MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krapp | 2025-09-13 23:06:35+00:00
My point is that "More and more people declaring social media net-negative" doesn't mean anything, and it certainly isn't a valid "first step towards changing anything" because it isn't actionable.

>I don't think you have to think of things in terms of "hate it more than I like it" when you have actual examples on social media of children posting self-harm and suicide, hooliganism and outright crimes posted for viewership, blatant misinformation proliferation, and the unbelievable broad and deep affect powerful entities can have on public information/opinion through SM.

Sure, and then there's plenty of children not posting self-harm and suicide, hooliganism and outright crimes posted for viewership, and plenty of information and perfectly normal, non-harmful communication and interaction. "net-negative" implies there is far more harmful content than non-harmful, and that most people using social media are using it in a negative way, which seems more like a bias than anything proven. I can agree that there are harmful and negative aspects of social media without agreeing that the majority of social media content and usage is harmful and negative.
by ks2048 | 2025-09-13 23:06:36+00:00
> People post heinous things under their full legal names just as readily.

I disagree with "just as readily" (i.e. most of the most heinous things are indeed bots or trolls).

Also, I imagine that without the huge amount of bots and anonymous trolls, the real-name-accounts would not post as they do now - both because their opinions are shaped by the bots AND because the bots give them the sense that many more people agree with them.
by Lerc | 2025-09-13 23:06:39+00:00
I have wondered if it's not algorithmic curation per-se that is the problem, but personalised algorithmic curation.

When each person is receiving a personalised feed, there is a significant loss of common experience. You are not seeing what others are seeing and that creates a loss of a basis of communication.

I have considered the possibility that the solution might be to enable many areas of curation but in each domain the thing people see is the same for everyone. In essence, subreddits. The problem then becomes the nature of the curators, subreddits show that human curators are also not ideal. Is there an opportunity for public algorithm curation. You subscribe to the algorithm itself and see the same thing as everyone else who subscribes sees. The curation is neutral (but will be subject to gaming, the fight against bad actors will be perpetual in all areas).

I agree about the tendency for the prevalence of conversation to influence individuals, but I think it can be resisted. I don't think humans live their lives controlled by their base instincts, most learn to find a better way. It is part of why I do not like the idea of de-platforming. I found it quite instructional when Jon Stewart did an in-depth piece on trans issues. It made an extremely good argument, but it infuriated me to see a few days later so many people talking about how great it was because Jon agreed with them and he reaches so many people. They completely missed the point. The reason it was good is because it made a good case. This cynical "It's good if it reaches the conclusion we want and lots of people" is what is destroying us. Once you feel like it is not necessary to make your case, but just shout the loudest, you lose the ability to win over people who disagree because they don't like you shouting and you haven't made your case.
by fl7305 | 2025-09-13 23:07:07+00:00
Not apples to apples.

Just being near a potentially aggressive bear is a bad situation.

Being near a car or a nuclear power plant is not a bad siuation.

Of course you should run in the other direction if you're close to a potentially aggressive bear.

Same thing if you're in the path of an out of control car, or near a nuclear power plant accident.

But you've got to separate the "probability of bad situation occurring" from the "severity of the bad situation when it does occur".
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-13 23:08:44+00:00
This is true. I knew what I was getting into. I didn't expect it to be ten years, but I did expect at least five, before I could get folks to pitch in. I knew the character of the folks that would be trying to force the system into shapes that would not last, and how they would react to me.

In this case, it was for an organization that I've been involved in, for decades. I'm incredibly Grateful for what it's done for me, and I'm simply paying it back a bit.

The system was required to help them improve their discoverability, which could be life-saving.

It's not hyperbole to say that the system has probably saved many lives, and will continue to do so, for the foreseeable future.

It's also pretty much worthless, monetarily. No one would be willing to pony up a fraction of what it would have cost to build, if it were paid.

