MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 4ggr0 | 2025-09-12 16:47:28+00:00
yeah, my interpretation went too far, but even just attributing The Mental Health Crisis to smartphone usage, as if this really was a significant core-reason, is not right to me.

"Teens are sad because they spend all their time on their phones", then maybe ask yourselves why teens flee to their virtual spaces. (maybe look at what seems important to them and is at the same time being dismissed and ignored by the people older than them, while being told not to be idealistic and naive.)
by robinhood | 2025-09-12 16:47:39+00:00
The former website's version was genius. This new version is genius too, but for totally different reasons. It's so creative, funny, beautiful and technically advanced. It's also extremely hard to understand globally. I find it awesome to push things forward, but considering how different the UX is from a standard website, and how confused I've felt during the navigation, I wouldn't copy this version as much as I copied the other previous versions.
by contagiousflow | 2025-09-12 16:47:45+00:00
I'm sure the introduction of standardized tests are an improvement upon a current system, but that's not really the point I am making. My point is the ongoing use and optimization of them leads to worse outcomes overall in terms of actual understanding of the material.

> For one, it's a huge equalizer

Could you explain this for me? It's nice that everyone is taking the same test but every piece of data I've seen points to a clear correlation between household income and SAT score, hardly an equalizer.
by xnx | 2025-09-12 16:47:49+00:00
> Long-form scrolling. Oversized footers. Absurd whitespace.

> Why are we doing this? What if we just made better ways to consume content?

Yes! Yes!

> It has window snapping, keyboard shortcuts, and a bookmark app. It works as well as you’d expect an operating system to work in a browser.

Oh no...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-12 16:48:03+00:00
Regardless of H1Bs who received better grades, I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs. Citizens make the rules via governance, not corporations. You can hire someone good enough domestically vs the best globally to import. US corporations simply want the cheapest labor possible at the best possible price, which is where policy steps in. If it impairs your profits or perhaps even makes the business untenable, them the breaks.

At current US unemployment rates, no new H1B visas should be issued and existing visas should not be renewed based on criteria. If you're exceptional, prove it on an O-1 visa.

H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c... | https://archive.today/7JX9A - June 27th, 2025

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (citations)

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

HN Search: h1b - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://h1bdata.info/

https://www.h1bsalaries.fyi/
by somenameforme | 2025-09-12 16:48:12+00:00
I think something most people don't consider is that war is still about logistics. Every single soldier needs food, water, basic consumables, ammo, and more. And each group of soldier will need comms, fuel, and so on. With even a relatively small group of soldiers you rapidly enter into the domain of tons of supplies needed every single day. And in general the majority of an army isn't out there fighting, but participating in supply and logistics. It's called the tooth-to-tail ratio. [1] In WW1 it 2.6:1 logistics:combat, in the Vietnam War (with its lengthy logistics pipeline) it was 12.9:1!

Operating, maintaining, and expanding these logistics pipelines is essentially what war is. Drones can play a major offensive (and defensive) role, but soldiers remain the most critical component in war, and probably will for the foreseeable future.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth-to-tail_ratio
by hadlock | 2025-09-12 16:48:14+00:00
A lot of "netflix users" are middle and high school age kids in third world countries using a borrowed account. User context matters a lot. If someone's friends-friends-friends uncle changes their password, it's no surprise those "netflix users" would switch to an ad-supported model. It's possible but unlikely the 12 year old kid watching anime on a shared/borderline stolen account has the resources necessary to buy an ad free account at US prices.
by labcomputer | 2025-09-12 16:48:20+00:00
"Death panels" is an unfortunate name, but they exist in all systems. The current system in my country and your country has them. Any future system in either our countries will have them. It does not matter if the system is public or private.

They are simply not avoidable unless you have literally (literally literally, not figuratively literally) an unlimited budget. No country or system has unlimited resources.
by mikestorrent | 2025-09-12 16:48:24+00:00
There are two different economies of scale at play here; but if that's the case, I can accept things that are bigger than a train container. Even if we decide that they still have to be just as big as existing reactors, the key thing here is that nobody should start the new wave of nuclear by building a nuclear plant. You have to start it by building factories that produce nuclear plants themselves as a commodity item.

Haven't we learned that already in devops? A nuclear reactor today is a big hand-bombed snowflake. I want nukes-as-code.
by yujzgzc | 2025-09-12 16:48:54+00:00
Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.

In the tech industry you also find a bend of very economically self interested version of privacy, which is that giving privacy to your users is a great way to claim you didn't know anything bad was happening. I'm pretty sure that, not high minded ideals, is why Meta invests so much in e2e encryption and privacy for WhatsApp, and publicizing it - when the next horrible thing is planned using Whatsapp, it lets them disclaim all responsibility for moderating what's happening on their platform
by dceddia | 2025-09-12 16:49:14+00:00
This resonated with me, something mentioned but not explicitly called out - the author started by working out at home, built the habit and some confidence, and later it morphed into a solid gym habit. But it didn’t start at the gym, and the comment about “it would’ve looked dumb to anyone watching” is crucial I think.

