MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vidarh | 2025-09-22 10:38:39+00:00
> As an aside, there are elements of this sort of thing in Bay Area tech culture too.

The more general case of misaligned strength of a statement is widespread in other cultures as well.

E.g. I'm Norwegian, and it's not unusuals for Norwegians to use similarly soft language, though it's by no means universal. A statement like "perhaps it would be worth thinking about doing X?" will often mean "do X" or "do X right now!", and where you lie on the range from the literal meaning on one end and a direct order with an implied threat on the other extreme, may hinge on subtleties of intonation, which words are emphasised, and/or the personality and your relationship with the other person.

I live in the UK now, and my impression is that the same is true here but to a much lesser extent, and will then often be phrased in ways that may be easier to recognise by either being overly formal and/or wrapped in a layer of sarcasm.
by palata | 2025-09-22 10:39:03+00:00
I think they are not in a position where they have to actually solve the technical problem, but rather in a position where they decide what they believe is best for the society.

"If you were able to break encryption only for criminals, it would increase the security of the people. Please try to break encryption only for criminals" is not completely unreasonable.

The problem, of course, is that it's not possible. But for those politicians, cryptography is pretty much magic. Why wouldn't it be possible?

Same thing happens for climate change: instead of understanding the problem and facing reality, politicians (and honestly most people) stop at "scientists just need to find a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere efficiently". That's not how it works, but it doesn't prevent them from behaving as if it was possible. "It's magic, just do this one more spell".
by al_borland | 2025-09-22 10:39:09+00:00
I had a hard time making it through the Summary section of the resume. I assume the bold was there to help people skimming, but some of it seemed almost random. The first line has “roll out new features quickly” in bold, which is pretty generic and makes me question the value of the bold text. The “y” in “quickly” also missed getting the bold treatment. So from the first bullet I’m questioning judgement and attention to detail.

Should bullet 3 say, “based of chart museum” or “based off chart museum”? “Of” seems like the wrong word there.

Halfway through the summary I was ready to stop reading.

I would tighten that section up a lot, and distill it down more. Make it easier to read with less jargon. Make sure there are no typos. It should be easy to skim because it’s well-written, not because words are in bold.
by nayroclade | 2025-09-22 10:39:21+00:00
I'd much rather be on a cruise ship than a lifeboat, but that doesn't mean cruise ships shouldn't have lifeboats.

No serious advocate of settling Mars, Venus or anywhere else in space seriously believes it will be easier than remaining on Earth, nor are they suggesting that it means we can abandon the Earth entirely, or care less about protecting its biosphere. They simply understand that, no matter much of a relative paradise the Earth is, so long as 100% of humanity exists there then we are placing all our species' eggs at the bottom of a single basket's gravity-well. It will do us absolutely no good if we solve climate change, war, poverty, disease, etc. only to get wiped out by the next comet or mega-asteroid that smashes into us. And, statistically, eventually one will.
by pjc50 | 2025-09-22 10:40:25+00:00
See recently: https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive

I get the impression that, in hardware companies, software is often not taken very seriously, when it can cripple the user experience for trivial bugs. It's also annoying that it's "proprietary" rather than open source, when hundreds of models will be using the same chipset in the same way. It's not a competitive advantage, the sleep code, it can only be a disadvantage if it's done badly.
by Sesse__ | 2025-09-22 10:41:36+00:00
> If BitTorrent knew network topology, it could act smarter -- CDNs accept BGP feeds from carriers and ISPs so that they can steer the traffic, this isn't practical for BitTorrent!

AFAIK this has been suggested a number of times, but has been refused out of fears of creating “islands” that carry distinct sets of chunks. It is, of course, an non-issue if you have a large number of fast seeds around the world (and if the tracker would give you those reliably instead of just a random set of peers!), but that really isn't what BT is optimized for in practice.
by ffsm8 | 2025-09-22 10:42:54+00:00
I think I remember exactly what you're talking about, even though I completely forgot what software it was.

I believe it was a technical documentation and the author wanted to create visual associations with acteurs in the given example. Like clock for async process of ordering, (food -) order, Burger etc.