I'd do it all over again, if I had to. Fortunately, I don't have to. The team that took it over have done great things with it. It's a ship of Theseus type of thing. There's probably not much code I wrote, left. I write apps that now leverage it.
by palata | 2025-09-13 23:08:59+00:00
> Unless the drive-by PR is fixing a simple bug in a simple way, then the contributor really should've opened an issue first. Doing otherwise is rude imo.

I kindly disagree. If the project is open source, it means that I can fork it. If I find an open source project and want to add a feature to it, I will fork, implement my feature, and then open a PR to the original project. A couple things there:

1. I have no need to open a PR to upstream, it's totally right to keep my changes in my fork (as long as I honour the licence).

2. If the maintainers don't feel like merging my PR, they don't have to. It's their right. They may request changes, and I may choose not to implement them.

It's not the only way to do it: it's perfectly fine to open an issue and ask for guidance. But I don't see the problem in opening a PR saying "look what I did with your project: you can merge it if you want".
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-13 23:09:41+00:00
In Mr. Kirk's own words, "The “Great Replacement” is not a theory, it’s a reality." https://www.instagram.com/p/C3swagnvfbN/

"Great Replacement Theory" is an inherently racist ideology that ignores (in the context of the US) multiple centuries of history in favor of an idea that there's an "other" that is going to replace "real Americans." It is, perhaps, a stretch to claim that the organization he founded promoted bigotry, hate, or the superiority of a particular race... But it's not much of a stretch when the organization's founder and leader is making easily-verified racist statements such as this one.

> Suggesting that someone's words justified death is an absolute moral wrong no matter what those words were.

In general, I haven't seen people making the hard assertion online that his words justified his death and I would agree with you. But I have seen plenty of "I don't think Charlie Kirk should have died, but the philosophy Charlie Kirk espoused shouldn't care if Charlie Kirk died" and I don't think I can argue with that assessment of the legacy of his work.
by godelski | 2025-09-13 23:10:02+00:00
> successfully doing it is another

Not to mention successfully measuring success or failure. The overwhelming majority of people I know (from your average Joe to your tenured professor at elite universities, from philosophers to physicists[0]) underestimate the difficulty of measuring things.

Almost everyone treats any metric as they would a ruler or tape measure. Even your standard ruler is not as good of a measuring device as you probably think! But this becomes a huge mess when we start talking about any measurement of statistics or some other abstraction. People treat metrics and algorithms as black boxes, rather than tools. Tools still require craftsmen, who understands: when they work, when they don't work, when they can be used in a pickle, what can be substituted in a pickle, their limits, what new problems they create, and so on. It is incredible how much complexity there is to things that appear so simple. But then again, that's why you get things like an engineering manual on o-rings that is over a thousand pages. And even those aren't comprehensive.

I'm not suggesting we all need to be "master craftsmen", but I actually think we would all do better if we recognized that everything has more depth than might appear. If only to give people a moment of pause to question if they are actually doing things the right way. There's always a better way. The real trick is learning what's good enough and you'll never know what is good enough when everything is simple.

[0] The exception tends to be those that need to work with high precision, since with these jobs you tend to be forced to deal with this in an explicit manner. So more common among people like machinists or experimental physicists. Though sometimes this ends up worse as they can end up operating on vibes. I think it happens when intuitions are successful for too long and not enough meta-analysis is done to update them.
by ks2048 | 2025-09-13 23:11:17+00:00
> it doesn't help a bit.

I would replace "it doesn't help a bit" with "it doesn't solve the problem". My casual browsing experience is that X is much more intense / extreme than Facebook.

Of course, the bigger problem is the algorithm - if the extreme is always pushed to the top, then it doesn't matter if it's 1% or 0.001% - the a big enough pool, you only see extremes.
by jitl | 2025-09-13 23:11:59+00:00
I find Swift to be a nice, less Rust-y Rust. It uses automatic memory management by refcounting (I would call it a GC’d language but people start flame wars about it). Alas ecosystem is small and oddly shaped.

