MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zestyping | 2025-09-04 22:18:24+00:00
Okay, they messed up something here. The number of little ASCII-art person squares depends on the size of your browser window. The squares get smaller when you make the window narrower, so it looks like it was coded to try to keep the number roughly constant.

If I make the window narrow enough, there are 10 squares in a row and 19 rows, a total of 190 squares. The number that are coloured "very conservative", "conservative", "centrist", "liberal", "very liberal", respectively, are 39, 67, 24, 31, 29.

In percentages, that's 20.5%, 35.3%, 12.6%, 16.3%, 15.3%. Roughly 56% conservatives, 32% liberals.

If I make the window really wide, I see 20 squares in a row and 13 rows, a total of 260 squares. The distribution is now 39, 100, 37, 46, 38.

In percentages, that's 15.0%, 38.4%, 14.2%, 17.7%, 14.6%. Roughly 53% conservatives, 32% liberals.

It's weird that the number of squares increases and decreases when you resize the window, and I would argue it's misleading because there's an animated transition that is obviously meaningless. But it's a lot worse that the proportions aren't consistent! All of us saw exactly 39 in the "very conservative" category, so maybe it is failing to proportionally scale that category while scaling the others?

Conclusions:

1. There's a programming bug that misrepresents the proportions.

2. The sample is significantly skewed toward conservatives.
by syphia | 2025-09-04 22:20:17+00:00
I think that humans can find new frontiers to struggle on and develop mental faculties for, even if the prior frontiers are solved.

"Problem-solving" might be dead, but people today seem more skilled in categorizing and comparing things than those in the past (even if they are not particularly good at it yet). Given the quantity and diversity of information and culture that exists, it's necessary. New developments in AI reinforce this with expert-curated data sets.
by sagarm | 2025-09-04 22:21:04+00:00
I want to. I like that I can open multiple windows, tab them, share and save URLs, all with no stupid app-specific updater widget, a pretty good sandbox, and explicit permissions for breaking out of that sandbox in limited ways (e.g. notifications). All that works seamlessly and consistently on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Often the same URLs also work well on mobile (Android) without installing more stupid apps. Extensions allow you to modify the apps, while staying in the sandbox.

Native app updaters and tray icons and startup services are incredibly obnoxious.
by fzwang | 2025-09-04 22:21:05+00:00
I work with students (older teens/early 20s) and I understand the feeling of fear/despair. The reality is there are things you can't change and you should focus on those that you can. We're still not sure what is the impact of this generation of AI and it's hard to get an unbiased view amongst the hype. There are non-AI factors (ZIRP, Post-COVID, economic/demographic trends) that are likely contributing much more to the poor hiring conditions we're experiencing. Some comments/suggestions:

1) Take the emotion out of it. AI is just a technology and you don't have to love/hate it. Do try to understand it. Even if you are a skeptic of the LLM/AGI hype, the technology underneath it all is still quite fascinating. It surprized a lot of technologists.

2) Don't count on your degree. I think we're in this weird period where the traditional institutions are slowly collapsing, but the new hasn't been invented/popularized. Do finish your degree, but take time to hedge your bets and gain experiences outside of school. The great thing about being in your stage of life is you have very little to lose and a lot to gain from risk-taking. If you're constantly surrounded by your peers and academics, you'll not have the exposure to reality that you'd need to adapt.

3) Biggest skill that's missing, esp in Gen Z and not taught in higher ed, is how to communicate/signal to others like potential future employers. Beyond the superficial stuff like how to craft resume etc, but genuinely building your professional network. Who you know really matters. And not in the casual/family/we-play-golf-together sense, but out of professional respect. Make it a habit to reach out to engineers you admire and just ask for advice and interesting trends they're seeing (ex. in cybersecurity). When you do it as a student, and not as a job/favor-seeker, it changes the social dynamics. You'd be surprized how many would not only respond but talk your ears off. If they ignore you, big whoop, don't take it personally and just move on. A small minority of these people could make a huge impact on your life and career.

