MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ivan_gammel | 2025-09-28 20:14:41+00:00
The “imperial” narrative is a made-up thing by contemporary Eastern European politicians. There are fringe political groups in Russia that think this way, but they have no significant influence and are mainly tolerated by Putin’s administration (it’s a destabilizing factor for internal politics). Russian empire ceased to exist in 1917 and whatever happened since then were not imperial projects.
by hinkley | 2025-09-28 20:14:42+00:00
Any time I haven’t heard about a tech for ten years I assume it didn’t work. I think I first heard of this stuff around ten years ago. At the time I think they were focused on kidneys. But those have a lot of complex plumbing.

As an outsider, who is either missing a mountain of context, or not so close to the problem they can’t see it, I would assume a better tack would be growing ghost arteries for bypasses and aneurism repair operations. Ghost intestines for reconstruction surgery for people with cancer or massive internal trauma. You’d have a simpler organ to reproduce, but in the artery case you’d likely have to also work turnaround time. Heart failure can be slow, but bypass surgery is often scheduled as either urgent or emergency (I just had a convo with a man who wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital after an angiogram showed he was one stairwell away from a fatal heart attack). But not having to harvest material from the thigh before surgery begins should shorten the surgery and reduce complications. You can have as much artery as you want for the surgery. You could have spares.
by yndoendo | 2025-09-28 20:15:04+00:00
What is the reason to append a textual file name with a number? User Experience?

They are magic numbers. Maybe a serial ID, date stamp with more magic, revision, release, ...

Magic Number land has 10 > 9 in the above.

9 > 10 is only possible when removing the Magic Number and morph into mealiness text.

At the moment I cannot think of any magic number where 9 > 10.
by margalabargala | 2025-09-28 20:15:21+00:00
Well, sometimes.

Sometimes you want a ride right here right now, other times you want "a ride to the airport at 6am tomorrow".

Uber let's you "schedule rides" but that doesn't actually do anything to guarantee a ride. You could wind up without a driver if you're unlucky.

Directly contacting the person driving you, 12 hours in advance, is a much better way to guarantee a ride.
by Barrin92 | 2025-09-28 20:15:39+00:00
If you're trying to convince Brits not to enact these policies "you guys made it through The Troubles" is a really bad argument unless you're very unfamiliar with the body count and terror and the public perception of that period in British history. (it included some fifty thousand casualties and sixteen thousand bombings)

An advocate of these policies would quite literally argue that not getting into something like The Troubles is the point and a lot of people would agree if that was what is on the horizon.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-09-28 20:16:31+00:00
The key insight to recognize is that within the Bayesian framework hypothesis testing is parameter estimation. Your certainty in the outcome of the test is your posterior probability over the test-relevant parameters.

Once you realize this you can easily develop very sophisticated testing models (if necessary) that are also easy to understand and reason about. This dramatically simplifies.

If you're looking for a specific book recommendation Statistical Rethinking does a good job covering this at length and Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way is a more beginner friendly book that covers the basics of Bayesian hypothesis testing.
by prewett | 2025-09-28 20:16:50+00:00
You could try software consulting agencies like Toptal. However, international freelance work as a junior dev is probably an uphill battle (especially since experienced local developers are having troubles finding work). If there's nothing local to you, and you cannot move, the only options that I see are software-adjacent jobs in other industries. IT would be an obvious choice. But even outside of IT you might be able to be able to write internal tools and ooch into a de facto software position that way. Try exploring work in another area that interests you, and look for things that are repetitive, annoying, or error-prone. Those are things that are possible candidates for tools, or also possible entrepreneurial opportunities.