Like with Rust you can write very imperative code full of mutation and thingies with tons of methods, or you can write very functional code passing around immutable struct values types. It also has decent async story, and newly got “actors” and is heading towards optional rust like borrow checking.
by sanarothe | 2025-09-13 23:12:08+00:00
When I was a teenager I submitted a random/unsolicited pull request to something in the spree ecosystem, got a very nice message from the maintainer/author saying that he appreciates it but it wasn't in the direction he wanted to take the library, but I could collaborate with him in some other way. Glad for the patience in that message, if it were spicy I might have been put off programming.
by palata | 2025-09-13 23:13:32+00:00
It's not rare for me to ask if they tested it. They can lie, but if they say they did and it crashes on me right when I start it, then I may never trust this contributor ever again.

Also I don't hesitate to be frank in my review, it's okay to say "I won't merge your feature because I don't think I can maintain that, but you're free to keep your fork". Or "I can merge it if you change this and this", but in that case I need to actually merge if they do what I asked for.
by kobalsky | 2025-09-13 23:13:45+00:00
I have seen it doing incredible stuff. One shotted adding a feature that included modifications to a proprietary backoffice system, db schema updates, defining new api models, implementing changes on the backend and then on the frontend.

I've also seen seen it choking when tasked to add a simple result count on a search.

The short answer is, it's cheap to let it try.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-09-13 23:13:48+00:00
To replace a historical C tool, you cannot compromise too much on the original constraints. Replacement has to be equivalently fast and no runtime. Which means even if you made a great design in C#/Java/Python/whatever, that is going to be a deal breaker for some. Safety is (somehow) not a compelling enough argument vs battle-tested.

Rust (or Go) are about the only popular languages around that can meet the spec. That Rust will always be theoretically more performant than GC Go makes it the more attractive option for re-imagining some of these bedrock utilities.
by vlovich123 | 2025-09-13 23:14:03+00:00
> So far I've always succeeded without using "unsafe" or indices, but it drags down productivity.

I really don’t understand this perspective. The whole philosophy of Rust is one where you document why “unsafe” is safe. It is not and never has been a goal to make everything safe because that is an impossible goal to merge with high performance systems language because hardware itself is unsafe. It’s why the unsafe keyword exists. If that wasn’t the goal, unsafe wouldn’t.
by bdangubic | 2025-09-13 23:14:41+00:00
same. 50’s, coding since the 90’s, make more $$ than I can spend in 3 lifetimes. one constant thing in my 3 decade career has been that absolute best people I worked with all had one common thread - absolute laziness. sounds strange but every other trait of a great SWE has not been universal except laziness.

the laziness manifest itself into productivity as crazy as this sounds. how? lazy people find a way to automate repetitive tasks. what I have learned from these over the years is that anything you do twice has to find a way to be automated as third time is around the corner :)

what does this have to do with AI? the AI has taken automation to another level allowing us to automate so much of our work that was not previously possible. I found myriad of ways to use AI and several of my best (lazy) co-workers have as well. I cannot imagine doing my work anymore without it, not because of any “magic” but because my lazy ass will be able to do all the things that I have automated out
by scaredofwatcher | 2025-09-13 23:14:55+00:00
jesus wtf. I feel almost targeted by this.

Dude, I dont know how related this is but I was on nofap and had made some post s in nofap

and then somehow I leaked it to my school

and then people called me edgelord for fuck's sake. I am not even kidding, wtf are you my fbi agent or something????????

HOLY FUCK DUDE, Literally the bullying was insane for something that was my past and it hurt me so much that i was near suicidal.

i still get hurt by bullying but I have someone on my side now so it feels better.

Never lose hope in life. Please look up suicidal helplines my friends. and please never bully, i see so many comments bullying because they want me to grow up when its a silly excuse for just being bs / trolling me / being sadist in taking joy out of me when i consistently told them that i consider it offensive in whatever i can say. holy fuck.

the nightmares.