Some more tactical stuff:

- I'd assume you already know this, but resist the urge to use AI to learn. I've banned AI assistants for our junior engineers because they really slow down learning. It feels faster but you actually retain very little. We're re-discovering that doing things manually has a ton of long-term benefits that are hard to capture.

- Do take some effort to understand how businesses work. You'll likely be working in one and it's in your interest to understand the flow of money, incentive structures, and how businesses make decisions.

- Learn to eat well and exercise. It'll help boost your mood and not get bogged down in despair. Find ways to keep your spirit up for the long-term. Diversify your information diet away from TikTok, Instagram, and social media in general. Young people today have the dubious honor of being the first generation to have to fight off mass algorithmic addiction. Try to talk to more people in person to get a better sense of reality.
by beaugunderson | 2025-09-04 22:21:56+00:00
doesn't really match what I'm seeing in Chelan County, WA... the county is now in a fight with the port because the port wants to create a Tax Increment Area to capture the taxes from the two data center buildouts... ~$100m over 25 years. they also estimate $150m sales tax revenue and $70m in property tax revenue for those data centers. one relevant stat is that Microsoft will become the biggest taxpayer in the county.
by 1718627440 | 2025-09-04 22:22:16+00:00
> It really is simple: aging is incredibly harmful and undesirable.

Doesn't make it a disease. Dying is a normal part of life as well as the decline before that.

> If everyone was born with cancer, that wouldn't make cancer any less of a disease.

No, then the people not having cancer would have the disease.

> I would appreciate if the "norm" was recognized

That's not how a norm works. You get that by doing trials and statistics, not by wanting it to be different.
by someguydave | 2025-09-04 22:22:33+00:00
Right. My understanding is that military doctrine is generally to immediately attack when encountering an ambush. Presumably, that will throw your attackers off their pre-planned attack and help you regain the initiative. So you want a big enough defending team such that you can immediately assault the attackers while also retreating with your VIP simultaneously. For the counter-assault team, you want to suppress the ambushers as quickly as possible (get their heads down), thus the automatic weapons.

As int_19h points out, there are special-purpose weapons made for this (see "personal defense weapons") and they are likely what pros carry.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-04 22:22:38+00:00
It's a big number, but it's spread across a lot of different investments.

Some of those big-name VC funds wouldn't even return your call if you wanted to invest several million dollars. Founders Fund brings in multiple billions of dollars when they raise a new fund.

His fame and status unlocked his access.

> Also I doubt that ex: Thrive LPs would care about this kind of thing.

Thrive has raised over ten billion dollars. If a normal moderately wealthy person showed up with a couple million dollars to invest they would not be invited to be an LP.
by echelon | 2025-09-04 22:22:53+00:00
To be clear: the Section 174 changes that took effect in 2022 were disastrous and absolutely contributed to the layoffs.

BBB reverses the changes for years 2025-2029 (what happens after that, who knows) and provides retroactive relief to small businesses under a certain income cap. Large businesses can accelerate amortization, but remain impacted for those years.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-04 22:23:04+00:00
Ah. I think currency controls might have been a new term for you. Or I should have said ”capital controls” to be aligned with wiki. [1]

Currency controls is what for example Argentine has been doing with set exchange rates and limits on conversion while mandating that all local businesses must be done in their currency.

It is not about controlling the currency, it is about creating hinders for capital movements in and out of countries.

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_control
by rdsubhas | 2025-09-04 22:23:06+00:00
Interest rate was hiked rapidly from 1% (in May 2022) to 4% (in Dec 3 2022).

Oct 2022 recorded the lowest for S&P 500 since COVID (till now).

COVID assistance was over. Vaccination reached a critical majority. On Sep 2022, Biden declared "COVID-19 pandemic was over" [1].

