MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by altacc | 2025-09-10 11:39:59+00:00
If this was Reddit I'd ask you what you were smoking! ;)

Calling the U.S. ‘peaceful and benevolent’ overlooks the sheer volume, aims and consequences of its military actions. It may not colonize in the traditional sense but its interventions often reshape nations in the US' favour, often violently, without accountability and leaving the populace of those countries much worse off than before.

I think it's not wise to judge present day against history as we should be aiming for improvement over time but if we look at recent history the US has a history of destabilising governments, often democracies, in favour of a more US aligned government. Often these efforts fail and the country descends into chaos. In others it leads to a government that uses death squads to help US businesses (see the banana republics).

Russia's aims in Ukraine were mostly likely to install a Russian aligned leader. This is similar to the USA's history of installing or supporting anti-democratic leaders. So whilst the US might not be absorbing countries but that shouldn't be the only metric for control.

Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan was under UN mandates and I agree that peace keeping forces are often good but that is not comparable to US military interventions. The US often acts unilaterally, or with limited partners and lack of widespread support.

With 251 military interventions since 1991 [1] we can cherry pick the best and worse uses of force, and I agree that sometimes force is needed, but I see the long term trend that the intention is indeed to help but it is mostly to help US interests. Consider as well that colonial Britain (and other colonial powers) also thought they were being helpful and bettering their colonies by bring "civilisation". Just because you think or state your aims are good doesn't make them so.

I'd argue that whilst the US could definitely not take over the world militarily (see how often it fails to take over a country) it already has in large part due to trade and culture and this is why it fears China so much, as China is now a rival for that power.

[1] https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/americas/u-s-launch...
by SirensOfTitan | 2025-09-10 11:40:03+00:00
I use AI almost exclusively for search, and usually force myself to grind against a problem a little before engaging it. I treat AI as a smart codemod tool when I do use it for software development: against easily verifiable, well-defined tasks, low mental effort but higher time commitment tasks.

I keep a list of "rules of engagement" with AI that I try to follow so it doesn't rob me of cognitive engagement with tasks.
by realusername | 2025-09-10 11:40:11+00:00
Depends of your company, I personally meet my team roughly every 3 months and I push back any task on the calendar because I know the days in the office aren't even half the productivity of the usual remote days. I even avoid big deployments during these days.

Remote is usually all focused work and the office time is mostly coffee chats and random interruptions of unrelated subjects because on how much easier it is to ping people.

So on my case it's the opposite, I'm a bit skeptical you can achieve the level of focus you have in a remote team in a standard open space, that would require some discipline that not everybody has.

Not to mention the abomination of the open space with no reserved desk so you aren't even guaranteed to sit close to your team, removing the only potential useful advantage of being on-site.
by elric | 2025-09-10 11:40:16+00:00
It does all seem utterly ridiculous. Both in terms of what's included and in terms of what isn't included. Pictographic-language-by-committee is probably the worst way of designing anything. ~4000 emoji, the choices range from infantile to offensive (to some).

We've had to rebuild multi-gigabyte database tables to change collations so people could use emojis in silly places. But hey, at least we'll be able to include a Hairy Creature emoji soon. Sigh.
Show HN: An app that organizes your content for you
by vasanthps | 2025-09-10 11:40:16+00:00
Have you ever wanted a note taking app that you can just post and forget? And the content you posted is available for you when you need it, easily findable?

OktoNote takes care of that for you. Your quick things to jot down, voice recordings, files, photos all of it can be uploaded to OktoNote and it takes care of understanding the context, organizes for you in beautiful cards, actionable for certain categories like tasks, searchable with related words not just exact keywords, a timeline view to fully see the things you posted in order.

You don't have to worry about creating a title, organizing them into folders so you can try to find them when you need it. OktoNote takes care of organizing from your clutter of thoughts, ideas and things to remember.

Some highlights:

Journal cards - Becomes a diary for your thoughts everyday

Tasks / Todos - Actionable cards to keep your things to do

Lists - Manage your purchase list, recipes etc.,

Itinerary - Becomes a log for all your events, travel etc., (BTW You can just share from any app and OktoNote converts it into cards extracting all required info)

Details to remember - Keeps the info of your wifi passwords, room codes, contacts etc.,

Study cards - Creates a summary of all your learning content and merges them into a single card when same topic making it a great tool for learning new topics, languages etc.,

Discussion notes - Just record your discussion and it creates a summary with action items

Attachments - Your files you want to keep forever and find when you need. Your driving licenses, proofs, important docs etc., findable when you need it.

App store - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/oktonote/id6749813362

More info - https://oktonote.app/
by defrost | 2025-09-10 11:41:14+00:00
> You know damn well what he means.