I’ve had a lot of good success with bodyweight workouts at home and I just want to highlight that bit of the author’s story for anyone else who feels like the gym is the only way - it’s not! And if you don’t like the idea of going to the gym for whatever reason, you can in fact exercise at home with very little equipment.
by sensanaty | 2025-09-12 16:49:42+00:00
The most depressing and disgusting - though not surprising - part is that the politicans want to draw out exemptions for themselves with these laws, under supposed "professional secrecy" rules.

What do they have to hide, exactly? After all, their logic tells us that they shouldn't worry if they have nothing to hide, right? And if anyone should have their chats publicly available, the number 1 people should be the scumbags that are pushing for this so adamantly. Let's see them lead by example, then maybe I would consider this as anything other than a draconian power grab.
by jonjacky | 2025-09-12 16:50:22+00:00
This is a 21 minute talk by Prof. Keith Winstein. The first half/three quarters of the talk doesn't address his title at all - he reviews his career as a student at MIT, a faculty member at Stanford, and a journalist, and his research on networks and statistics.

The most interesting part of the talk is the last 5 - 10 minutes, when he discusses what worries him about AI. His last slide:

Four Steps to the Apocalypse:

Existential (the Terminator scenario - he doesn't think this is likely. what really worries him is the next three)

Sociological (AI makes us stupid)

Disciplinary (AI makes us lose something core to our discipline --- our confidence that computation is understandable)

Consolidationist (Centralization of computing power so innovation only happens where it is 'supposed' to --- but historically, innovation often comes from unexpected places)

He very briefly proposes a remedy -- something computer scientists can do -- which is a not at all overtly political or social, but instead is a new direction of computer science research. Something about enabling a computation to be made comprehensible outside the organization that computes it. Also, changing incentives so organizations are rewarded for correctness of the result rather than the amount of computation they do. His next to the last slide: "Paying for results, not effort". His third-from-last slide: "We're building an OS for distributed computing that represents computations as first-class (not processes, containers, VMs, lambda invocations)"

I didn't find this remedy to be very clearly explained or convincing - it's crammed into the last few minutes of the talk.
by esbranson | 2025-09-12 16:50:26+00:00
Almost no one gets "health insurance" through their employers. Most employees get health benefits.

In the US, a majority of large employers don't buy insurance in the strict actuarial sense. They self-fund health benefits under ERISA, paying claims directly and hiring insurers only as administrators (ASOs). The plan may contract with an insurer (e.g. UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Cigna) to process claims and run the network, but for most employees at large firms, the insurer is not actually insuring anything. Self-funded ERISA plans are regulated by the US Department of Labor, not state insurance commissioners.
by sigma02 | 2025-09-12 16:50:28+00:00
As someone who wears corrective lenses for astigmatism, I can guarantee that what you perceive as a straight line, assuming you are human, is not, until your brain corrects it and signals 'straight line' to you.

It takes a day or so for your brain to get used to any consistent distortion and totally disregard it.

This is just pointless complaining... A bigger complaint with curved screens is: crazy reflections.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-09-12 16:50:34+00:00
> This was a question in a different interview (which I thankfully passed):

> Given a list of stock prices through the day, find maximum profit you can get by buying one stock and selling one stock later.

It was funny to see this, because I give that question in our interviews. If someone suggested a constraint solver... I don't know what I'd have done before reading this post (since I had only vaguely even heard of a constraint solver), but after reading it...

Yeah, I would still expect them to be able to produce a basic algorithm, but even if their solution was O(n^2) I would take it as a strong sign we should hire them, since I know there are several different use cases for our product that require generalized constraint solving (though I know it by other names) and having a diverse toolset on hand is more important in our domain than writing always-optimal code.
by dirtikiti | 2025-09-12 16:50:43+00:00
"These website encourage scrolling, but just to get people to the bottom of the page? And then what?"

so you're putting the content in a fancy container to scroll through... just to get to the bottom of that container. And then what?

i dont want an os inside a web browser inside an os.

i want to browse web [i]pages[/i].
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-09-12 16:51:25+00:00
>I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.

I really hope Congress acts to make Instacart's tactics felonious with harsh penalties that ruin the company so thoroughly that it terrifies the stock market to stop investing in companies with similar HR policies. Furthermore, if the HR employees who are responsible or even in the loop could be prosecuted and ruined, this would be good too.