I don't remember if I commented on the issue myself, but I do remember that it reduced readability a lot - at least for me.
by tkfoss | 2025-09-22 10:43:30+00:00
Interestingly CD/DVD/BluRay optical pickup units can be used to build fluorescence [0]/laser [1] scanning microscopes, atomic force microscopes [2], nanoscale 3D printers [3], interferometers [4] etc, due to their high precision, low cost and high availability.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2950435X24000283 [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6066758/ [2] https://hackaday.io/project/186604-low-cost-and-high-speed-nanoscale-imaging-tool [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-021-00532-4 [4] https://opg.optica.org/ol/abstract.cfm?uri=ol-24-10-670
by kace91 | 2025-09-22 10:43:37+00:00
As someone taking adhd meds, I think you’re missing this person’s bigger point.

You can be stuck for decades, as I was, taking advice that won’t work for you, until you figure out that you can get a medical solution that instantly enables all of those pieces of advice becoming usable.

It is not a coincidence that those pieces of advice weren’t working, they were never going to work unless preceded by medical help.

Many people pre diagnosis suffer the equivalent of taking years of running advice and wondering why the stay behind before noticing they’re missing a leg and it won’t work until they get prosthetics.
by joz1-k | 2025-09-22 10:43:38+00:00
The problem is that AI can generate answers and code that look relevant and as if they were written by someone very competent. Since AI can generate a huge amount of code in a short time, it's difficult for the human brain to analyze it all and determine whether it's useful or just BS.

And the worst case is when AI generates great code with a tiny, hard-to-discover catch that takes hours to spot and understand.
by lenkite | 2025-09-22 10:43:46+00:00
That's an interesting assertion but does not hold to reality. Nearly every single modern Go library leverages Generics in some manner AFAIK. It is a feature primarily meant for library authors anyways. Go generics are still limited - nowhere as powerful as Rust/C++ or even Java's generics. Primarily because they added it too late and ran into considerable trouble, instead of upfront thinking about the design.

Interfaces however are far more fundamental. Any app with components and modularization would declare intent through interfaces. Not having interfaces/traits as a language feature is like living without a hand or leg. Sure you can limp and hop, but it will get rather tiresome.
by gadders | 2025-09-22 10:44:20+00:00
I would say for me that the difference between Influencing and Manipulating is that when you manipulate someone you could a) advance arguments you know to be untrue or that you don't intend to fulfil (negotiating in bad faith) and/or b) trying to get someone to do something that you know with a high degree of certainty is against their best interests.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-09-22 10:44:43+00:00
I wish the western allies would dump their US bonds to drive bond yields into the ground and threaten US budgets, like the military one, that relying on cheap debt.

But this is a difficult decision to make, do you sacrifice possible (less likely) future earnings to destabilize a super power to save it from fascism but in turn risking a power vacuum to your disadvantage?

Id take this gamble but im a mere democratic citizen, that doesnt care about global pro-fascism support, like other right leaning governments do.
by arthens | 2025-09-22 10:44:46+00:00
I'm skeptical this is the reason:

- Chatgpt uses mdashes in basically every answer, while on average humans don't (the average user might not even be aware it exists)

- if the preference for em dashes came from the training set, other AIs would show the same bias (gemini and Le chat don't seem to use them at all)
by scrapheap | 2025-09-22 10:47:00+00:00
Interestingly that would put some UK banks as running code that was written when the currency was still Pounds, Shillings and Pence.