I'll refer you to the HN guidelines.

Moving on;

There isn't a limited number of aircraft suppliers - my son built one at a public high school in Australia, we (small exploration company) flew 19 air frames for several decades, sourced from many suppliers.

In the same manner there will not be a limited number of AI suppliers forever and hardware to train today's monster models will be affordable and available to more and more, smaller and smaller groups, as time progresses.
by dijit | 2025-09-10 11:41:26+00:00
Sure, I'm on both sides depending on the situation so I can help here.

"Collaboration" and "communication" are definitely issues, as employers state openly, but not for the reasons you think.

I worked in a fully remote company for the last three years, I selected people who I knew would be independently motivated and who knew how to communicate effectively in an async manner.

Yet, there were issues still in communication that would have been solved with being able to hear someones tone and body language. Little issues spiralled out of control- and lack of trust crept in when people were quietly doing work that had very small visibility (but was important).

I'm not saying remote work was the reason, but remote work exacerbated certain particular issues in this dimension- eventually the founders (who had lost trust) started laying off people they perceived as not important, despite them being fundamental to any future in which the project would be successful.

You'll also notice that the companies that care the most about RTO do not invest in communication in other ways, they'll probably use awful communication software like Teams, WebEx - or in marginally better cases: Zoom.. and since people don't like to interface with these tools (and they're poor even when you do): there can be a feeling of being out of the loop from upper management as they don't know what's going on.. they just see radio silence.
by graemep | 2025-09-10 11:41:56+00:00
> Skin color isn't it, actually.

Is contradicted by this

> My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.

Unless you are taking skin colour very literally, which is obviously not it (someone's academic performance is not going to change if they get a heavy tan or use s kin whitening cream or take a drug that changes skin colour etc.).

I interpreted "white" to mean an ethnic identity, not a literal description.
by nsavage | 2025-09-10 11:41:57+00:00
Agreed, this is a big problem. I tried a paper zettelkasten to get around the taking notes and losing them problem, but my collection grew too big to maintain on paper. Because of that, I've been building Zettelgarden (https://github.com/Zettelgarden/Zettelgarden) to help and try to solve this problem for myself.

Among other things, it breaks your notes apart into facts and entities, then stores those along with embeddings. This helps surface things you've seen before since it makes and surfaces links based on individual things, instead of the text as a whole.

In case anyone is interested, I wrote a bit about the process here: https://nsavage.substack.com/p/facts-arguments-theses-buildi...
by benterix | 2025-09-10 11:41:58+00:00
> I am curious though, would this job that mom goes back to actually be more "productive" than taking care of a four year-old and two-year old human child?

Actually, any job she likes? In this case, it's not for the baby, it's for her. Being with a child 24/7 has its toll, and people are social animals, they like being with others. In this case, work - especially white collar - is a kind of rest for parents. At least this is the attitude of many fresh mums (and dads) around me.
by myrmidon | 2025-09-10 11:42:15+00:00
> Or if someone takes an action knowing that it could crash an airliner with hundreds of people aboard, they should not be imprisoned?

If the risk is not excessive, my answer would be no. If the behavior is only realistically punishable when it actually results in an accident, then the answer would also be no.

I think that neither air travel nor chemical plants pose an excessively elevated risk to human lives right now, thus increasing punishments for infractions would be disproportionate, nto very helpful and potentially even detrimental for safety long-term.

Your analogy (beating someone with a tire iron) also clearly features intent; this is not typical for accidents and makes punishments less justifiable and much less useful.

If you actually want to make a strong case for increasing (shareholder) liability, it needs to be clear that those additional punishments and enforcement overhead would actually save lifes, and that very critical point is absolutely not obviouis to me right now.
by magic_hamster | 2025-09-10 11:43:08+00:00
> Maybe it is my age (44), or maybe I am even in a privileged position financially

You think? I was so sure that anyone who can get by without working would immediately rush to upend their life and suffer the many annoyances of working in an office! /s

If it wasn't obvious, a lot people don't have a choice. They can always leave, but this RTO thing is everywhere and it's not so easy working remotely nowadays.
by DecoySalamander | 2025-09-10 11:43:44+00:00
I do it by reading domain name and comparing it to what I expect it to be. It's not hard and when in doubt I can easily check WHOIS info or search online for references.

This is also easily avaidable by using password manager which will not autofill credentials on a page with a wrong domain.

Edit: And yes, I do this for every link emailed to me that does anythig more high stakes than point me to a newsletter article.
by chrismorgan | 2025-09-10 11:44:05+00:00
> if you want a 'visual' line-break you have to add unnatural double space at the end of preceding line.

