MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hsbauauvhabzb | 2025-10-27 22:10:30+00:00
In theory this is nice assuming you push the opening hours back but the cost of it would be significantly more than the developer time wasted by a mile.

Binding times to timezones to geographic locations (which have different sunrise and sunset times) to opening hours to social stigmas (you wake up after 11am? Tisk tisk) is downright silly, but humans don’t like change so fixing it will never happen.
by piva00 | 2025-10-27 22:10:35+00:00
Same, I hate this last weekend of October when sunset suddenly shifts from 17.00 to 16.00, it makes the winter darkness so much worse... It'll be dark before I start and end work anyway (on solstice it's 8.30-14.30), at least let me have sunlight a little later in the day so I won't feel as miserable.
by whshdjsk | 2025-10-27 22:11:08+00:00
And yet, Will, with all due respect, I can’t hear your voice in any of the 10 articles I skimmed. It’s the same rhetorical structure found in every other LLM blog.

I suppose if to make you feel like it’s better (even if it isn’t), and you enjoy it, go ahead. But know this: we can tell.
by onion2k | 2025-10-27 22:12:02+00:00
Something that Claude Sonnet does when you use it to code is write scripts to test whether or not something is working. If it does that for Excel (e.g. some form of verification) it should be fine.

Besides, using AI is an exercise in a "trust but verify" approach to getting work done. If you asked a junior to do the task you'd check their output. Same goes for AI.
by petermcneeley | 2025-10-27 22:12:47+00:00
Iver heard its 700k total but lets not quibble. The value of economic development is difficult to measure in the mere wages or size of total industry (I mean here we are still definitely talking 10s of billons) It is the total contribution to the complexity of the economy. I think people are extremely confused about economic development because they are trained to view the world as mobile capital.

It might simply be that Canada cannot compete in any market. You have a very interesting choice at this stage. Do you A. not have an economy or B. have an economy that may require some sheltering from the world.

A mobile capitalist wants A. A human that is bound to the country probably wants B.
by phire | 2025-10-27 22:13:22+00:00
Multiuser machines could get away with surprisingly little memory; They had some major advantages over home computers:

Users were all connected via CRT terminals over serial, so you didn't need to waste any memory on screen buffers. This also reduced CPU usage as the user wouldn't get any CPU time until they pressed a key, and the scheduler might queue up multiple key presses before even switching to the user's task (while still showing immediate feedback)

They also had superior IO. Home computers were connected to slow floppy drives (at best, some were still using tape) so they typically tried to keep the whole working set in memory. But multi-user machines had relatively fast hard drives and could afford to shuffle the working set in and out of memory as needed, with DMAs handling the actual transfer in the background.

As others have pointed out, these machines had bank switching. But I doubt such machines were ever configured with more than 256k of memory, with 128k being more typical. Wikipedia claims 32k was the absolute minimum, but with very little free memory, so I suspect 64k would be enough for smaller offices with 4-6 users.
by fidotron | 2025-10-27 22:13:24+00:00
> However I've been exploring AArch64 for some time and I think it has some very interesting ideas too. Maybe not as clean as RISC-V but with very pragmatic design and some choices that make me question if RISC-V was too conservative in its design.

Not enough people reflect on this, or the fact that it's remarkably hazy where exactly AArch64 came from and what guided the design of it.
by foofoo12 | 2025-10-27 22:13:33+00:00
> Even large companies are still grasping at straws when it comes to good code

Probably many reasons for this, but what I've seen often is that once the code base has been degraded, it's a slippery slope downhill after that.

Adding functionality often requires more hacks. The alternative is to fix the mess, but that's not part of the task at hand.
by dboreham | 2025-10-27 22:13:51+00:00
There have been various cryptocurrency-based efforts (including some of my own) in this space so we must presume that their lack of adoption is the issue rather than lack of available technical solutions.

Why the lack of adoption? I'm not sure but some combination of incentives, inertia and regulatory capture seems likely. Consider for example that the payment mechanism most people use (credit cards) took decades to become ubiquitous and is itself based on an older system (cheques and banks) that is much older. It's still not possible to freely and cheaply send money digitally in the US, but it is in the UK but only because the government made it a rule that banks had to provide such a service.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-27 22:14:01+00:00
The reality is providing support to parents and their children is not profitable, and therefore social programs and government subsidies are required. So, socialism or bust now that humans can control their fertility and make economic and opportunity cost driven decisions around said fertility.

TLDR Society is going to have to pay for kids if they want to attempt to have more kids in society, because kids are expensive.
by machomaster | 2025-10-27 22:14:31+00:00
You have a lot of incorrect logic. I will only comment on one.

