

The crits were dismissed because LHC is working.
by oriel | 2025-09-14 19:24:10+00:00
To add to this further, I've had great success following The Body Keeps Score; seeing it as a repository of past stress and trauma.

As part of this, I've been able to locate and work through stress and trauma activations in my body, where normally they'd cluster around my head and never actually get resolved.

Every time I go to work out, I pay attention to what areas of my body arent responding, are activating oddly; and I'll work to strengthen the foot-to-neck paths. It started with a back injury and has resulted in me finding I needed wide foot shoes and changing my entire stance, posture, complex movements, etc.

Some times I find it odd that I don't have that daemon running around yelling, because hes now activated in my body, and all I have to do is stretch.
by anonyonoor | 2025-09-14 19:24:17+00:00
Has anyone ever built a document editor with SVG?

I realize it's far from a best practice and even explicitly stated as a bad idea somewhere in the SVG spec, but the idea of a document editor where you can individually position each and every character and make detailed, individual glyphs natively without loading fonts is interesting to me.

Are there any examples of this? Or perhaps different (better) approaches to a document editor with the advantages I said above?
by maxglute | 2025-09-14 19:24:26+00:00
Then there's is no progress to be made. Developing using cheap energy regardless of emissions, i.e. the harm/ethics (positives) of poverty reduction > pollution any day. US/west sets the baseline for historic not just annual per capita emission - annual doesn't capture historic emissions for building infra/capita base. Many countries still have magnitude more steel to smelt and concrete to pour. If developing / low middle income countries does most of the growing/developing on clean generation, better, if west wants to subsidize that like prior climate pledges, they're welcome to. Until then, their per capita is floor of what everyone should aim for. Ultimately, global emissions isn't really worth worrying, as in even if it's existential for some tiny islands or climate death zones, there's shit all do because most of the world who desires to be rich and comfortable will just chug along.
by kwakubiney | 2025-09-14 19:24:58+00:00
I resonate highly with this. Especially when brainstorming ideas with my manager. He's very quick with suggestions, and I am always saying ehhh I don't know let me think about it. I have realized that him giving me ideas quickly to iterate on is beneficial because I am always able to refine it. I still do think it is a deficiency in some sense as I would have loved to be one of those guys who could just grok stuff instantly and contribute quicker
by schneems | 2025-09-14 19:25:23+00:00
Oh for sure. Ask questions, just not annoying whiteboard questions. Also I hate this “ask us anything” part of the interview. It’s so performative.

It should be rephrased as “the jeopardy round” since it’s still about the candidate, but phrased backwards. And it’s not a time for REAL questions, it’s a time to show you’re smart and attentive but not TOO smart, you want the interviewer to feel good about themselves so they can feel good about you.

> what my response would be

I don’t ask candidates to do anything I wouldn’t put up with. It would be unusual but I would be game (if they were serious). Fundamentally that’s what my fantasy is about: a world where interviewer and interviewee have mutual respect for each other.

In the recent past I’ve asked candidates to walk me through code they’ve written. I’m super happy to reciprocate for 15 min and I think the candidate (if they’re working with me directly) would get a lot out of it.
by Analemma_ | 2025-09-14 19:25:37+00:00
But you and the parent are both ignoring that, in the real world, prototypes constantly (in fact, nearly always) get shipped straight to production and not updated or rewritten, precisely because they solve a pressing problem, and if they solve it well they get real users right away who start bringing up new feature requests and bugs before the prototype can ever be fixed.

This was a constant pattern in software engineering even before LLMs, but LLMs are making it much worse, and I think it's very head-in-the-sand behavior to ignore that. It's akin to going "well, you can't blame the Autopilot because the person should have been fully-attentive ready to react at any millisecond". That's not how humans work, and good engineering is supposed to take real-world human behavior into consideration
by Waterluvian | 2025-09-14 19:25:38+00:00
I think a big part of maturing professionally is how I’ve gotten a better handle on not trusting my gut.

He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right. He’s trying to take credit for a decade of my hard work. He’s going to exploit me and everyone will believe him and not me.

The more likely reality: he’s new here and I’ve been here for a decade. He was hired to basically replicate my success for sibling teams. He’s feeling immense pressure. He’s probably terrified of failing. I probably make him feel threatened. My defensive posture makes this worse. I give him signals all the time that he probably reads as me wanting him to fail or not liking him.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-09-14 19:26:07+00:00
> Do you think this was just a coincidence?

Yes, and there is no reason to believe otherwise that I am aware of.

I provided many quotes showing that Kirk played the race, sexuality, and religion cards frequently. I beleive he did so to provoke rage and engagement, and the evidence seems to support my stance.

Can you provide even a single quote that shows Biden considered her lesbianism, blackness, or other 'controversial' characteristics as the deciding factor here? From where I sit it looks like he just did what his constituency demanded. Kirk on the other hand made unsubstantiated claims about all of the above to drive engagement.

> I'll pretend to believe you. Let me ask you something else then.

I'm only discussing this particular case because you chose it as the most defensible from my long list. Even then, you are struggling to justify the divisive language Kirk chose. Had you chosen the one about black pilots this would be even more open and shut.

Kirk wasn't stupid, but he was kind of a jerk.
by trimethylpurine | 2025-09-14 19:26:18+00:00
I'm not citing the article's content, I'm citing its existence. That's perfectly valid not just for academic research, but in any scientific forum.

The articles are a self admission of political leanings. If Disney can't be trusted to tell you themselves what their political leanings have been, then nothing can convince you. That's by definition an unscientific approach and it's obviously not exemplary of a good education to say the least.

I'm not interested in continuing. Thanks.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-14 19:27:12+00:00
"an opiate"? You do not get constipation from one pill that is "so bad".

Plus it depends on the opioid. Hydrocodone and oxycodone for example leaves the system pretty quickly (ER, too), and once it does, you can defecate without issues. Morphine on the other hand causes awful constipation but can be treated with proper diet. Hydrate, plum jam, magnesium citrate, or laxatives if serious. You can skip a dose or two so you can defecate.