MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zamadatix | 2025-09-19 17:10:17+00:00
I'd also agree Trump is more conservative than Biden is liberal, but I think we're getting a bit into the weeds here...

The point with Biden and Trump is whenever free speech is mentioned, people conclude the part of a political spectrum they identify with is being attacked by someone they perceive as being on a different part, with no belief there could ever be a person actually worried about free speech itself. It's not at all about whether I agree or disagree with where they perceive that threat to be from on the spectrum, it's just what such people like to claim. I've yet to see a normal political spectrum where 100% of folks agree with free speech absolutism, even when inconvenient.

To folks who actually care about free speech instead of partisan politics, the idea of debating where on a scale of 1 to 10 the source of the threat might be from is in itself absurdly irrelevant. To folks that don't care about free speech, it's convenient to perceive free speech claims as only ever having a hidden partisan agenda instead of allowing the possibility of a free speech absolutist. The only exception I can think to any of this is a political spectrum where one side is "free speech absolutism" itself.
by godelski | 2025-09-19 17:10:25+00:00
Thanks! That's some interesting evidence right there. Like you suggest, not enough to outright verify the WaPo article, but it should make us not dismiss it outright either. I really wonder how they are defining the difference, because if it's just like your demonstration then it's probably not meaningfully different.

Can you repeat with libraries? I'm not sure I'll be able to analyze that security though.

And are you able you share the prompts and output?
by daemonk | 2025-09-19 17:10:31+00:00
So the queen can lay 3 types: hybrid female, Ibiricus male, structor male. Did they do karyotyping? Is it actually that the queen somehow removed its own genetic material from the nuclei or does it somehow get silenced when the M. structor genetic material is present in the nuclei (which is interesting by itself). Perhaps some kind of complex imprinting is happening.
by kccqzy | 2025-09-19 17:11:05+00:00
This is classic short term thinking. Whether or not AI is a bubble like the dot com bubble remains to be seen. But gamers have been buying Nvidia since before the dot com bubble and it is a market demand that has existed for a long time and will continue indefinitely. It doesn't make sense to cede this market to AMD.

I purposefully compare AI boom with the dot com bubble because we all knew how important the internet became eventually, but investments in it were way ahead of its time.
by whstl | 2025-09-19 17:11:23+00:00
Exactly the situation in pretty much every company I worked at in the last 10 years.

Fighting the Product Manager, fighting the Designer, sometimes even fighting some micromanaging stakeholder that won't leave you alone.

It's definitely fights I can win, but do I even have the energy anymore? Development work involves more than meets the eye. While there are some folks who understand the technical intricacies, it's tiring having to join discussions you know won't go anywhere.

I wish it was 2000-2010 again, when my biggest problems were Sales promising features we don't have and then having fun with the other devs coding it.
by dkarl | 2025-09-19 17:11:26+00:00
Did the author miss it when this happened twenty years ago?

In 2000, at my very first job, was when I first met a developer who got into it for the money and not for the love. When he told us he picked computer science in college because it seemed like it was a good way to make a living, and a lot easier than law or medicine, the rest of us programmers looked at him like he had sprouted a second head. By 2010, people like him were the norm.

Who cares, though?

If you're a "curious" developer, the existence of a massive preponderance of incurious engineers who are in it for the money doesn't change who you are. It doesn't have to change how you see yourself.

Socially, there are more "curious" developers to connect with and learn from than ever before.

The downside is that people outside of the industry will draw conclusions about you based on their perception of engineers as a whole. Boring and mercenary.