I also found Erwin McManus' approach to finding what you like do helpful. Take a sheet of paper and make to columns: "I love this!", "I really dislike this". Over the course of a couple weeks, when you're feeling one of those, write what you are doing in the appropriate column. You'll get start seeing some patterns after a while. His theory is that what we excites us is pretty specific, so look for things like "writing tools for others" rather than "programming". (However, while I think he's right, I also think we are much broader than that, so you might look for things that are not even related to programming. You might find something completely unexpected that does have local opportunities.)
by wilkystyle | 2025-09-28 20:17:04+00:00
Hey all—author here. Releasing this fun little side project today, as it has been helpful to me and thought it might be beneficial to others as well. I work with Python in my day job, and I spend a lot of time in other environments that are ephemeral or which do not have a compiler (and I do not have admin privileges). I can usually get by with whatever Vim is present or available, but sometimes it's just nice to have my full development environment. This was a fun effort to see how much I could reduce the effort of getting my full Neovim configuration up and running. Happy to answer any questions!
by al_borland | 2025-09-28 20:18:00+00:00
I still write utilitarian programs all the time. If the code I’m writing isn’t addressing a need and making someone’s life a little easier, what am I doing?

The world doesn’t need another generic JavaScript framework, but a lot of people have little annoyances everyday that can be made better with code. This is my favorite code to write. Nothing is that impressive, technically speaking, but it changes how people work and makes their job suck a little less. I find this type of work much more fulfilling than working on some silly integration between 2 systems that will be gone in 3 years.
by vonnik | 2025-09-28 20:18:16+00:00
To the people who claim that we’re running out of data, I would just say: the world is largely undigitized. The Internet digitized a bunch of words but not even a tiny fraction of all that humans express every day. Same goes for sound in general. CCTV captures a lot of images, far more than social media, but it is poorly processed and also just a fraction of the photons bouncing off objects on earth. The data part of this equation has room to grow.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-09-28 20:18:32+00:00
I think even 111 years is being too cautious. One only needs to look as far as the numerous vagrancy laws in England to see how a citizen might be prevented from living "where he liked and as he liked". Persecution of minorities including 'witches', Gypsies and Jews has been a continual theme. England has had banned books, even banned translations of the Holy Bible.

The Edwardian era was a very unusual period of liberality, I'll agree. But at least in that quote, Taylor is making some strange omissions that I hardly think are accidental: for a start, where is the mention of women's suffrage, introduced for the first time ever after the Great War?
by jlg23 | 2025-09-28 20:18:37+00:00
> I could be wrong, but I recall in many developing countries phones there are many teenagers who code on their phone because laptops (even tablets) are prohibitively costly.

Yes, I see that a lot here in the far south of Morocco.

> They might be wiring their phones up to some cheap keyboards, which is technically possible but I don't know if they're doing that.

They do. Adapters are about $2.
by ux266478 | 2025-09-28 20:18:58+00:00
Plymouth is harder to identify. It's not just the Puritans at Plymouth, nor exclusively New England. It's merely everything that came with the second colonization. The Dutch are a foundational part of Yankeedom. In fact, New York should probably be considered more foundational than Plymouth. You would be right to identify Jamestown with the modern GOP. Traditionally it was represented by the Democratic party, but I assume you're familiar with that.

I should note these geists extend far beyond legitimate political guise.
by Vegenoid | 2025-09-28 20:19:31+00:00
If contextual ads are more effective than personalized ads, then there is an enormous market waiting to have its lunch eaten by a contextual ad provider, which should be able to operate at a far lower cost than a personalized ad provider.

That we don't see that happening at all is pretty strong evidence that personalized ads are more effective than contextual ads. I find it highly unsurprising that ads which are based on the history of a person are more effective than ones based only on their present. If someone was looking for a car last week, odds are that they are still looking for a car.
by bookshed | 2025-09-28 20:19:47+00:00
Imagine Bazite's mascot made a distro, well that distro would be NixOS's fork and it's called Lix (https://lix.systems/). When they kicked Eelco Dolstra out of his project (NixOS) Lix became redundant so they stayed in NixOS. Also google is your friend.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-28 20:20:03+00:00
I think it is a poor analogy.