Businesses got a reality check.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_Unite...
by jacobolus | 2025-09-04 22:23:44+00:00
Consiglio contro la pestilenza was apparently written in the Florentine language. You can find a nice scan at https://archive.org/details/ita-bnc-in1-00000486-001/ and the corresponding mediocre OCR at https://archive.org/stream/ita-bnc-in1-00000486-001/ita-bnc-... (using better OCR software could give a version with few errors; I don't think anyone has produced a carefully checked digital text). There's some discussion at https://www.jstor.org/stable/40606241 as well as plenty of other commentary around. If you are trying to figure out specific details about this book, you should just check the book. I wouldn't expect adding a carefully produced copy to an LLM training corpus would make that much difference unless you have niche questions about it.
by flysand7 | 2025-09-04 22:24:07+00:00
There's something similar I've done programming on linux. I've been working on some things in Odin programming language for a while and there are a ton of changes I've made where the commit contained an executable, because when Odin compiler makes the executable it names it after the main package's directory, without suffix.

Once I complained about this to the community someone suggested a clever gitignore hack:

* !*/ !*.*

This by default ignores all files, except those that have a suffix and directories. I think this is a useful lesson - if you flip which files you ignore you can change the failure mode from "I accidentally committed a huge file into a repo" to "why isn't it working?". The latter can be pretty much be answered by good CI testing (maybe not always though).
by 9rx | 2025-09-04 22:24:26+00:00
> There isn't really something called the "interests of the population at large" here, populations in reality are heavily heterogenous with often conflicting interests.

Incorrect. In a democracy, the people gather, present ideas, discuss, argue, and eventually reach agreement. That agreement may not be exactly what any individual wants, but the population at large does reach an agreement as to what is in its interest as a whole group.

> What I'm trying to point out here that a democracy is going to try to serve, or rather balance the interests of everyone involved.

Whereas in reality the interests don't show up. In fact, in the USA, showing up to the table (a.k.a. lobbying) has come to be considered abhorrent behaviour, even though that's technically the civic duty of all citizens in a democracy. Lobbying (i.e. gathering, presenting ideas, discussing, arguing, and eventually reaching agreement — and passing that result onto the massager, in the case of representative democracy) is the only way a democracy can function, fundamentally.

China isn't cut off from the rest of the world. They notice just as well as we do that even if these places are democratic on paper, the people don't actually practice it, instead leaving control to a small group of figureheads and the few people who do show up to (i.e. the 'evil' lobbyists). Their claim is that leaving control to that small group of people who are pushing their own personal interests, is, on the spectrum, ultimately less democratic than an equally small group that ostensibly takes in all the considerations of the population at large.

I infer that what you are trying to say is that in a place like the USA, the social environment would allow people to change their ways, kick the small group to the curb, and start practicing democracy, if for some reason they wanted to in the future, without tremendous pushback, whereas the CCP would not be so accepting. That is no doubt a fair assessment, but completely talking past the original point. It wasn't said based on some kind of future hypothetical.
by wubrr | 2025-09-04 22:24:35+00:00
The main discussion point of this comment chain is around the practical benefit to society of the NFL.

Coming in and saying 'we can't judge the practical societal value of anything because groups of people don't have values' is both incorrect and does not argue either for or against NFL as having a practical value, or introduce any new argument or data into the discussion.

> repulsive

Spare me the poetics, you're the only one to talk about repulsiveness in this comment chain so far.
by maplethorpe | 2025-09-04 22:24:45+00:00
I mean, I imagine that will be happening as well, but I don't think it would stop TV manufacturers from adding their own layers on top. Just like you can choose from different color and sound profiles, maybe you could choose a "cinematic" AI filter, which adds artificial rim lights to everything on screen.

Obviously this is a nightmare scenario for filmmakers, but it also feels like the logical conclusion of where we're heading.
by arp242 | 2025-09-04 22:24:45+00:00
It's just three blokes and a bunch of contractors. According to Wikipedia Hollow Knight sold more than 15 million copies, at $15 that's $225M. Of course you have store fees, and discounts, and taxes, and whatnot, but all of that accounted for they still made at least dozens of millions – if not more.

It's unclear if they would make more money if it was much more expensive. I picked it up for €19.50 today; not sure I would have paid €80.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-09-04 22:25:16+00:00
Absolutely loved this article, which tickles my ADHD brain in all the right ways. I learned that Ratatui does render-diffing, I learned that the Emacs render-diffing ("redisplay") is from 1981, is more sophisticated, and written by Java's creator (James Gosling).