> In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to > max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower.

Wrong. There are limited resources and it is not feasible to give every person every opportunity. "Let's give everybody a chance to become an opera singer, an Olympic 100m winner or a lotto winner, to see how they will use that chance. Even if they won't be any good at this and waste money, at least they will raise their starting position, improve on their potential and raise the average!". This is just silly. No, it is mathematically impossible to give every opportunity to every person.

If anything, giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human). It makes no sense to make a potentially brilliant mathematician an below-average kindergarten teacher, while forcing a good teacher-to-be, to become a 20-years-in-a-making-junior-vibe-programmer. This is a terrible idea for economy, society and individual people (including the ones that DEI are trying to promote). People have different preferences and different abilities (some have in many areas, many have in a few, some are terrible at everything). Maximizing potential should be based on an individual's merit. Fair and equal opportunities will naturally lead to different results, because people are different. You can't simultaneously have equity and equal opportunities, discrimination (racism, sexism, DEI) and inclusion, equity and efficiency.
by lithocarpus | 2025-10-27 22:14:34+00:00
If facebook made it possible to write your own ranking algorithm for what you see, there would be a huge variety of different algorithms you could choose from. 99.9% of end users don't have to write their own they just have to choose whose they want to use - or combine multiple of those available.

I think that'd be great, but not for facebook's profits probably.
by godelski | 2025-10-27 22:14:59+00:00
> I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it

It is definitely a complicated problem but governments tend to but good funding agencies for work that uplifts the broader society and creates the foundation for new markets. That's the idea behind science funding anyways. New science might not create a trillion dollar business directly but it sure lays the funding for new multi billion dollar companies and companies to skyrocket from 500bn to 5T market caps...

But my point is that a project like this is global. I want the US putting money in. We're the richest and benefiting the most. But I also want other countries putting money in. They should have a vested interest too.

I think an interesting mechanism might be to use agencies like the NSA. We know their red teams but what about the blue? I'd love for the blue teams to get more funding and have a goal to find and patch exploits, rather than capitalize on them. Obviously should have a firewall between the teams. But this should be true for any country. It might just be some starting point as it could be a better argument for the people that don't already understand the extreme importance of these types of open source projects.

> I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs

Typically these projects run as nonprofit foundations. They're already getting tax benefits. Though I think we can recognize that this isn't enough and isn't remotely approaching the value.

It's definitely not an easy problem. Like what do you do? Tax big companies (idk, an extra 0.1%?), audit to determine dependencies, distribute those taxes accordingly? In theory this should be simple and could even be automated, but I'm sure in the cat and mouse game the complexity would increase incredibly fast.

But hey, it shouldn't just be America. Different countries can try different ideas
by chermi | 2025-10-27 22:15:28+00:00
Do you have a list of integrations, both working and planned? How well does it play with markdown? What is the format of the drawings? Am I blind or is there no info on the database system? My biggest problem with notion is its reminder system - if you change the time of a scheduled item, the reminder is removed, even though it was originally defined relative to event time and should thus be easy to recompute. Or do you not have schedule/calendar system?
by th | 2025-10-27 22:15:41+00:00
It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works.

A relevant tweet from 2016 (https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595):

> Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016

Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.

If 300 people submit talks and 294 are men, then 98% of talks will likely be from men.

If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.

Outreach to encourage folks to apply/join/run/etc. can make a big difference in the makeup of applicants and the makeup of the end results. Bucking the trend even during just one year can start a snowball effect that moves the needle further in future years.

The world doesn't run on merit. Who you know, whether you've been invited in to the club, and whether you feel you belong all affect where you end up. So unusually homogenous communities (which feel hard for outsiders to break into) can arise even without deliberate discrimination.

Organizations like the PSF could choose to say "let's avoid outreach work and simply accept the status quo forever", but I would much rather see the Python community become more diverse and welcoming over time.
by tsumnia | 2025-10-27 22:15:46+00:00
I linked my lecture about how I see "ethics" as another term for "politics" in the academic sense.

Other points to note: All AI will always have bias; a) because neural networks literally have a constant called 'bias' in them; and b) training a prediction algorithm means it is being trained to be bias and running a clustering algorithm means lumping commonly themed attributes together.

If you mean "BIAS" as in "RACE/ETHNICITY/SOCIOECONOMIC_STATUS", then most groups already do this, state they do it, and still deal with the general public not believing them.
by ASalazarMX | 2025-10-27 22:16:46+00:00
According to his Wikipedia page, his downfall was the loss of the capital island of the Falkland islands. He was a true military dictator, abuses and all, but he might have understood that losing the Malvinas would be the end of his regime.