But let's face it, in the eyes of most of the population, boring and mercenary is a step up from how we were perceived when it was just us nerds who were weird enough to enjoy it.
by zipy124 | 2025-09-19 17:11:58+00:00
That number is not tax as a percent of profit like corporation Tax, but includes all contributions. For example 23.5 from that number is just social security paid by the company. In other developed countries like the UK we also have those sort of taxes (at 15% of pay in the UK). It is misleading of the report to give this number as a % of profit since then if a company makes no profit, it technically has an infinite tax rate, despite the fact the tax owed does not depend on the profit.
by calebm | 2025-09-19 17:12:04+00:00
So just to clarify - yes, I do think looking at the sun directly for very short periods is good (especially if it's lower on the horizon). But overall, what I as trying to get at is that being outside and getting the bright light of the sun on your eyes is helpful. The best way to do this is on the water. When you look at the sun reflecting off the water, you are getting the bright light, but because the water is reflecting it, and the waves are constantly changing the angles, the sun like gets spread evenly over your eyes.

For the naysayers, if looking at the sun is so bad, why is it not considered bad to look at the sun's reflection on the water? Additionally, when the sun is low, if you look at the brightness of the sunlight, it is less bright than some artificial light sources, and doesn't hurt to look at. How could this be bad?
by dfxm12 | 2025-09-19 17:13:02+00:00
Your job is not to prove why you prefer Chinese style kitchens. I merely asked you to explain your analogy.

I was trying to understand your analogy, because, having cooked in western kitchens and been in bedrooms (often in the same house!), it made no sense to me. It's not like people generally sleep in their kitchens. Your reasoning seems to be that cooking makes your house smell. Even if this is true, I still don't see how this makes your kitchen feel like your bedroom.

Then you talked about hoods, with an undefined "adequacy" measure. I correctly suspected here you were going to use this undefined adequacy measure to move away from the analogy about cooking in your bedroom (presumably because it is inexplainable) to start a separate argument and take it wherever you needed to. You found some study (about Canada, but there's a lot of "West") that talks about hoods (being found in 90% of homes). But you see, some of these hoods are not adequate enough... sigh

OK, all that is beside the point, because again, what does any of this business about hoods have to do with bedrooms?
by jonas21 | 2025-09-19 17:13:06+00:00
The frontier moves over time. If you stay at any one spot, it will eventually mature and become less fun and interesting. There will be more of the clock-in / clock-out types, and that's perfectly fine -- as you pointed out above, at different stages in life, people may be looking for different things, like stability.

But if you're looking for that spark and excitement again, you need to get back out to the frontier. One frontier that is particularly exciting to me is using AI to speed up the tedious parts of the development process, and to tackle areas where I don't have specialist knowledge. Similarly to how Linux opened up a powerful OS to individuals, AI is enabling individuals to create things that would have previously required large teams.
by squigz | 2025-09-19 17:13:08+00:00
I'm unsure why you think I don't already try to live a "good" life.

To me, and most atheists I've discussed this with, death is not an "abyssal, terrifying maw" - it is simply the natural conclusion to life of any kind. It does not 'scare' me; it inspires me to live a good life, to help others, to die with the knowledge that I hopefully made the world a slightly better place.
by KittenInABox | 2025-09-19 17:13:42+00:00
If my wife suggested that we need to manage our budget by curbing just my spending on the occasional Steam sale, instead of figuring out a way to downsize our two SUVs, I would consider her a huge piece of shit.

[In comparison, the government just announced increasing funding to ICE by an order of magnitude more than 1B$]
by danielearwicker | 2025-09-19 17:13:50+00:00
Java approach: create the JVM to support one language, so it has rich high-level concepts that are unfortunately skewed toward certain assumptions about language design, and it can be reused only for other languages that are similar enough.

WASM approach: start very low-level so C is definitely supported. Thus everything is supported, although every language has to roll its own high-level constructs. But over time more patterns can be standardised so languages can be interoperable within a polyglot WASM app.
by Retric | 2025-09-19 17:13:51+00:00
Increasing the retirement age isn’t necessary. It increases overall prosperity in exactly the same way all those things that increase productivity do by allowing you to use extra labor on other problems.

