MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-02 03:07:22+00:00
>> And if you immersed yourself in the writings of non-native English speakers for a significant amount of time, then a paper written by a native English speaker was presented without you knowing who the author was, would you look for the same kind of mistakes in it that you have been finding?

> I wouldn’t look for anything. As I’m reading a text, something in my brain would immediately go "this is probably written by a non native speaker" when coming across certain awkward turns of phrase.

The problem is that the more a person is looking for a pattern, the more they are likely to believe they have found an instance of one.

For example, if a police officer is regularly tasked with identifying drivers leaving bars who might be intoxicated, they will naturally use a form of "pattern recognition" to determine which vehicles to stop. Common indicators are a vehicle that is driving too slow or remains stationary after a traffic light turns green.

So what happens when a sober designated driver is tired and drives overly cautious?

What will the cop do if the designated driver falls asleep at a traffic light?

Would the cop testify along the lines of:

I wasn't looking for anything. As I observed the vehicle, something in my brain immediately said "this is probably a drunk driver" when coming across those driving patterns.

This is by definition a form of confirmation bias.
by like_any_other | 2025-09-02 03:08:30+00:00
Legally that sounds about right, but morally, your argument does nothing to defend Apple. They pioneered stealing autonomy from their users. They know governments abuse this [1,2,3]. Yet they prefer to profit off keeping their users prisoner, than give them control of the devices they paid for.

Maybe the first time you chain a man to a tree, you can plead ignorance, that you didn't know wolves would come eat him at night. But by the 100th time, you're as guilty as the wolves.

[1] Apple pulls app used to track Hong Kong police, Cook defends move - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-apple-i...

[2] Apple removes nearly 100 VPNs used by Russians to bypass censorship - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41712728

[3] Apple's Cooperation with Authoritarian Governments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26644216
by dang | 2025-09-02 03:08:42+00:00
When I look at the top text, I see at least 2 rules that apply to companies.

Edit: Btw, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you aren't: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Edit 2: sorry, I was totally wrong about that! see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45106871
by thrav | 2025-09-02 03:09:30+00:00
Much of my team would probably qualify me as about as buyer-pull as sales people get — I told my VP my strategy for pipe generation in a QBR was exercising more product influence — and I disagree with many of the author’s points.

I challenge my customers and attempt to convince them they have the wrong approach to achieve X all the time.

Attaching to buyers pain is the only way you’ll ever get anything meaningful done.

Identifying and building the pain and knowing you have the solution is how you create urgency. If you’re doing it right that work is valuable for your customer and your company.

Most people need to see something before they’re willing to invest team time mapping solution to pain / use cases.

Some customers completely drop the ball on deployment. People get fired. People leave and the project gets abandoned. Shit happens. It’s rarely the vendor’s fault, unless it was a complete mismatch, and that’s everyone’s fault.
by the_af | 2025-09-02 03:10:07+00:00
> 1: You're assuming a specific type of output in a specific type of context. If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.

I think nobody is upset about reading an LLM's output when they are directly interacting with a tool that produces such output, such as ChatGPT or Copilot.

The problem is when they are reading/watching stuff in the wild and it suddenly becomes clear it was generated by AI rather than by another human being. Again, not in a context of "this pull request contains code generated by an LLM" (expected) but "this article or book was partly or completely generated by an LLM" (unexpected and likely unwanted).
by yibg | 2025-09-02 03:10:07+00:00
I also don't like the push towards accounts with google / apple etc or using apps to do everything, or the walled gardens that are the apple and google app stores.

To play the devil's advocate though, hasn't this always been the case when new technology gains widespread adoption? e.g. going backwards in time, at some point not having an email address wasn't a big hinderance, nor was not having a phone number etc. Telcos got regulated, maybe that's the next step for google, apple etc.
by YZF | 2025-09-02 03:10:08+00:00
It's a lot more complicated than this. For example, money can be borrowed using stock as collateral and spent. Companies can and do also issue more stock. There are also indirect effects, for example investors putting money in new ventures.

Either way the economy is not zero sum game where there's a fixed amount of money. If the stock market grows there is more money. That money reflects future expectations discounted to today but it's still more money.

On the original question, how does Ballmer being very wealthy impacts the rest of us, there is no easy answer. It depends on what he does with his money. It can be neutral, positive, or negative. The sentiment though seems to be mostly driven by jealousy and a sense of unfairness. It's in fashion these days (in some circles) to hate the "rich" (which is basically anyone better off than yourself more or less).
by grg0 | 2025-09-02 03:10:13+00:00
In the old days, when somebody asked a stupid question on a chat/forum that was just a search away, you would link them to "let me google it for you" (site seems down, but there is now a "let me google that for you"), where it'd take the search query in the URL and display an animation of typing the search in the box and clicking the "search" button.