In the past I've heard that some banks put a decimalisation layer on top of their existing business logic, that would translate between the old Pounds, Shillings and Pence currency, and the new decimal currency. I wonder if there are any banks out there which still have Pounds, Shillings and Pence at the heart of the computer systems.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-22 10:47:47+00:00
Exactly this. The EU has shown what happens when you let a minority run amok with the keys to the weapons locker. The scars are still plentiful and even if the last of the eyewitnesses are dying we are still steeped in the lore of the lead-up, the middle of and the aftermath of World War II. That Germany is seeing a resurgence of this is at least as scary as seeing how many other countries are easily programmed to start their march to the drumbeat of Nazi or ersatz ideology, only with slightly different scape-goats. For now it is not quite enough to tip the balance but that could happen at any moment. I hope we'll see the last of the bullet holes in the buildings patched before we start making new ones. That's the one use I have for russia right now: they seem to help us remember and it seems to serve as a uniting force.
by Someone | 2025-09-22 10:47:50+00:00
For the basic processes, why wouldn’t they? It’s not like adding an amount of money to an account while simultaneously subtracting the same amount from another account has gotten out of vogue or that the algorithms to do so have changed.

FTA: “the reason it lasted is because it was very simple and it worked properly and it was high volume, simple transactions,” he added. “The banks are moving away from these systems because the people who understand them are leaving, and no young professionals want to learn languages like Cobol.””

I guess young professionals do not want to write software that is very simple and works properly (/s, but only partially)
by pjc50 | 2025-09-22 10:48:11+00:00
The future of everything with a text entry box is AIs shoveling plausible looking nonsense into it. This will result in a rise of paranoia, pre-verification hoops, Cloudflare like agent-blocking, and communities "going dark" or closed to new entrants who have not been verified in person somewhere.

(The CVE system has been under strain for Linux: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Linux-Criticism-reasons-and-con... )
by iefbr14 | 2025-09-22 10:48:37+00:00
> It found that 50% of banks admitted to relying on software that only one or two staff members, who are at or near retirement age, understand.

This is an organizational problem or just plain neglect. I learned cobol back in the seventies in one day. I used it for 40 years and I never had any problems understanding programs written by others.
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-09-22 10:49:04+00:00
> “The fact that the EU interior ministers want to exempt police officers, soldiers, intelligence officers and even themselves from chat control scanning proves that they know exactly just how unreliable and dangerous the snooping algorithms are that they want to unleash on us citizens,” commented Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer. “They seem to fear that even military secrets without any link to child sexual abuse could end up in the US at any time. The confidentiality of government communications is certainly important, but the same must apply to the protection of business and of course citizens communications, including the spaces that victims of abuse themselves need for secure exchanges and therapy. We know that most of the chats leaked by today’s voluntary snooping algorithms are of no relevance to the police, for example family photos or consensual sexting. It is outrageous that the EU interior ministers themselves do not want to suffer the consequences of the destruction of digital privacy of correspondence and secure encryption that they are imposing on us.”

EU ministers want to exempt themselves (https://european-pirateparty.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-wan...)
by al_borland | 2025-09-22 10:49:05+00:00
In the past (20 years ago), those tier 1 roles were a great feeder for the organization. Because that role touched so much, it meant everyone had a lot of perspective on the organization as a whole, and thought about support and maintenance while building new things.

It’s easy to say who cares and hire from the outside, but that organizational context and care for support is lost. People build whatever and throw it over the fence, which makes everything worse, imo. Those people also tend not to stick around, so they have no skin in the game and it’s hard to develop culture as people rotate in and out frequently.

There are always some people who will never learn, and these people are cheaper, but there are other hidden costs as you seek to optimize for low-skill workers.
by epolanski | 2025-09-22 10:49:14+00:00
It's no coincidence that most of the countries that at some point become more autocratic are presidential republics.

Linz has argued that presidential republics have the following issues:

- dual democracy legitimacy (both president and legislature claim popular mandate)

- rigidity (fixed term rather than parliamentary approval prevents adaptation to crises)

- winner take all logic (total exclusion of opposition from power)

- personalization of power (authority concentration)

Further, the Carnegie Endowment in 2025 found that autocratic transitions occur at "striking speed" in presidential systems.

[1] https://kellogg.nd.edu/sites/default/files/old_files/documen...
by gampleman | 2025-09-22 10:50:26+00:00
I suspect that a lot of this form of cultural subtlety is designed to be hard on purpose. This allows individuals to show off and spar on a fairly harmless linguistic level - "he is so suave, she conveys her meaning just so" etc. Effectively it is a way to show off verbal + emotional intelligence in a way that doesn't look like showing off, since it's all about politeness.