I appreciated the explorations of the complexities of widget rendering, and syntax construction, and explorations of possible solutions and their tradeoffs, with ultimately a reasonable conclusion from the author that it wasn't worth their effort.

This was a great introduction to the design space of TUI libraries. Thanks!

> I think it's okay to both explore and to give up, other paths await.

100%, and thank you for taking us on this enlightening journey. Too much is lost to silent "failure"
by ggm | 2025-09-04 22:25:45+00:00
I may misunderstand it but Japan has two important differences:

Firstly, a significant number of houses are one family lifetime. People clearfell and rebuild routinely. The marginal value of a home is different when it's lifetime is constrained. Not all houses by any stretch, but its far more common.

Secondly Japan's population is shrinking. It's further along a pathway the developed economies share absent immigration. Thus, there is far more housing stock to head of population.

There is a third reason and it is perhaps more relevant: Japan's zoning laws are bizarre. You can put a house up next to a tire recycling plant, and have a Zen temple across the road and a sofa factory operating out of your front verandah. Nobody seems to care. California take note.
by lordnacho | 2025-09-04 22:25:52+00:00
Well, we can hope this is only a transitional issue. Here is why.

AI will, like previous technologies, enable some of us to become more productive. In fact, it raises the bar on productivity, since an experienced programmer can now create much more code. (An inexperienced one can create much more mess, so you might not see it in aggregate statistics).

When it comes to the classroom, we should do the same. We raise the bar so that in fact, you cannot do anything without using AI. Much as you would run out of time if you didn't have a spreadsheet in a stats course 20 years ago, or pandas 10 years ago. The new tech enables more work to get done in the form of learning more high level things, while relegating lower level things to just building blocks that can be understood in the same way we understand reference texts, ie "I've seen the principal once, and I can find it again if I get to that level of abstraction".

Teaching needs to change. Perhaps the thing to do is have an Oxford tutorial rather than traditional class. For those who didn't attend, a tutorial is basically two students and a professor in a room, talking. You can't hide. You can prepare however you like, and you should spend quite a lot of hours if you're sparring with a politics or math professor. But once you're in the room, it becomes painfully obvious if you are unprepared. This is a way to get accountability.

At the moment, we have this high school system testing that is a factory. Every test is done as a thing that is easily marked. Multiple choice, or short answer, or short essay. It encourages superficial learning when you know you can dance around the important topics and just pick up the easy points, as well as simply avoiding silly errors. You can also win by simply learning the likely questions, and aping the answers.

Have a weekly small-group session with an expert, and they can find your limits. Yes, it will cost money.
by zetazzed | 2025-09-04 22:26:34+00:00
Their revenue is like $670bln. If you come up with an innovation that increases that by 0.01%, say by better optimizing prices or targeting adds, you've added $60m of revenue. If you pay a star engineer $1m per year and they have even a reasonable chance of an improvement on this scale, or a similar reduction in costs, then you have a super profitable deal.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-09-04 22:26:39+00:00
Credit card based payment systems really shouldn't suffer these kinds of problems: The entire reason why credit cards exist in the first place (compared to debit cards) is to enable distributed, asynchronous, eventually-consistent payments. It should be perfectly normal for a business like steam to simply store the details necessary to process payment and then eventually reconcile with them, at a pace that the processors can handle. Instead we've built a world that operates under physics-violating assumptions. Gah.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-04 22:27:28+00:00
> Reminds me of the trick of telling yourself "let's give this my full attention for just 5 minutes, and if I still don't want to do it we can move on". I pretty much always end up wanting to keep doing that thing.

Inertia is a good mental model for attention in ADHD. I sometimes tell people that my attention is like a large truck. It can be hard to get it started and up to speed, but once it's up to speed it's hard to stop.