In that case, going against UK in an unwinnable war was a way to preserve his regime, as long as no bombings were made targeting him, so he could still protect his life. UK is not as ruthless in war as, say, USA or Israel, IMO that was a calculated risk to prolong the end.
by roncesvalles | 2025-10-27 22:16:48+00:00
I'm convinced there is basically no foolproof way to secure a bicycle in public.

I've seen everything from braided steel being cut clean to combination bike locks getting picked (by the attacker actually figuring out the correct combination, not just brute-forcing it apart or wangjangling a paperclip).

They just need to steal 1 good bicycle to more than pay off the cost of their equipment. One stolen bicycle could feed a family for a week. In some place like the Bay Area where $1000 bicycles abound, the economics are just too appealing.
by mothballed | 2025-10-27 22:17:16+00:00
Understanding other cultures and giving me a chance to experience them has always been the quickest way to get me to become far more stereotypical / bigoted. I am willing to be open and idealistic about most any idea / ethnicity / culture but once I actually face it in real life and question if I want my kids exposed to that, then the rubber hits the road.

The internet has accelerated this.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-10-27 22:18:54+00:00
If you want to do one email for expired users and another for non expired users and another email for users that somehow have a date problem in their data....

Well, in that case you wouldn't want to pipe them all through generateExpiryEmail.

But perhaps you can write a more generic function like generateExpiryEmailOrWhatever that understands the user object and contains the logic for what type of email to draft. It might need to output some flag if, for a particular user, there is no need to send an email. Then you could add a filter before the final (send) step.
by kstrauser | 2025-10-27 22:19:03+00:00
First comment: I freaking love your privacy policy. Seriously. Great job!

Second: I haven't downloaded it yet because my itsatrap.gif warning bells are going off about pricing. On a scale of free to kidney, what are we looking at here? Is this going to be priced for end users, or will it look closer to an enterprisey kind of plan?
by alex43578 | 2025-10-27 22:21:03+00:00
On a related note, has anyone found a good local LLM option for working with Excel files?

Here's my use case: I have a set of responses from a survey and want to perform sentiment analysis on them, classify them, etc. Ideally, I'd like to feed them one at a time to a local LLM with a prompt like: "Classify this survey response as positive, negative, or off-topic...etc".

If I dump the whole spreadsheet into ChatGPT, I found that because of the context window, it can get "lazy"; while with a local LLM, I could just literally prompt it one row at a time to accomplish my goal, even if it takes a little longer in terms of GPU and wall-clock time.

However, I can't find anything that works off the shelf like this. It seems like a prime use case for local models.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-27 22:21:06+00:00
> The polarization is due to progressive politics messing up the country.

Yeah that's why the most progressive areas of the country are the ones struggling the most, right. Like Mississippi, Appalachia, Arkansas...

Maybe if you guys would actually deal with some of your issues instead of bashing your bibles your kids wouldn't be running the fuck out of your towns as soon as they're able to, but I'm sure it's still some poor Portlandian black transwoman's fault for being alive while not knowing you exist or whatever, and definitely not the ideological positions of everyone you've elected in the last 5 decades.
by petermcneeley | 2025-10-27 22:21:16+00:00
I mean if you just control your borders you dont need government investment and support. This is the backwards way of creating tariffs. The problem is that it is asymmentric. A larger country can do that way better than a smaller. Aka they could make their product cost zero if they really want.

I hate to say it but the boondoggles of Canada are just graft. These arent investments in any real sense.

As for this line 'Unfortunately this is the very difficult place the manufacturing sector in Canada finds itself in. And the Canadian working class as a whole.'

look this is just neoliberalism. Maybe stop doing that and things will suck less.
by tim333 | 2025-10-27 22:21:39+00:00
That skips over some bits with Thatcher. She started well taking on the unions but overdid raising interest rates, wrecking much British industry and went kind of nutty in the end trying to push through the poll tax which 90% of the population hated and led to her being kicked out.

I don't follow the details with Milei but I get the impression of something similar where he's starting well undoing dumb stuff but I'm not sure about trying to prop up the currency rather than just letting it float and having normal economics like most democratic counties.

I think a lot of good governance comes down to undo stupid stuff and try not to do new stupid stuff.
by dfe | 2025-10-27 22:21:40+00:00
Except it isn't a fact-check at all. As usual, Paul Krugman is light on real details and heavy on cherry-picked facts to suit his own personal narrative, not unlike Trump.