Every time somebody pastes an LLM response at work, it feels exactly like that. As if I were too fucking stupid to look something up and the thought hadn't even occurred to me, when the whole fucking point of me talking to you is that I wanted a personal response and your opinion to begin with.
by platevoltage | 2025-09-02 03:11:16+00:00
You missed the point.

The point of Hockey is to score the most points, not win the most fights. If fact, you are penalized for fighting. The more violent team often loses the game.

The point of MMA is to win the fight by using violence.

The people who watch this metaphorical hockey game for the violence have a 4 letter acronym that they label themselves with.
by konmok | 2025-09-02 03:11:36+00:00
Thanks, but we still need better data on births for this argument to hold any water. Additionally, if you want to include the segment of the population that has fled, you will also need data on the birth/death rates for that segment.

I would also like to note that you found a study looking at birth/death rates, but after realizing it suggested a shrinking population, decided to combine information from that study with information from a separate dataset so that the population could be argued to be growing.

And none of this actually takes nonviolent deaths into account, however small you believe that number may be.

This... is not good science.
by neural_drift | 2025-09-02 03:12:54+00:00
Hi HN,

During a production migration last year, we hit a nightmare: our backups looked fine, but restoring revealed schema mismatches and partial data loss. It cost hours of downtime, and we realized… we had no way to validate backups before trusting them.

That led me to build BackupGuardian — an open-source tool to validate database backups before migration or recovery.

What it does:

Detects corrupt/incomplete backups (.sql, .dump, .backup)

Verifies schema, foreign keys, constraints

Checks data integrity, row counts, encoding issues

CLI + Web App + API (CI/CD ready)

Supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite

Example:

npm install -g backup-guardian backup-guardian validate my-backup.sql

You get a report with a migration score, schema checks, and recommendations (like missing indexes).

We’re open source (MIT) → GitHub repo .

I’d love feedback on:

Other hidden backup issues you’ve run into

Integrations that would help (CI/CD? Slack alerts? MongoDB support?)

Whether this is useful for your workflows

Thanks!
by accrual | 2025-09-02 03:13:19+00:00
Current release (7.7) and previous (7.6) worked great on my Pi 4. There were a few extra setup steps due to the unique firmware boot setup, but after it works exactly like any other OpenBSD system. I rarely think about it being ARM64.

Runs great even in a passive enclosure. It's gotten it quite hot before when left it running in a backpack by mistake... but it remained perfectly stable and I could SSH into it (though I didn't dare touch it).

https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html
by tzs | 2025-09-02 03:13:52+00:00
One thing that has surprised me about property taxes is how little people know about how they are calculated. I learned this watching the arguments on Nextdoor whenever there is a bond issue up for vote.

For example there was recently a measure on the ballot here to raise the property tax for the county library from something like 0.32/1000 (i.e., $0.32 for every $1000 of your property's assessed taxable value) to something like 0.45/1000.

The last ballot measure for the library was in 2017, and costs to provide the same level of services today that they were providing then have gone way up.

A lot of people, even people who said they strongly supported the library, were urging people to vote no. Their argument was that assessed property values have gone up by a much larger percentage since 2017 than the library says it needs, so the prior measure should still be raising all that the library needs.

What they didn't understand (and many still did not understand even after I and others explained) is that there are at least 3 different ways that things funded by property taxes work, two of them do not get an increase when assessed values go up, and the library is one of those that does not get an increase.

Those three are:

1. The way most people think they all work. A rate is set once, say 1.00/1000 and if you pay $400 one year and your assessment goes up 20% the next year you pay $480 next year.

2. The way many bonds that fund a specific project work. The bond is to raise a fixed a fixed amount, for example $5 000 000/year for 3 years in order to build something. There is no fixed rate. Let's say you pay $400 for this one year, and your assessment goes up 20%. If the average assessment goes up 20% that year, you will again pay $400. If the average assessment goes up less than 20%, you will pay more than $400. If the average assessment goes up more than 20%, you will pay less than $400. On your tax statement a rate will be listed, but that rate will go down each year that the average assessment goes up and vice versa.

3. The way many bonds that fund open ended things work. They are similar to #2 in that they raise a fixed amount every year, and the rate automatically adjusts down when assessments are up and up when assessments are down. The difference is that the amount raised can increase up 1% a year to cover increased costs without the need for voter approval.

The library bond is a #3. When it passed in 2017 the rate was something like 0.49/1000. It was now down to 0.32/1000 because assessments were up around 50% over their 2017 values. Thus, that 50% windfall that so many people thought the library must have reaped from that rise in property values did not exist. All the library has gotten since 2017 are those 1% increases.