I learnt it the hard way.
by Lerc | 2025-09-13 23:15:01+00:00
>My point isn't that it's automatically harmful, simply that there is a very strong incentive to protect the revenue. That makes it daunting to study these harms.

The problem is that having an incentive to hide harms is being used as evidence for the harm, whether it exists or not.

Surely the same argument could be applied that companies would be incentivised to make a product that was non-harmful over one that was harmful. Harming your users seems counterproductive at least to some extent. I don't think it is a given that a harmful approach is the most profitable.
by Tade0 | 2025-09-13 23:15:17+00:00
My maternal grandparents are currently 98 and 96 and the last time I visited them grandpa said that his father didn't live to age 60.

Meanwhile he has an older sister who, while bedridden, is very much alive at 100.

I suppose the necessary medical breakthroughs happened in the second half of the 20th century, as no one, including the people in question, anticipated they would live this long. Grandma even stated in her will that my second oldest cousin would inherit the apartment - supposedly to have "a better start in life when she grows up". That was 30 years ago and my cousin's oldest child should be in high school now right now.
by IncRnd | 2025-09-13 23:15:26+00:00
Best Site Ever.

I just purchased an Infinity for home, a Quantum Wrench for work, and a Self-Cleaning Nuclear Blast for cooking when I travel.

I can't wait until those arrive! They look even better than the 217 Samsung TVs I purchased to give as bonuses to the maids at a couple of my properties.

Why travel the world, when I can travel all of reality-writ-large?!?
by saghm | 2025-09-13 23:15:32+00:00
> Perhaps (though i lean towards disagreement), but that discussion is not with the maintainer or rest of the team. "I thought about it and this is the best approach trust me bro" is not a great push request. All those questions the contributor answered and "discussed" are un-resolved for everyone else, and the burden of proof should be on the contributor.

I'm not sure what I'm missing, but that sounds very similar to the idea that the parent comment says about reflection happening before, during, and after writing the code. It's not at all uncommon for me to explain some code I pushed for review with something like "Originally, I planned to use approach X, but then I ran into complication Y, so I switched to approach Z to handle that". At least to me, this fits the pattern of reflecting beforehand (selecting an initial approach), during (deciding on how to handle a complication during the process of development), and after (literally the explanation itself to describe how the final state was reached), but it doesn't sound anywhere close to "trust me bro".

I don't read the parent comment as arguing against these sorts of explanations, just against the idea that the explanation could be sufficiently written entirely up front before any of the code was written.
by ameixaseca | 2025-09-13 23:15:37+00:00
As I said, I have no intention of starting an argument.

I would just like to point out a few issues:

A) I deliberately focused on the language itself in my claims.

The functions I cited earlier were meant to illustrate the side effects of a certain mindset of the core language.

Keep in mind: these functions are not from some random library in the ecosystem, but from the core library of the language, providing core functionality. And that hasn't changed, nor the functions.

B) You've made a number of statements in response to my comments, but I don't see any supporting references.

The only justification you've given is your own opinion that "the article is too old and not relevant anymore".

Which takes us to point C.

C) I skimmed through the article again, along with the general documentation of the language, and I stand by this statement:

"Every major point in that article about the language is as relevant today as it was in 2012."

PHP might work fine for templating some web pages, but so does Jinja. As a general programming language, it falls short in too many ways to list here. You can revisit the original article I mentioned before for a more comprehensive list, in particular the "core language" section.

Well, at least that's my opinion. As I said, you're free to disagree - and that's OK.

--

Side note: The easiest approach during a disagreement in an online discussion is to write a lot of "opinion-based statements" as if they were facts, and leave everything else as an exercise for the reader.

If you want to be taken seriously, please don't do that.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-09-13 23:15:58+00:00
But we could have it so much better if there was more effort put into a next generation of tools that take all the harsh lessons learnt from the tools before and "just" do it better.