That’s just a bad syntax choice on Gruber’s part. CommonMark adds trailing backslash as an alternative, so that will work in most places these days.

> And even this is renderer dependent, I don't think is part of the spec (?)

Yes it is. Quoting https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax: “When you do want to insert a <br /> break tag using Markdown, you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return.”

> IIRC GitHub comments renderer does't need it

Yes, GitHub decided on a wilful violation of Markdown for issues and discussions.

> text editors which auto-convert double space into ". "

I have seen that as a feature on Android keyboards, but I would be very much surprised to find it in non-keyboard software.
by jcattle | 2025-09-10 11:44:09+00:00
It's only fine passing between various tools if you tell each tool exactly how they should serialize your values. Each tool will interpret column values in some way and if you want to work with those values in any meaningful way it will convert to their representation of the data type that is likely present in a column.

Going from tool to tool will leave you with widely different representations of the original data you've put in. Because as you said yourself. All of this data does not have any meaning. It's just strings. The csv and the tools do not care if one column was ms-epoch and another was mathematical notation floating point. It'll all just go through that specific tools deserialization - serialization mangle and you'll have completely different data on the other end.
by dgroshev | 2025-09-10 11:46:01+00:00
That's precisely it.

Previously, we always had the output of office work tightly associated with the accountability that the output implies. Since the output is visible and measurable, but accountability isn't, when it became possible to generate plausible-looking professional output, most people assumed that that's all there is to the work.

We're about to discover that an LLM can't be chastened or fired for negligence.
by mnky9800n | 2025-09-10 11:46:25+00:00
I spend my time like this

- reading papers, blogs, articles, searching google scholar, and chatting with perplexity about them to help find other papers

- writing research proposals based on my reading and previous research

- analysing data lately this means asking Claude code to generate a notebook for playing around with the data

- writing codes to explore some data or make some model of data, this also has a lot of Claude code interaction these days

- meetings, slack, email

- doing paper and proposal reviews which includes any or all of the above tasks plus writing my opinion in whatever format is expected

- travelling somewhere to meet with colleagues at a conference or their workplace to do some collaboration that includes any or all of the above plus also giving talks

- organising events that bring people together to do any to all of the above together

I’m a soft money research scientist with a part time position in industry working as a consultant.
by devnullbrain | 2025-09-10 11:46:36+00:00
>Preferably with evidence

Sorry, can't do that. But my take is:

There is a part of the population that are opportunistic freeloaders. People who don't have intrinsic motivation to do their work but do it to avoid the consequences.

I think it's a pretty big part of the population! And I also think that, while managers are likely to have encountered them, reaching a software development role (and then choosing to spend your spare time commenting on HN) filters out a lot of them. So there is a mismatch where managers want to defend against the freeloaders while the employees commenting here can't accept the lack of trust inherent in the mandate and won't countenance the micro-management needed to prove that trust would be earned.

I think it also partly explains why we've failed to see remote companies gain a competitive advantage in hiring. They have adverse selection for active freeloaders.
by dijit | 2025-09-10 11:46:57+00:00
Apologies, what I meant was "larger than an iPhone 5/5s";

I provided pictures in a sibling comment thread to show what I mean, there's about 20% of a difference between the iPhone 5 and 6, and that size difference is very similar for the mini.

If people wanted to buy a phone that was the size of the 6, they would have purchased the SE from 2020, which was that roughly that size.
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2025-09-10 11:48:33+00:00
I'm sympathetic to your reasoning, and I actually think your conclusion about how people wfh is probably true (a minority finding it wildly more productive) but the problem I see is that most execs don't understand what a lot of their employees do on a day to day basis, nor do I think they could properly understand the data even if they had it as a result. And, if they did have it, why don't they show it if the conclusions are so self evident?

In reality I think it's much simpler: the work that executives (and some upper level managers) do relies on a certain amount of theater. They need to be seen (in person) and they to be seen doing work (in person). That's part of the "deal" with being an exec --- you need to be able to act the part. Then, they just assume that's how it should or needs to be for everyone else.
Show HN: Drizzle Cube – embeddable MIT licensed analytics
by cliftonc | 2025-09-10 11:49:19+00:00
This is a project that I have been working on, after extracting it from a side project that is going nowhere fast, but has been quite a learning experience.

It's a complete analytics stack that you can embed in your own application, that provides a semantic query engine (based on cube-js definitions) that allows you to give your users the ability to safely create their own queries, and as a result their own dashboards.

It is also a simple enough language that you can use AI to easily write queries for it, so you can offer 'AI powered analytics' very quickly and easily.

It is built in typescript, uses Drizzle at the core, hence the name. So you can integrate it directly in your app if you already use these, or build a new separate microservice alongside if not.