Spending 5 minutes on something is a way of forcing yourself to get started. Once you're up and running it's will be hard to break your attention. For that reason, it's important to choose carefully which things you deliberately spend attention on if you have ADHD.
by wubrr | 2025-09-04 22:27:36+00:00
I don't dislike sports. I love several sports, and am actively engaged in sports on a regular basis.

What I dislike is the mass propagandization of sports, and the use of sports as a means of mass advertising and manipulation of the public.

Also, just because something has an economic or cultural impact doesn't mean it's a benefit to society. WW2 also had an 'economic and cultural impact'.
by Zigurd | 2025-09-04 22:27:39+00:00
That Stripe is involved is probably the best endorsement of Stripe being involved in crypto. Banking in South America is something crypto skeptics have heard for many years now. I was involved in a project that combined crypto with mesh networking. The launch was going to take place in South America. Why? Because university students in Brazil are desperate for a little bit of side hustle money, and incentives could cross borders easily using crypto. This was backed by first tier VC that had a number of crypto investments, including fundamental crypto technologies, alongside other more mundane things. Nobody involved in the project had any intention of creating a bunch of poor student bag holders. Nevertheless, the combination of mesh networking and crypto based incentivization wasn't enough to even turn it into the next Helium (they still around?)

SpaceX using crypto? Are any of their customers seriously going to pay using crypto? Are they gonna pay any of their bills using crypto? I'm not trying to piss in your Cheerios. But making real world use cases not die of uselessness is going to be a challenge.
by jared_hulbert | 2025-09-04 22:27:40+00:00
We are seeing more SRAM in the form of CPU caches, this is one of the things that is actually scaling still.

Are you asking why not use SRAM in something like a DIMM? You could do this. Here's why I wouldn't advocate for this. Assume you had zero latency SRAM in your DIMM. It still takes ~40ns to get out of the processor by the time you go through all the memory controller and phy. So you'd have an incredibly expensive but small DIMM taking up limited pins on the processor package/die. Even then you'd only cut the memory latency in half, and we'd still be stuck at a new lower flatline.

Incorporating the SRAM in die is different story, you get to scale the latency and the bandwidth closer to the other capabilities of the cores.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-04 22:28:39+00:00
Starvation used to be "a normal part of life". So was having half your children die before they hit the age of 10. That was the normal, natural outcome of having a child - if you want to have grandchildren, just make more children! Some of them would live, surely!

This is how it was - until humans decided that this sucks and something should be done about that.

I see no reason not to dispose of aging at the earliest opportunity. And this starts by recognizing: aging sucks for everyone, and should be disposed of.
Subscriptions aren't enough for SaaS companies, we're now moving towards credits
by aosaigh | 2025-09-04 22:28:48+00:00
I just got an email from Netlify talking about their upcoming shift from fixed-priced subscriptions to a credit-based subscription.

You now pay for credits. When your credits run out, your website stops.

What counts towards credits?

- Deploys

- Compute hours

- Form submission

- Bandwidth

- Requests

Is this the next greedy evolution of subscription-based pricing?
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-04 22:28:52+00:00
>> high-growth startups in his portfolio include Anthropic (currently valued at $183 billion), Anduril ($30.5 billion), Ramp ($22.5 billion), Cognition ($9.8 billion), Neuralink ($9 billion), Strike (~$1 billion), and Polymarket (~$1 billion)

> His change of direction, elusiveness, and vision are all generational.

I hear he's pretty good at football too.
by const_cast | 2025-09-04 22:29:00+00:00
Are you going to expand on me being wrong or is "nuh uh!!" all you can offer?

The reason I'm smug is that technical people think they're hyper intelligent and cracked the code.

Ha! Those silly law makers! Don't they know I perfectly followed the laws algorithm and hit an edge case? Now they HAVE to let me off the hook!

No they don't. Why would they have to do that? Laws aren't algorithms, they're natural language intended to curb bad behavior.

If your behavior is bad, and a judge or jury thinks it's bad, you're getting curbed.

The inverse of that is you can actually break the law and get away with it, if the behavior isn't bad. Maybe it's justified, maybe you're a struggling single mother or something... the jury can just say "nahhh" and you go home.