Canada's advertisement aired during one of the World Series games, after Trump's initial tweet. As others here have commented, Reagan's position was more nuanced than "tariffs bad", which is how the ad portrays it. Krugman himself admits this in his own article.

Then Krugman goes on the usual ad hominem attack against Donald Trump, because he just admitted that Reagan was in favor of using tariffs to settle political disputes, particularly in response to countries leveling tariffs against the U.S.

Which, mind you, is exactly what Donald Trump says he is doing, raising tariffs on Canada in response to several long-standing tariffs they have had on the importation of U.S. goods. Krugman doesn't dispute this. He cleverly doesn't bring it up at all and instead calls Trump a petulant child levying tariffs for his own political purposes.

Forgive me if I can't take Krugman or anyone else parroting Krugman seriously when he hasn't been able to make a soundly reasoned argument in decades. These low-on-facts high-on-rhetoric articles are empowering Trump.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-27 22:22:06+00:00
> If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant.

It’s not inoperative. A contract requirement that is redundant with a legal requirement still has separate effect (that is explicit here since this clause is a basis for both cancelling an award that has already been made and clawing back funds that have already been disbursed, separate from any penalties for the violation of the law itself.)

> In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it.

If by “this kind” you just mean “incorporating existing legal obligations separately as contract obligations with contractual consequences”, every government contract has multiple such clauses and has for decades.

If by “this kind” you mean more narrowly incorporating the specific anti-DEI provisions and partisan propaganda about DEI inside the clause also incorporating existing legal requirements, I’m pretty sure you will find that most federal contracts that have had their language drafted in the last few months have something like that because of agency implementations of EO 14151. How many people are signinf them...well, I would say look at whoever is still getting federal money, but given the shutdown that’s harder to see...
by machomaster | 2025-10-27 22:22:41+00:00
> virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having (...) men's rights

So people who dislike a cultural type of discrimination also dislike practical discrimination against men? People who dislike what is going on in general, also have practical opinions how the situation could be improved in practice, how to make the situation more fair?

This is akin to being surprised that people who are actively against animal abuse are also helping animal shelters.
by godelski | 2025-10-27 22:22:47+00:00
> targeting hobbyists and small outfits

Sounds like a great botnet!

I'm joking a bit but these are exactly the entities that have fewer capabilities to detect malicious behavior.

Assuming JetKVM is operating in full good faith that doesn't mean they themselves aren't going to be the target. You compromise them and you compromise all their customers. That's true regardless of the company size, but is also the reason for transparency
by IX-103 | 2025-10-27 22:22:48+00:00
That's exactly right. For a long time people of color were relegated to lower paying jobs and faced higher police scrutiny. Similarly, less than a century ago women were practically property - unable to even get a bank account without a man's permission.

Over the past century we've made significant progress in remediating these injustices. Unfortunately, this has caused the recent rise in reactionary politics. "Make America Great Again" = take me back to when women were property and people of color knew their place.

As for me, I'm willing to put up with a few tantrums if it means that we're that much closer to treating people as people.
by inopinatus | 2025-10-27 22:22:54+00:00
The full maxim I was taught being, “it’s either DNS or permissions”.

The fatal design flaw for the Domain Name System was failure to learn from SCSI, viz. that it should always be possible to sacrifice a goat to whatever gods are necessary to receive a blessing of stability. It hardly remains to observe that animal sacrifice is non-normative for IETF standards-track documents and the consequences for distributed systems everywhere are plainly evident.

Goats notwithstanding, I think it is splitting hairs to suggest that the phrase “it’s always DNS” is erroneously reductive, merely because it does not explicitly convey that an adjacent control-plane mechanism updating the records may also be implicated. I don’t believe this aphorism drives a misconception that DNS itself is an inherently unreliable design. We’re not laughing it off to the extent of terminating further investigation, root-cause analysis, or subsequent reliability and consistency improvement.

More constructively, also observe that the industry standard joke book has another one covering us for this circumstance, viz. “There are only two hard problems in distributed systems: 2. Exactly-once delivery 1. Guaranteed order of processing 2. Exactly-once delivery”
by recursive | 2025-10-27 22:23:37+00:00
I don't believe there are any contexts where <li> is valid that <div> would also be valid.

I'm not opposed to closing <li> tags as a general a general practice. But I don't think it provides as much benefit as you're implying. Valid HTML has a number of special rules like this. Like different content parsing rules for <textarea> and <script>. Like "foreign content".

If you try to write lint-passing HTML in the hopes that you could change <li> to <div> easily, you still have to contend with the fact that such a change cannot be valid, except possibly as a direct descendant of <template>.