VS Code and Visual Studio IDE are fundamentally different products. One is a lightweight editor, the other is a full IDE with different architecture and capabilities. Chrome and Chromium are the same product type (browsers) where Chrome is built from Chromium source with proprietary additions[1].

A better analogy would be VS Code vs VSCodium, which actually mirrors Chrome vs Chromium: same codebase, one with Microsoft's proprietary bits removed, or Fedora vs RHEL.

[1] Both Google Chrome and Chromium are maintained by Google.
by oncallthrow | 2025-09-28 20:20:44+00:00
The latter part at least is true. Sending "grossly offensive" messages is illegal under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003, specifically Section 127:

> a person is guilty of an offence if he—

> (a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or

> (b)causes any such message or matter to be so sent.

I suspect the former is also true, but am not well-read in that area
by mwkaufma | 2025-09-28 20:21:50+00:00
> laid out next to each other in memory

Moving goalpost. But just to follow that thought: Decoupling alloc+init via e.g. placement-new to do this introduces a host of complications not considered in your solution.

If that layout _is_ a requirement, and you don't want a totally nonstandard foundation lib with nonstandard types promiscuously necessitating more nonstandard types, you want a std::vector+index handle.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-09-28 20:21:56+00:00
a dear friend generated a QR code for his show, used the code on flyers that he printed, made sure that the code worked, and a ~week later discovered that the qr code was now showing an ad and requesting payment to not do that

I had rarely seen him that angry - but I totally, totally got it... qr code freemium gating is such a pettily predatory business "model".
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-09-28 20:22:04+00:00
I don’t quite see what they’re getting at.

Is it just because it’s another VM switch to get to dom0? Seems a bit unlikely…

Xen has a hypervisor for dealing with the low level details of virtualization and uses dom0 for management and some HW emulation.

QEMU/KVM uses the host kernel for the low level details of virtualization and the QEMU userspace portion to do the actual HW emulation.

They’re actually remarkably similar aside from the detail that the Xen hypervisor only juggles VMs but the KVM design involves it juggling other normal processes…

The people praising Firecracker are just turning a blind eye to the 10000+ lines of (really hairy) C code in the kernel doing x86 instruction emulation and the actual hypervisor part.
by skeletal88 | 2025-09-28 20:22:14+00:00
Our system in Estonia works well.

I don't get the resistance to a digital/national id in other countries. To us it is quite bizarre.

Some have explained it with a lack of trust between citizens and the country.

But without such digital id it is impossible to have such digital government services as we have here. The government services need to verify and autheticate the citizen, so they only access their own data and not someone who has the same name and birth date by accident.

I don't see how such a system gives the government more powers. It already has all the data on its citizens, but it is spread out, fragmented, stored with multiple conflicting versions, maybe some of it is stored in databases where no one cares about security, etc.
by al_borland | 2025-09-28 20:22:17+00:00
I have some scheduled jobs that generate reports that go out to people weekly. Without these they would be suck manuals trying to look things up and tracking it in Excel on a weekly basis. I could give it to them to run themselves, but it’s much better for it to just show up in their inbox.

In other cases I have code that fixes error conditions when they arise. No one has to run it manually, but if it didn’t exist, they would end up with the ticket to fix it manually. Even if they forget it’s there, it is given them more time with each run.
by dijit | 2025-09-28 20:22:37+00:00
I would really agree with you, as a person who was born into the underclass I know full well the barrier to entry of getting a “first person in the family” passport and a drivers license has somehow lower hurdles (but those are well known).

However, as mentioned, I can’t in good faith argue for the government to have an easier time categorising people. Such a system is so ripe for abuse. I have even advocated for it based on the Estonian eID system and the Swedish BankID (though I am aware of Danish and Norwegian BankID- I never used those).