PS: the library measure did pass.
by drittich | 2025-09-02 03:14:07+00:00
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To help with quality and improve our products, human reviewers may read, annotate, and process your API input and output. Google takes steps to protect your privacy as part of this process. This includes disconnecting this data from your Google Account, API key, and Cloud project before reviewers see or annotate it. Do not submit sensitive, confidential, or personal information to the Unpaid Services."

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Are we approaching the vision of 'malleable software'?
by north_creao | 2025-09-02 03:14:23+00:00
Been revisiting the Ink & Switch essay on "malleable software" and I'm starting to think we might be at a genuine inflection point. Their core thesis: most software today is rigid, forcing users to adapt their workflows to fit the software, rather than software adapting to users. True malleable software would be as modifiable as clay - users could reshape any tool to fit their exact needs. When they wrote this, it felt like beautiful theory but practically impossible for non-programmers.

But the recent advances in LLM-powered code generation are changing something fundamental.

For the first time, the gap between "I want this tool to work differently" and "I can make this tool work differently" is collapsing for ordinary users. Natural language becomes the universal programming interface.

This creates an interesting dynamic: software becomes reactive to user intent rather than users being reactive to software constraints.

I'm seeing early signs of this shift - people replacing entire SaaS workflows with custom tools they can modify on demand. The relationship between human and computer is starting to invert.

Few questions for HN: 1. What are the implications for software distribution/business models? If anyone can modify software, what happens to traditional SaaS? 2. Do you think most people will craft their own apps, or they prefer "out of the box" solutions? 3. Do you think the high agency dividend appears, people who think "how to make things better" will significantly improve productivity with malleable software?
by geodel | 2025-09-02 03:15:05+00:00
I do not see it as a master strategy. It is just something that happened. Similar to having no plan of having million fakeish Chinese brand selling crap on Amazon.com. But ones they are there then Sure, why not . May be in few year a lot of crashed and burned AI talent will be looking for boring corporate IT/AI job and Amazon will be around to offer that. And if does not happen there will still be ton of other work to do for Amazon.
by sgc | 2025-09-02 03:15:41+00:00
I often think the solution is to move away from crafting a perfect ideology to encapsulate in your license, and just throw out some numbers. If you make more than N* the median income of this or that place, you can't use this software for free (whether that means licensing fees, code contribution, etc can vary). Let the smaller fish grow. If they get big enough, they can give back.
by sixo | 2025-09-02 03:15:46+00:00
You really missed my point. All your objections either:

1. Also apply to the present day pricing of property tax:

- "How do the police and fire departments set the fees?" - "Are they fixed for everyone in their area" - "how do the police and fire departments assess your property value?" - "Does someone make a fortune building a software system for police and fire departments to manage all of this?" - "Does the state now step in and take the property from them, effectively enforcing a monopoly that the state doesn't benefit from?" - "When a derelict building begins to burn on a block and threatens in-use buildings around it, who pays the firefighters for stopping the derelict building's fire?" - "what stops the new police and firefighter businesses from raising the price every year on every constituent? - "When grandma on fixed social security's fire fighting fees go up too much for her to afford to live there any more..."

2. Or pertain only to a version of my proposal where the insurance is not effectively required, and people can freely opt out

- "What about people who don't get any kind of insurance and pay no fees?"

3. Or, are irrelevant to the specific question of how private property is taxed

- "What about people who don't own property." - "Does the state pay if a park is on fire?" - "Will there be competing police and fire departments that offer lower rates (for lesser service?)?" - "Functionally, the state is in the best position to capture the necessary revenue to support these services." (The state simply can be the insurer! I did not even propose *private* insurance.)

Literally every single one! It's like you were arguing with someone else who proposed something entirely different--the libertarian you cite, perhaps, someone you argued with in the past?

I think in fact a well-executed insurance-like system would be functionally equivalent to the status quo, except that it would be far more efficiently priced.

I suspect the only real difference is that property tax, due to the path-dependent history by which it got this way, has wound up being substantially progressive as a tax, compared to what you would get if you tried to rationalize it. And it therefore feels impossible to replace it, because you'd set back all that progressive taxation, only to run into the problems that lead to the status quo in the first place. We really don't like to admit what it is what we're the govt paying for; the lump sum of taxes is a way of protecting the revenue streams that support public benefits from too much individual scrutiny.

But surely there is some other approach to keep moral-upside public goods in tact than this "security through obscurity". Surely.

> Once you really sit down and think about it, the idea that you "own" any real estate is kind of a joke.