The government has the power to allow corporations to incorporate and to continue to operate, but if these same corporations are harmful to our country's citizens then government also has both the power and responsibility to make it impossible for these corporations to continue to exist. There is no fundamental human right involved. Corporations exist at the sufferance of people, not the other way around.
by labcomputer | 2025-09-12 16:51:30+00:00
> The ideal that actually lets customers see pricing info is: a health savings account, a high-deductible insurance with no cap, and then as a cost savings measure the insurance company can incentivize yearly check-ups.

Well, that's just silly. The whole point of insurance is to cover tail cases: Catastrophic costs with low probability. If there is no cap, why have insurance at all?
by electroly | 2025-09-12 16:51:44+00:00
Looks awesome. I've attempted my own implementation, but I never got it to work particularly well. "Open Notepad and type Hello World" was a triumph for me. I landed on the UIA tree + annotated screenshot combination, too, but mine was too primitive, and I tried to use GPT which isn't as good at image tasks as Gemini as used here. Great job!
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-12 16:52:02+00:00
Emacs also has a lot of inbuit tools to help you understand what's going on under the hood.

- `info` lets you read the emacs manual

- `apropos` lets you search for various elisp symbols in the editor, so if you're looking for something vaguer than a direct function or command you can search via apropos.

- The in-built `describe` (though I use a fantastic package called `helpful`) lets you figure out what the definition of a given variable, function, or command is. You can even look at what command a given key binding calls.

- Claude does a great job at teaching details of the editing/programming model of emacs which helps if you'd rather not read through the entire emacs manual

Things like this make emacs a joy to hack on (until you're trying to debug some slightly annoying behavior or crufty event loop thing ;)
by dutchCourage | 2025-09-12 16:52:17+00:00
You could've stopped your sentence at "I don't know how a country filled with guns can survive."

The main downside of abusing the words nazi and fascist is that it gives an out to the actual fascists out there. When it comes to gun violence, there are a lot more (self proclaimed) neo-nazis killing innocent people than people killing them.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-09-12 16:52:33+00:00
At least personally, I've been very underwhelmed by their performance when I've tried using them. Usually past a few dozen variables or so is when I start hitting unacceptable exponential runtimes, especially for problem instances that are unsatisfiable or barely-satisfiable. Maybe their optimizations are well-suited for knapsack problems and other classic OR stuff, but if your problem doesn't fit the mold, then it's very hit-or-miss.
by gnfargbl | 2025-09-12 16:52:54+00:00
You're right, but that just shows how fundamentally silly this interview approach is.

In any real engineering situation I can solve 100% of these problems. That's because I can get a cup of coffee, read some papers, look in a textbook, go for a walk somewhere green and think hard about it... and yes, use tooling like a constraint solver. Or an LLM, which knows all these algorithms off by heart!

In an interview, I could solve 0% of these problems, because my brain just doesn't work that way. Or at least, that's my expectation: I've never actually considered working somewhere that does leetcode interviews.
by mindslight | 2025-09-12 16:53:15+00:00
Why not tariffs? Basically the continuous version of discrete sanctions, that wouldn't encourage as much routing around. Tax Russian oil/gas at the max point in the Laffer (-esque) curve, with all the revenue flowing as direct aid to Ukraine.

(I know 'tariff' has become a dirty word these days to due the obvious abuse, but I swear I'm making this comment in good faith)
by BoredPositron | 2025-09-12 16:53:36+00:00
This guy literally wrote the same AI generated rage bait article format for every programming language he could think of yesterday.

https://medium.com/codeelevation/python-is-dying-and-nobody-...

https://javascript.plainenglish.io/react-is-dying-and-nobody...

https://javascript.plainenglish.io/php-dead-and-nobody-wants...

https://medium.com/javarevisited/java-is-dying-and-nobody-wa...

https://javascript.plainenglish.io/javascript-is-dying-and-n...
by hadlock | 2025-09-12 16:53:53+00:00
There's not a lot of 20 year olds who have made a single mistake that rolled back multiple years of work, almost instantly. When that happens to you for the first time, it is very humbling; and may take months or years to understand and learn from what happened. We all have things to learn from others, but proportionally there are very few self help authors under the age of 40.
by woah | 2025-09-12 16:54:09+00:00
I'm certainly not an expert in immigration law but this whole system seems pretty stupid.

On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens.

On the other hand, it would be extremely detrimental to the US to kill the golden goose of our tech industry by turning it into some kind of forced welfare for citizens. Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.

And then of course, the entire program is structured in an extremely bureaucratic way, with all this nonsense about publishing job ads in secret newspapers.