Instead changing demographics means retirement benefits may need to alter their payout formulas, but more prosperity means more money for retirees in absolute terms even if they keep receiving the same percentage of GDP. IE X% of per capita GDP in 2025 is way higher than X% of per capita GDP in 1975 adjusted for inflation easily offsetting increased lifespan. The same is nearly guaranteed in another 50 years.
by csdreamer7 | 2025-09-19 17:13:55+00:00
It also encourages users to upgrade to newer hardware since older devices are known to get slower as they age due to software increasing complexity and hardware mitigations (yes, they are also for phones). Most users will just blame the device.

Not saying that is the cause of this slow down, but since the mpeg4 patents don't expire till 2027(?) (and one of those patents prevents hardware decode on Linux) we as a society have given Google every incentive to do this and I welcome them to make mpeg4 irrelevant.
by mindslight | 2025-09-19 17:14:06+00:00
Trump is a master in captivating people to cast aside their values and go all in for Dear Leader. I bet many of the people who were conned are still supporters, and eagerly asking for another serving of Kool-aid.

One of the most glaring examples of the effect is how in his previous term he led all of all of his supporters to the opposite side of a clear second amendment issue - the summary execution of Breonna Taylor in retaliation for Kenneth Walker's Constitutionally-protected act of night time home defense. This is one of the exact situations the NRA and wider gun lobby always invokes to rally support, and yet they just completely discarded it in favor of cheering on the jackbooted home invaders that came to make those "cold dead hands".

I'm just waiting to see where Trump's current gun control push is going to go. Gun registration/prohibition for "trans, foreign-looking people, liberals, antifa hiding under your children's beds, etc", but really anyone and everyone who might have some semblance of a spine. These cultists really have no values left.
by ryandvm | 2025-09-19 17:14:39+00:00
I don't like agreeing with the Cato institute, but the reality is that the FCC has long enjoyed excessive power to override the 1st amendment.

https://www.cato.org/blog/jimmy-kimmel-fcc-why-broadcasters-...

Fortunately MAGA doctrine requires overt and performative bullying, so these dinguses don't use the usual bureaucratic tricks and instead tweet "wE aRe cANcelLinG yOU!!!"
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-09-19 17:14:46+00:00
Sometimes I agree, but in other cases a merely administrative problem ends up meaning there's no effective remedy. The judge also ruled that the plaintiffs can't get an injunction against the prospective claims the court does have jurisdiction over. If the government can illegally cancel your grants at any time for any reason, and months of court action isn't enough to get them restored, I think it's fair for a journalist to summarize that as "courts are letting the government break the law without consequence".
by fair_enough | 2025-09-19 17:15:41+00:00
My university pulled the same BS 10-15 years ago. The worst part is that they sent the "test" email from the same email address they use for all of their other announcements, and then had the gall to send an automated "shame on you" reply if you clicked their link.

Knowing what I know now about the IT staff and professors and knowing in hindsight only 3-4 of my CS classes were of any relevance to my work, I seriously regret not cheating my way through undergrad. I wish I could take back the time I wasted on Java and spend it with my N64.
by catigula | 2025-09-19 17:15:52+00:00
You're saying the words but I suspect you haven't interrogated them. Again, I'm not sharing my speculation, I'm sharing my actual experience and conclusions as an atheist. Anyways, it doesn't seem like we're getting anywhere with our dialogue, cheers.

Also I want to point out that it's clear that you don't practice what I outlined or you wouldn't have mocked the belief of religious people as "a magical place in the sky", hence cargo cult morality. It looks like morality to you, it may even feel like morality, but it demonstrably isn't. You haven't inconvenienced yourself at all, you merely did what felt good.
by suzdude | 2025-09-19 17:15:53+00:00
As usual, simply reading the quote would quickly show that you're wrong:

> We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it

"My side" is Americans who think political violence is disgusting.

What 'side' are you on?
by _fat_santa | 2025-09-19 17:16:07+00:00
> The ocean we swim in has gotten bigger and deeper.