I’m still fully convinced that the British “Online Safety Bill” is actually a ploy to ensure that they have linked accounts to identity on any site where comments can be made; so they can prosecute people for expressing opinions[0]. Why else go for Wikipedia, and why else focus on sites with public commentary. You can’t say it’s to prevent pedophiles when with the right hand you imprison people for saying things online while with the left hand releasing actual pedophiles into society[1]

To be fair, they did say it wasn’t primarily about protecting children[2], but then I guess I should figure out what else the OSA is for.

[0]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0022...

[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/prisoners-ear... & https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce80nl1k0p3o

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910285
by bearjaws | 2025-09-28 20:23:15+00:00
I think its less a problem of lawyers and more a problem of age.

I learned today Chuck Grassley plans to run again and would be 95 years old in congress. This is insane.

If you've worked retail you know many above 75 are not all there, plain and simple.

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025...
by raesene9 | 2025-09-28 20:23:26+00:00
Can't say as I agree there. I was in the UK at the time (lived here all my life) and I'm fairly familiar with the horrors of the time.

My point is we were able to get through something like that, which was very serious, without needing to proscribe free speech in the way that's being done now for some people putting paint on planes.

So if we didn't need it for something that serious, we don't need it for this.
by oblio | 2025-09-28 20:23:49+00:00
The bad faith is super strong when it's being swamped by a lot more bad faith driven by greed. I'm not talking about you, but about all these companies with overnight valuations in the billions and their PR machines.

To your example, frankly, I would have started with that very important caveat, of an initial situation defined by very poor quality. It's a very valid angle as a lot of code that's available today is of very low quality and if AI can't take 1/10 or 2/10 and make it 5/10 or 6/10, yes, everyone benefits.
by lxgr | 2025-09-28 20:24:01+00:00
USB-C doesn’t only carry USB data.

I’m not sure if e.g. Displayport even has the capacity for link training (and there are USB-C to Displayport cables that have to support legacy devices that know nothing about USB); HDMI (until 2.2 or so) definitely does not.

It’s ok to not agree with the USB-IF’s tradeoffs in their solutions, but denying the complexity of the problem space can be a hint that you don’t sufficiently understand it to pass that kind of judgement.
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-28 20:24:13+00:00
If you don't like the default natural sorting order, you can just change it in Dolphin. Settings > Configure Dolphin > View > Content Display > select anything other than "natural". You can even pick if you want case sensitivity or not.

The OS doesn't think you're too stupid to understand sorting, it relies on you being smart enough to figure out where the setting is located. In this case, four levels deep is probably too much to ask from users if they will write an entire blog post like this before finding the toggle.
by rapind | 2025-09-28 20:24:15+00:00
> The only "experience" you get with LLM is "put another coin into the slot and pull the lever again".

I relate it to directors on a production. It's certainly very valuable to know how to operate a camera, and especially to understand lighting, storytelling, etc. It gives you insight in how to work with the people who are actually doing these tasks. It helps you to know when someone is gaslighting you, etc.

That being said, it's kind of an insane statement to say that all a director does is pull a lever. I'm sure there are a ton of wannabe directors who try to do exactly that and proceed to fail miserably if they don't adapt quickly to reality. But having a great director is obviously a huge differentiator in output.

Do I think we'll have as many programmers in the future as we do today? Probably not. I think we're going to see a real decimation of coders, but at the same time we might (I say "might") see much greater overall production that may not otherwise exist from the less talented vibers or w/e ridiculously critical name you want. Some of that is certainly going to be interesting and maybe even radically game changing.

IMO our feelings about this are about as relevant as shaking our fist at the cosmos.
by kianN | 2025-09-28 20:24:33+00:00
I don’t mean for the bar to sound too high. I think working through khan academy’s full probability, calculus and linear algebra courses would give you a strong foundation. I worked through this book having just completed the equivalent courses in college.

It’s just a relatively dense book. There’s some other really good suggestions in this thread, most of which I’ve heard good things about. If you have a background in programming, I’d suggest Bayesian Methods for Hackers as a really good starting point. But you can also definitely tackle this book head on, and it will be very rewarding.
by userbinator | 2025-09-28 20:24:48+00:00
So how’d you safely solve having cables of (widely) varying resistance?