The fact that it makes it hard for foreigners to productively engage is just a side benefit of the arrangement.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-22 10:51:09+00:00
24 years ago, and someone did act. I see this all as a result of 9/11 and Bin Laden & company giving the US just what it needed to end up authoritarian. Effectively he won that day and managed to damage the USA in ways that it did not have a mechanism to effectively deal with. As a result the USA has made one own goal after another and it does not look like they've decided to stop doing so.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-09-22 10:51:26+00:00
That looks like it would be easy to argue that it passes (claiming "makes the platform better for everyone", "not achievable without using the data", "the data is data that the people share voluntarily on the platform and isn't sensitive", "they're customers, we e-mailed them and they could opt out if they cared", "we expect this to have no impact on the individuals" (until the AI starts regurgitating sensitive details, but that's an "oops" for later), and "we are offering an opt-out even though we wouldn't have to" (claimed despite the lawyer strongly urging an opt-out, otherwise they wouldn't have even offered that).
by mcdeltat | 2025-09-22 10:54:01+00:00
I wrote about this a while back [1] because most documentation is just plain bad. At best it's a reiteration of what is obvious and at worst it doesn't exist. Far too often it says too little of the bigger picture and too much of oddly specific edge case details. If I can't come to your project from 0 knowledge about your project and get it running without tearing my hair out, the docs failed.

[1] https://mc-deltat.github.io/articles/what-the-f-is-this-code...
by jacquesm | 2025-09-22 10:54:46+00:00
As another European: Obama didn't make things (much) worse, but he also didn't do anything to really arrest the slide even though he had the opportunity to do so. At the same time: I realize that in many ways his hands were tied but he also simply never tried, when he could have. Similar to how it took him 7 long months to speak up when he really should have spoken up much, much earlier. Right now the whole democratic wing of the US establishment looks like it is along for the ride, rather than that they are fighting tooth and nail to arrest the further descent into madness.
by devoutsalsa | 2025-09-22 10:55:11+00:00
Evolution of LinkedIn posts over time...

"Should you choose to inscribe the lexical designation 'DOMINATE' within the commentary section, I shall subsequently furnish you with my proprietary methodology for accumulating substantial financial wealth in the millions."

"Comment the word DOMINATE and I'll share my secret method for making millions of dollars."

"yo if u type DOMINATE in comments ill tell u how 2 get mad rich like millions n stuff fr fr no cap"
by cornholio | 2025-09-22 10:55:39+00:00
We will quickly evolve a social contract that AI are not allowed to directly contact humans and waste their time with input that was not reviewed by other humans, and any transgression should by swiftly penalized.

It's essentially spam, automatically generated content that is profitable in large volume because it offsets the real cost to the victims, by wasting their limited attention span.

If you wantme to read your text, you should have the common courtesy to at least put in a similar work beforehand and read it yourself at least once.
by derf_ | 2025-09-22 10:56:39+00:00
I cannot tell you how many times I've had to go through 30 hyperlinked pages of fluff explaining universal basic concepts before finding the five sentences I actually needed (buried in five different places).

And just as many where people explain in detail exactly how to do foo with bar without explaining why I would want to do foo in the first place and what a bar even is.
by jhanschoo | 2025-09-22 10:56:46+00:00
You are mistaken.

> in war, murder is often praised;

The killing of an enemy combatant, for example, is usually lawful, praised and not considered murder. Generally speaking, the killing of a civilian is sometimes a war crime and considered a murder.

You also have a lot to say on the nuanced ethics of killing and on sexual violence, but these deal with the underlying concepts themselves and the words don't matter; in fact philosophers frequently give common terms a specialized, ad-hoc definition when they want to discuss these concepts themselves.
by technothrasher | 2025-09-22 10:56:56+00:00
Back when I had my Indigo XS24 up and running as my main workstation, I remember they used to put out periodic "Hot Mix" demo CDs with a bunch of the latest third party software to try out. Loading the demos off the CD was excruciatingly slow, but I definitely looked forward to getting the disks in the mail.
by tiempie | 2025-09-22 10:57:21+00:00
Note, the API is written in GO and based on your JSON structure. So the example below is for CRUD-ing [key1][key2] in file.json. The value (which can be anything) is then added to the body of the request. Moreover, there are helper functions for appending and incrementing values. Great for personal projects!