It comes with a complete React + Tailwind front end framework that you can copy/paste or use directly. Really interested in knowing if others feel this is useful, and hoping to get some real world usage other than myself. You can use play around with it without signing up - though there is a daily limit on the AI feature so I dont have a cost explosion.
by natmaka | 2025-09-10 11:49:22+00:00
Indeed!

Experts (International Energy Agency, McKinsey, etc.) are clear: renewables will produce the majority of electricity by 2050.

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/tripling-renewable-power-ca...

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/energy-and-materials/our...

This is inevitable (no other possibility is realistic), and this applies to France, where RTE (EDF's subsidiary that manages the electricity grid) has emphasized that 100% nuclear power is out of the question, and that more than 60% nuclear power would be utopian.

This trend is already clearly visible and welcomed by investors.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...

The cost of producing renewable electricity is increasingly lower than that of nuclear power.

https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

During their operation, they do not consume fuel, produce waste, or expose people to a major accident, and are therefore and will be preferred.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-09/european-...

The surplus electricity sometimes produced by renewables will be leveraged by increasing storage capacity (electric vehicles, hydro pumped storage, etc.) as well as green hydrogen. It will gradually replace nuclear electricity, which is supposed to compensate for their variability, especially since the latter cannot adjust its production quickly and frequently enough ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796580 ).

All of this will reduce the nuclear load factor and therefore increase its production cost (it is only profitable with a high load factor), with strong feedback (the higher the load factor, the more likely it will be).

This will increasingly favor the deployment of a system based primarily on renewables, meaning that nuclear electricity will become less and less useful and more and more expensive, making its fate (and therefore the profitability of the heavy investments required for its infrastructure) easy to predict.

A renewable-nuclear mix will doom the latter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJJ7n_Ryjg
by kristopolous | 2025-09-10 11:49:31+00:00
Wow it's almost like racism is systemic.

It's pretty wild how you can show lower achievement scores for any countries definition of "black" while changing who belongs in that group.

For instance, Italians were considered black in the early 1900s and wouldn't you know it, there was an achievement discrepancy for Italians so long as that definition held.

Or you can look at apartheid and post apartheid South Africa - when the political structure flipped, so did the academic scores of the groups.

The discrepancy follows the social category and power asymmetry and not the actual people. It's a social artifact, not some biologically inert trait.
by bpt3 | 2025-09-10 11:50:27+00:00
My kids' schools are optimized for the lower edge, while providing some (but significantly less than the lower edge) additional support for the upper edge who almost exclusively come from upper income families who are assumed to be able to fend for themselves.

I want all people to live fulfilling lives and reach their potential, but we are pouring limited resources into a bottomless pit while intentionally de-emphasizing the fundamentals of education that worked well for decades (or longer), and any question of those methods receives an extremely hostile response.

It's no wonder that people are choosing to opt out in some form or another, or that the results are suboptimal.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-09-10 11:52:23+00:00
The notion of a "platform" caught my attention. Funny story: About five years ago, I got a little nostalgic and wanted to retrieve some data from my Atari XL computer (8-bit) from my preteen years. Back then, I created primitive software that showed a map of my village with notable places, like my friends' homes. I was able to transform all the BASIC files (stored on cassette tape) from the Atari computer to my PC using a special "SIO2PC" cable, but the mapping data were still locked in the BASIC files. So I had the idea to create a simple BASIC program that would run in an Atari 8-bit PC emulator, linearize all the coordinates and metadata, and export them as a CSV file. The funny thing is that the 8-bit Atari didn't even use ASCII, but an unusual ATASCII encoding. But it's the same for letters, numbers, and even for the comma. Finally, I got the data and wrote a little Python script to create an SVG map. So yes, CSV forever! :)
by kstenerud | 2025-09-10 11:52:45+00:00
Precisely. The barn door is already open as far as the C library goes. And since C's error mechanism is all in-band (another bad idea in hindsight), the only thing the extra invariant checks will do is add even more (now uncontrollable) crash points to an already intolerably crash-prone app.

Panics are like goto: Only useful in VERY rare circumstances. Every use of a panic should require a rock-solid justification for why you're choosing to crash the process - similar to how every call to abort() requires justification in any professional C codebase. assert() in production code was a horrible idea because liberal use was actually encouraged.

Rust's panic mechanism was almost good. Unfortunately, they chose to give them all innocuous names like unwrap() rather than or_panic(). So now you have to check for it all the time using clippy because it's too easy for a human to accidentally gloss it over. Linting usually points to a design failure in the language UX.
by itssimon | 2025-09-10 11:52:55+00:00
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