IMO this is the part that the author is missing. Back in the 2000's, software development was a much smaller field and your main focus was the "curiosity pond" where all the developers went to tinker.

Now software dev has expanded into an ocean. That pond is still there but the author missed the pond for the ocean.
by yorwba | 2025-09-19 17:16:26+00:00
If ibericus/structor hybrid females become sterile workers, but pure ibericus females become queens, that increases the share of ibericus genes in the next generation. So as soon as a mutation arose that had this effect, it outcompeted all other lineages, but also made ibericus dependant on hybridization with structor males to produce workers for the colony. The adaptation that is the focus of the article works around this drawback by letting ibericus colonies produce their own supply of structor males.

So there are roughly three evolutionary phases:

1. Hybridization is common, but largely inconsequential.

2. Hybrid queen elimination.

3. Male cloning.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-19 17:16:33+00:00
Correct.

It's somewhat morally neutral in my view if someone is successful because their rich parents funded their aspirations. However, it has to be recognized just how insular big successful businesses are. It's more the exception, not the rule, that someone goes from rags to riches. They usually have a rich family member backing them. It's not what you know, it's who you know.
by thijsr | 2025-09-19 17:16:37+00:00
This is a project that we've been working in collaboration with Google and AWS. We present a vulnerability that allows a malicious virtual machine to leak all physical memory of its host, including the memory of other virtual machines running on the system. L1TF Reloaded combines two long-known transient execution vulnerabilities, L1TF and (Half-)Spectre. By combining them, commonly deployed software-based mitigations against L1TF, such as L1d flushing and core scheduling, can be circumvented.

We've demonstrated our attack on real-world KVM-based cloud solutions. Both Google Cloud [1] and AWS [2] wrote a blog post in response to this attack, where they describe how they mitigate against L1TF Reloaded and how they harden their systems against unknown transient execution attacks. Google also decided to award us a bug bounty of $151,515, the highest bounty of their Cloud VRP yet.

PoC is available at https://github.com/ThijsRay/l1tf_reloaded

[1] this submission

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/ec2-defenses-against-l...
by soiltype | 2025-09-19 17:16:42+00:00
> (Rome itself — the exception that proves the rule

You really have to explain specifically what you mean by this phrase, or else it's typically just saying you don't actually understand the rule or the exception.

It sounds like you're claiming Rome succeeded for reasons that overcame its geographical disadvantages, and due to this growth protected itself from naval invasions. But Rome was not a maritime power during its early republic period, let alone earlier. So why didn't Carthage or anyone else just sail upriver (Rome was not on the coast, just to clarify the context) and destroy Rome? How did Rome succeed in the first place to become a maritime power capable of defying southern Italy's geography?
by buran77 | 2025-09-19 17:17:05+00:00
It wouldn't have killed you to look for something slightly older, seeing how I mentioned Babylon.

The oldest European map, of Greek origin, unsurprisingly has the Aegean at the center, and North pointing up.

Creativity historically played a part in drawing maps but the "up on the map is better" philosophy is rejected by the reality of the first documented maps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps
by firefax | 2025-09-19 17:17:21+00:00
Can we get a shout out to all the projects that are just barebones 90s style HTML?

Fast loading, clean design, right to the point.

Contrast that with say, Parrot Security: https://www.parrotsec.org/

Now, the design itself is nice. Prominent download button, some marketing copy, then documentation etc... but only if I enable JS -- otherwise, just a blank page.

Maybe I'm paranoid or crazy, but I prefer to give JS out as little as possible. I appreciate when folks like paulg design a site like HN so that I can access the core functionality without JS.
by defgeneric | 2025-09-19 17:17:40+00:00
A clerk who once used a physical filing system but now uses a computer may naturally begin to bring the filing system to a higher level of abstraction. Think filing clerk -> database administrator -> relational algebra...