We've had 50+ years to do that. Progress has been unimpressive, to be charitable. It's time to let some different people try something else.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-09-13 23:16:04+00:00
This raises two questions.

- Does this suggest that courses of antibiotics might reduce heart attack risk?

- Does this suggest that regular use of, e.g., Listerine might reduce heart attack risk? (While, perhaps, slightly increasing esophageal cancer risk.)

It would be interesting to run an epidemiological study to see if current interventions move the needle in a meaningful way.
Show HN: TheBigBadMouse – A safe place to ask for anonymous help
by iCeGaming | 2025-09-13 23:16:12+00:00
Sometimes life throws you into situations where there’s no clear way out.

You try to do the right thing — report fraud, abuse, corruption, or a deeply personal issue. You go to the police, the courts, or the people in charge.

But then you hear things like: “It’s too complicated.” “We don’t have enough evidence.” “Why bother?”

And just like that, your problem disappears into a void. The system moves on, but you’re left with the fallout — stress, debt, ruined relationships, or even threats to your safety.

TheBigBadMouse.org was born out of this exact frustration.

It’s a simple, anonymous platform where you can share your story, seek help, and connect with others who understand. There are no logins, no tracking, no ads. Just a raw, unfiltered place to speak when no one else will listen.

The idea is simple:

Post anonymously about what happened.

Get feedback or advice from people who’ve been there before.

Find others who care, even when official channels don’t.

Over time, we hope to build a community of people who not only listen but can organize and act when institutions fail us.

It’s very early, and right now it’s just a barebones platform. But it’s live, and I’d love feedback on the idea, the execution, and whether this is something that resonates with anyone else.

https://thebigbadmouse.org/
by palata | 2025-09-13 23:16:57+00:00
> As an open-source maintainer, you should be ecstatic — in fact, you owe a significant debt — to every single person who engages with your project.

I totally disagree. I don't owe them anything at all. If anything, they're using my work, for free.

> After all, if you don’t want those interactions, keep your code to yourself!

Because I'm giving my code for free (generally under a copyleft licence) does not mean at all that I want interactions.

> The goal in open-source must always be to create a positive, compounding community.

Again, no. It may be one of your goals if you want to, but it's perfectly fine to open source your code without wanting to create a community at all.
by brandonb | 2025-09-13 23:18:10+00:00
Can you expand more on why you'd want regular CRP over hs-CRP (specifically for cardiovascular risk)?

For homocysteine, one proxy is B12 or folate (which are more cost-effective to test). To my knowledge, ESR is used in certain rheumatologic conditions, and was used more often in the past, but isn't currently used for heart disease.
by figbert | 2025-09-13 23:18:12+00:00
I was tricked into trying Gleam earlier this summer, and really liked it! I anticipate that I will at least use it for all future web projects (one example: https://github.com/FIGBERT/bdab) due to my serious JavaScript allergy.

I will note something that might be of use for the work in this particular article: https://hexdocs.pm/gleam_stdlib/gleam/dynamic/decode.html

Gleam Decoders are something I haven’t fully wrapped my head around, but are supposedly very powerful and do exactly what this article is focused on (parsing input data into Gleam types) in a more(?) idiomatic way.
by watersb | 2025-09-13 23:19:23+00:00
This is about the app that first shipped with PowerPC "Classic" Macs.

As a tech demo for PowerPC performance, it was beautiful.

It was ported to NeXTStep-based macOS with the new millennium.

You can still find an equation graphing app in Applications → Utilities; it's called "Grapher".

I just checked on my MacBook, macOS Tahoe Release Candidate, and the app is part of the immutable /System partition at /System/Applications/Utilities/Grapher.app
by b112 | 2025-09-13 23:20:31+00:00
You're not wrong about "change" meaning "new potential wealth streams". But not sure Facebook counts, 2004 vs 1993 shows an immense difference in network connectivity and computer ownership. No way, hands down, Facebook would be what it is, if it started in 93. It probably would have gone bankrupt, or been replaced by an upstart.