It seems that these issues could be addressed very simply by tweaking Trump's proposed "gold card" system: anyone can get a work visa, by paying $100,000 per year. This is not tied to a specific employer. The high payment ensures that the only people coming over are doing so to earn a high salary in a highly skilled field. There is no tying the employee to a specific company, so it is fairer for citizens to compete against them.
by pfedak | 2025-09-12 16:55:11+00:00
This is nonsense, at least in part because it's mixing two different ideas. The notion that the image "looks exactly the same as how it originally appeared" is only true when one of your eyes is positioned exactly where the camera sensor would have been, which requires a specific distance away from the screen.

Lines in 3D remaining straight in a photo is unrelated and not actually demonstrated by the image. I'm having trouble imagining why this matters - you're trying to find the intersection of two lines in an image without drawing anything?
by marginalia_nu | 2025-09-12 16:55:35+00:00
The distortion is mostly a problem with ultrawide monitors, which typically have the pixel density of a regular 16:9 monitor, but with twice as width.

Flat ultrawides are an especially miserable experience, where the sides of the monitor are viewed at a 60 degree angle, a pronounced deviation from the 90 degree angle in the middle.
by ahartmetz | 2025-09-12 16:55:53+00:00
By the way, The German words in Yiddish are not bastardized standard German, but bastardized Pfälzisch, basically the dialect where I grew up. "Gefilde Fis[c]h" is how one would pronounce "Gefüllter Fisch" there, etc.

In the middle ages, the Mainz-Worms-Speyer region was the center of Jewish life in Germany.

I think I even found a wrong explanation on that Wikipedia page, simply by knowing Pfälzisch: A "Schnook" is a housefly. It doesn't match the Yiddish meaning that well, but it's the exact same word.
by zdp7 | 2025-09-12 16:55:55+00:00
I'm not sure why you think there is no price transparency in the US. I know exactly how much I was billed and how much my insurance paid. I generally don't ask ahead of time, because it's going to cost me $20. I get an explanation of benefits for every visit. When I was still below deductible at one appointment they gave me options and how much it would cost. What I don't really get is the option to choose. Limited providers and the network limit my options. From your description you have extraordinary insurance. I have good insurance (according to a staff member commenting on our low deductible). It does not work how you describe. Our insurance servicer (United Healthcare) makes all the decisions. Doctor prescribed x, it gets denied. We've had denials on meds they have been covering for years. I wish we could shop around. It's just not realistic.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-09-12 16:56:12+00:00
That amount of deceleration can vary a lot from car-to-car.

I had a rental recently that would just keep going and going when I released the accelerator. I could be going 65 mph, release, and 30 seconds later, still going ~60 mph. As someone that used to drive manuals and now drives and EV, I hated it. My typical driving style is built around the idea that the brake pedal is an evil device that converts cash into brake dust and waste heat, so I use it as little as possible and release the accelerator earlier when I'm going to need to stop. That doesn't work on a car that barely slows down at all when you release the pedal.

I don't know if this was considered a feature for this car, or if maybe the throttle cable was too tight or stuck or something, but I hated how much more I had to use the brake pedal.
by HankStallone | 2025-09-12 16:56:28+00:00
Neither had I. I've heard of clutch braking, where you downshift to slow the vehicle, though that won't bring it to a stop. Truckers use that sometimes because it saves wear on the brakes, and it's banned some places. I suppose regenerative braking could have a similar effect, but why not have that turn on the brake lights the same way pressing down on a brake pedal does?
by tialaramex | 2025-09-12 16:56:55+00:00
> All programming languages do what you say

By definition the Undefined Behaviour can't have been what you meant. So, all the languages where you can just inadvertently "say" Undefined Behaviour aren't meaningfully achieving this goal.

I must say I'm also extremely dubious about some defined cases. Java isn't UB when we try to call abs() on the most negative integer... but the answer is just the most negative integer again, and I wonder whether that's what anybody meant.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-12 16:56:57+00:00
Plenty, because despite the noise around the alternatives, even those alternatives are built with help of GCC and LLVM, written in C++ and aren't getting any rewrite short term.

Then there are whole industries where only C, C++ and Assembly matter, including standards, so it will take a while for new contenders to be taken seriously on such industries.
by bluGill | 2025-09-12 16:57:23+00:00
Using a bad algorithm when a good algorithm that is known to exist is premature pessimization and should be avoided.

There is some debate about what premature optimization is, but I consider it about micro optimizations that often are doing things a modern compiler will do for you better than you can. All too often such attempts result in unreadable code that is slower because the optimizer would have done something different but now it cannot. Premature optimization is done without a profiler - if you have a profile of your code and can show a change really makes a difference then it isn't premature.

On the other hand job interviews imply time pressure. If someone isn't 100% sure how to implement the optimization algorithm without looking it up brute force is faster and should be chosen then. In the real world if I'm asked to do something I can spend days researching algorithms at times (though the vast majority of the time what I need is already in my language's standard library)