I agree with this! It would be far better to model property ownership outright as renting from the public. People are awfully attached to the fiction of "ownership", though, and I think that deserves some credit.
by al_borland | 2025-09-02 03:16:56+00:00
When I go to a YouTuber’s website, I expect something else there, not the same thing I’d get from going to their channel page.

Your post here says you turn the video into a blog post, but the screenshot on the website made it look like a branded YouTube clone with just the one user’s videos. Was the key points under the video what was added? YouTube has that too now with their AI helper.

If the AI can actually understand the video and turn it into an article. I do know people who would like that. As far as I can tell, YouTube isn’t doing that with its AI yet, nor have I been able to get other generic chatbots to do it. I did it on my own once based on pulling subtitles, reformatting those, and running that through AI to write it better, but didn’t put it together into a single tool.
by aag | 2025-09-02 03:18:37+00:00
What a wonderful essay. I learned to type on a manual Underwood typewriter with a carriage return lever. I don't miss it, but there was something so satisfying about moving that lever and feeling the whole carriage move. It meant that I had typed another line, and had made progress. The thing I truly don't miss was not being able to afford a new ribbon, and having to move back over every character and type it again to make sure that it showed up because the ribbon was so dry. Or not being able to undo mistakes.
Ask HN: Why does Seattle feel so risk-averse compared to the Bay Area?
by annyma | 2025-09-02 03:19:12+00:00
Today I posted about an AI startup project I’m working on — zero salary, very early stage, “build for passion.” Dozens of people reached out, but almost all were from the Bay Area. Zero from Seattle.

It made me wonder: why does Seattle’s tech culture feel so optimized for W2/RSUs/stability, while the Bay feels wired for risk-taking and possibility?

Is it just my experience, or have others noticed the same cultural gap?
by EPWN3D | 2025-09-02 03:20:03+00:00
I grew up in the Chicagoland area. Every time the teachers' union went on strike, my parents' property taxes went up. This caused unending amounts of distress in my household, when the whole point of owning a home was to have a predictable cost of living over an extended period of time.

I have absolutely no issue with prop 13. It's way too fucking easy for state bureaucrats to just keep soaking property owners every time they fuck up a budget.
by mistachkin | 2025-09-02 03:20:19+00:00
Location: Manhattan, NYC.

Contracts: Yes.

Remote: Yes.

Hybrid: Yes.

Willing to relocate: No.

Technologies: C/C++, C#, Win32, Linux, POSIX, SQL, etc.

Projects: Tcl/Tk, Eagle, SQLite, System.Data.SQLite, Fossil SCM, Comdb2

Interests: automation, cryptography, databases, developer tools & SDKs, distributed systems, (Internet) security, public key infrastructure, runtimes, sandboxing, scripting languages, testing, virtual machines, and LLM integration

Profile: https://w.sb/r/profile

Affiliations: Tcl/Tk Maintainer ( https://w.sb/r/tcl ), Formerly SQLite Development Team ( https://w.sb/r/sqlite )

Side Project: https://w.sb/r/git

Résumé/CV: https://w.sb/r/resume

Email: [put_my_first_name_here] [at] [put_my_user_name_here] [dot] com

Phone: Please see "https://www.mistachkin.com/" for detailed instructions.
by YZF | 2025-09-02 03:20:29+00:00
This community is diverse. It's just really in fashion today to be against capitalism and the rich. Marxism is the answer apparently.

The interesting thing to me isn't this community specifically, it's that all the prosperity that we (here anyways, for the most part) are enjoying, all the technological achievements, the lifting of billions of people from poverty ( https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief ), elimination of many diseases, increased lifespan, were mostly achieved under some version of capitalism.

It's not that there aren't problems (lots) and it's not that the widening gap between the very rich and everyone else isn't a concern but the simple narratives are also wrong.
by modernsorcery | 2025-09-02 03:21:41+00:00
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Contact information in resume.
by modernsorcery | 2025-09-02 03:22:42+00:00
I have a decade of experience founding and advising startups; a decade of experience as a software developer and tech lead; and a wide variety of supporting experiences. Let me help your business get to the next stage of success.

Location: Seattle, WA USA

Remote: Only

Technologies: cloud -- AWS, EC2, RDS, Dynamo, Lambda; docker, containers; Typescript, Python; numpy, pandas

Resume: https://zmichaelgehlke.com/misc/zmgehlke-resume.pdf

Email: See resume.
by magicalhippo | 2025-09-02 03:23:15+00:00
In the case of our experimental reactors, a large part as I understand it is that they were fooling around in the 60s. Thus a lot of "meh just put it over there" scenarios and such, without much consideration of the consequences.

Another point is that Norway has no way to process the leftover materials, and currently nowhere to store the processed materials.

So we need to ship the highly radioactive stuff abroad, and build a storage facility for when it's processed.