Smartphones already do this. They essentially measure the resistance of the cable by measuring the voltage and correlating it with the current drawn, and regulate the current accordingly.

That would require twice the number of contacts for the same number of physical wires, which would make the plugs even larger.

No. Look at the pinout. It's not symmetrical. They could've made it perfectly symmetrical.
by dmurray | 2025-09-28 20:24:49+00:00
He's explaining why he's not taking André Arko's side, which one can infer he's been asked to do.

No one is expecting him to speak out in favour of Ruby Central's side, and he several times mentions how poorly they've executed and communicated whatever they're trying to do. And the complaints about that are well-known to anyone reading this post, and don't need to be rehashed.

So no, I think he is indeed reserving judgment, but because of what he feels the need to emphasize given the narrative so far, it looks disproportionately critical of one side.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-09-28 20:25:16+00:00
>That's because they remember how the life under Soviet rule looked like

Just as a reminder: Latvian Riflemen helped to create it by supporting Lenin in the crucial phase of revolution and suppressing anti-Bolshevik rebellion in Moscow. Baltic republics were well-represented in party structures and in Soviet elites. So this “oh, it was so terrible in Soviet Union” projection on Russia is a very specific nationalist narrative ignoring shared history of both nations, which included shared suffering from the same regimes and shared participation in oppression.
by gizmo686 | 2025-09-28 20:25:16+00:00
Yeah. When your timing results are a single digit multiple of your timing precision, that is a good indication you either need a longer test, or a more precise clock.

At a 5ms baseline with millisecond precision, the smallest improvement you can measure is 20%. And you cannot distinguish a 20% speedup with a 20% slowdown that happened to get luck with clock ticks.

For what it is worth, I ran the provided test code on my machine with a 100x increase in iterations and got the following:

== Benchmarking ABS == ABS (branch): 0.260 sec ABS (branchless): 0.264 sec == Benchmarking CLAMP == CLAMP (branch): 0.332 sec CLAMP (branchless): 0.538 sec == Benchmarking PARTITION == PARTITION (branch): 0.043 sec PARTITION (branchless): 0.091 sec

Which is not exactly encouraging (gcc 13.3.0, -ffast-math -march=native. I did not use the -fomit-this-entire-function flag, which my compiler does not understand).

I had to drop down to O0 to see branchless be faster in any case:

== Benchmarking ABS == ABS (branch): 0.743 sec ABS (branchless): 0.948 sec == Benchmarking CLAMP == CLAMP (branch): 4.275 sec CLAMP (branchless): 1.429 sec == Benchmarking PARTITION == PARTITION (branch): 0.156 sec PARTITION (branchless): 0.164 sec
by sebastiennight | 2025-09-28 20:25:18+00:00
There is a large conceptual gap though, between "solving a complex math problem" which is navigating through logic/reasoning, versus "correctly predicting the next token in the multiplication of 2 or more large numbers".

Eg. If we've already worked out premises that A is larger than B, and 2C is smaller than B, than you can easily compute the next token in the sentence "Therefore C is..."

versus computing 123,287,211 times 971,222, where computing the first token is non-trivial, but computing what comes after "11973" in the result is even less obvious. (it would be tremendously easier if you were predicting the result backwards, starting with the last digit).

There is some evidence that models actually "plan ahead" somewhat (something like guessing more than one token at a time, eg. when writing a line in a poem, the model has an "idea" of what the ending word will be) but there are limits to the reliability of that, vs. using a calculator tool.
by vunderba | 2025-09-28 20:25:35+00:00
From the article

> More subtly, doctors can fudge the language by asking patients if they consent to something like “try different medicines, including placebos” to retain the power of self-fulfilling improvement.

Unless your name is Charlie Kelly [1] - that ain't going to work.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2999352