DELETE/PUT/GET: /api/file/key1/key2/...
by Brendinooo | 2025-09-22 10:57:33+00:00
>And Luke 16:9, which you quoted, is taken out of context.

What context am I missing?

>Not so much that they give away all that they have, as Jesus commanded

Matthew 19:16-30, which you're quoting, is taken out of context.

https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/does-jesus-teach-us-t...
by Retr0id | 2025-09-22 10:58:10+00:00
This aspect is fascinating

> The breakdown came when another chatbot — Google Gemini — told him: “The scenario you describe is an example of the ability of language models to lead convincing but completely false narratives.”

Presumably, humans had already told him the same thing, but he only believed it when an AI said it. I wonder if Gemini has any kind of special training to detect these situations.
by rnhmjoj | 2025-09-22 10:58:24+00:00
The opposition to chat control is really missing the point: chat control does not break encryption, the law is about mandating client-side scanning, not weakening cryptography so law enforcement can break it more easily or introducing backdoors. If you say "don't break encryption", they will just respond that this will not break encryption, which is true, but also completely irrelevant.

What we should be advocating instead is the freedom of doing whatever we want with our computing devices, which include rejecting the sort of crap companies and various government like to impose on ourselves.
by zecg | 2025-09-22 10:59:19+00:00
Let me be reasoned and measured and say fuck the entire gallery of those assholes. I only use Signal now, but I'm fully willing to give that up as well if this goes through and go full GPG-encrypted e-mail with keys exchanged IRL. The only thing I use the smartphone for other than Signal is navigation and OSMand works offline perfectly, I'll just pop my simcard into the cheapest dumbphone I can find and occasionally connect my phone to wifi to download new vector maps.
by Dumblydorr | 2025-09-22 10:59:24+00:00
Canoe camping is nicer than backpacking. I’ve done both and I’ll never prefer backpacking again. Much easier on the body to canoe, you can hold 200 pounds of gear, ice, cot, cast iron cookware, guitar, huge power bank.

Backpacking is spartan and uncomfortable by comparison. And with canoe camping, much more primo sites and much fewer people around.
by rdrd | 2025-09-22 11:00:00+00:00
Just watched your video, really love the style and openness.

My only suggestion is niche it down a bit. The SQL tutorial guides and features sound great, but the functional list feels a bit like a laundry list. Even here you describe it as a tool for "developers/founders/teams".

Try targeting a specific domain, tech stack, database type, or developer segment (e.g., large B2B teams, small B2B teams, indie devs, or funded startup founders) to stand out. If you pick a clear niche, you can build a stronger SEO strategy around long tail keywords and tailor both the product and the messaging and work out what order to build out features. Even if long term you plan on wanting it to be a tool for all databases, segments etc.

It's much easier to produce content with this in mind, e.g. if you were targetting getting the most out of Postgres you could easily produce a bunch of content for PostgreSQL 18 which formally came out of beta a few weeks ago and has native support for UUIDv7 etc.

Fwiw I’m doing a ton with SQLite atm as a solo dev. If your landing page had said "THE VERY BEST TOOL FOR SQLITE MANAGEMENT TO HELP SOLO DEVS AND SMALL TEAMS MAXIMIZE SQLITE PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY" there’s a good chance I would have signed up for updates but atm it felt a little generic, some of the features I might use, some I definitely would not.
by decafninja | 2025-09-22 11:00:55+00:00
Historically he has had bouts of anti-American rhetoric.

The same can be said with the Korean liberal/left parties in general, to varying degrees.

So while he is currently presenting himself as more of a centrist and pragmatist, it remains to be seen if he remains so.

Conspiracy theorists on the Korean right claim it is Trump that is playing into LJM’s hand in providing an excuse to pivot to the PRC.