E.g. there would be enormous difficulty in replacing the Dewey Decimal System with something else, if only due to its physical inertia, but with a computer system a curious clerk can invent an alternative categorization and retrieval system which inevitably touches on mathematical topics.
by naasking | 2025-09-19 17:17:40+00:00
> Is something that can be easily achieved with Tailwind without either using @apply all over the place, effectively now doing regular old CSS but with Tailwind syntax, or by using JS/TS variables extensively making the styling pretty hard to read.

Define an html component, say MyButton:

<button class="h-8 other-inline-styles-here">{MyButtonText}</button>

And use that component everywhere and the styles carry through:

<MyButton MyButtonText="Click here!" />

People worry about regurgitating the same CSS with Tailwind, while continuing to regurgitate the same HTML structures all over the place. Encouraging inline styling encourages you to stop repeating your HTML, which is a better approach, even for a design system.
by arcfour | 2025-09-19 17:17:55+00:00
Where I was, they tracked who didn't do it, and came down on them, then their manager, and then it became an HR issue. Only one or two people went down the HR path, and then they did the training pretty quickly. Of course it didn't start harsh, just "hey, a reminder, we are tracking this and you need to do it" but when you blatantly ignored it the response got more firm.

Also, the last one I took they talked about phishing using a malicious Google docs link IIRC.

Anecdotes don't mean you know everything about a system.
by throw10920 | 2025-09-19 17:18:04+00:00
Here we have the "stupid" bit of my reference. No, the budget should not track population growth, because improved technology means that occasionally the cost to provide the same service to an individual decreases, whereupon the budget should also decrease. Or, for instance, a military threat or other transient event (eg COVID) that necessitated temporarily elevated funding levels expires, and the budget should decrease accordingly.

The converse being, of course, that sometimes transient events or large shifts (eg increase in costs of materials used to make some important good that the government procures) make things cost more, and so the budget should increase in proportion to those beyond population growth.
by borski | 2025-09-19 17:18:26+00:00
There is always a ton of work; off-the-shelf tools are rarely off the shelf and require set up, maintenance, etc.

A lot of writing glue code to build dashboards and things.

Nowadays, a lot of AI work to improve attorney and paralegal efficiency, etc.

Law firms have software devs and/or IT on staff, or they contract it out. Contracting rather than a W2 is also an option.

It’s not “fun.” But it pays well and is often doable remotely / part-time.
by constantcrying | 2025-09-19 17:19:44+00:00
People completely underestimate how drastically SW development has changed in demographics over the last two decades.

Millions of people entered the field, many of them explicitly because they saw it is a good job opportunity. The average software developer is now a completely different person than they were ten or twenty years ago. Importantly there has been a major shift towards people in India and other Asian countries, where development has been outsourced or where developers are hired from as well as differences in college graduates. This is clearly reflected in the job market, which is getting more competitive.
by aanet | 2025-09-19 17:20:19+00:00
Thanks.

This looks intriguing. From the article:

"The technology has learned to spot patterns in people's medical records to calculate their risk of more than 1,000 diseases.

The researchers say it is like a weather forecast that anticipates a 70% chance of rain – but for human health.

Their vision is to use the AI model to spot high-risk patients to prevent disease and to help hospitals understand demand in their area, years ahead of time...

The AI model was initially developed using anonymous UK data - including hospital admissions, GP records and lifestyle habits such as smoking - collected from more than 400,000 people as part of the UK Biobank research project[1]."

I'm curiously interested in understanding long-term health risk, and how to lower these, potentially with early interventions.

FWIW, the Nature paper quoted is here [2]

[1] https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09529-3
by tennysont | 2025-09-19 17:20:38+00:00
I very much agree with this. I'm sure that dev culture as a whole has gotten less curious as it has gotten more mainstream. However, I think that the absolute number of curious devs has grown. There are ways to convert that advantage to replace what is lost, but it does take effort. Although, I suspect that it took effort to be in tech 20 years ago---people just forget that (or had more effort to spare when they were younger).

-- a 28 year old