MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kelnos | 2025-10-28 07:46:02+00:00
> that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly

That's because, in general, STEM itself is already a "Men in STEM" program. We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls are given dolls, and continues all the way through teen years as boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls, culminating in STEM careers being already full of men with conscious or unconscious biases against women.

Creating a "Men in STEM" program would be a waste of time, and would just be about scoring conservative political points.
by jtrn | 2025-10-28 07:46:54+00:00
I'm a clinical psychologist by day, and I just have to say how incredibly bad all the writing and talk about suicidality in the public sphere are. Given that I worked in an acute inpatient unit for years, I have seen multiple suicides both in-unit and after discharge, and i also work as private clinician for years, so I have some actual experience.

The topic is so sensitive, and everybody thinks that they KNOW what causes it, and what we should do. And it's almost all just noise.

For instance, it's a dimension, from "genuine suicidal intent" to "using threats of suicide to manipulate others." Anybody that doesn't understand what factors to look for when trying to understand where a person is on this spectrum, and that doesn't understand that a person can be both at the same time, does not know what they are talking about regarding suicidal ideation.

Also, there is a MASSIVE difference between depressive psychotic suicidality, narcissistic suicidality, impulsive suicidality, accidental suicide, fainting suicidal behavior, existential suicidality, prolonged anxiety suicidality, and sleep-deprived suicidality. To think that the same approach works for all of these is insane, and pure psychotic suicidality.

It's so wild to read everything people have to say about suicidality, when it's obvious that they have no clue. They are just projecting themselves or their small bubble of experience onto the whole world.

And finally, I know most people who are willing to contribute to the discussion on this, the people who help out OpenAI in this instance, are almost dangerously safe in their advice and thinking. They are REALLY GOOD at writing books and giving advice, TO PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT SUICIDAL, and give advice that sounds good, PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT SUICIDAL, but has no real effect on actual suicide rates. For instance, if someone are suffering from prolonged sleep deprivation and anxiety, all the words in the world are worth less than Benzodiazepines. If someone is postpartum depressed, massive social support boosting, almost showering them with support, is extremely helpful. And existential suicidality (the least common) needs to be approached in an extremely intricate and smart way, for instance by dissecting the suicidality as a possible defense mechanism.

But yeah, sure, suicidality is due to [Insert latest societal trend], even if the rate is stubbornly stable in all modern societies for the last 1000 years.
by mariusor | 2025-10-28 07:47:11+00:00
And what do populations with a death sentence hanging over their heads usually do? Oh yeah, they take up arms and try to invade their better off neighbours.

Maybe that's a worst case scenario, but the better ones still include many millions of people displaced towards more temperate zones. It will lead to the greatest migration humanity ever suffered and I'm not sure that in a scenario of scant resources, that's going to go on in a peaceful and dignified manner.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-10-28 07:47:20+00:00
Have you daily driven a Tesla?

The blower speed can be mapped to the steering wheel button. And it’s actually easy to map things because the software is made by a company with real software people, the software quality in terms of intuitiveness is night and day compared to the legacy companies. I find it easier to adjust the heat/cooling in my Tesla compared to the standard buttons. I don’t generally mess with the temperature though, and turning AC on and off is very slightly annoying through the screen, but that doesn’t happen much. Also the voice controls actually work well enough that I can use them reliably. You do have to figure out what to say (“my butt is cold” does not turn on the seat heater, unfortunately), but once you know that the system is very good at reliably picking up what you’re saying.

> What happens if, tomorrow, some service goes away and your Tesla doesn't update?

I would sell it at a greater loss due to it being nerfed and I would at that point buy a different car. I don’t generally drive cars that old anyway, just because random issues become a lot more frequent and I don’t want to deal with that.
by throwawaykf10 | 2025-10-28 07:48:03+00:00
You have cited a lawsuit (of which there is no recorded outcome, so probably an out-of-court settlement) against the same company that has had to pay millions for discriminating AGAINST women and minorities.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-settles-28...

So maybe one could argue maybe they were not DEI enough!

On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?

My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.
by procaryote | 2025-10-28 07:49:43+00:00
I like the general idea, but unless you're assuming some very clever language or even more clever ORM that fixes things implicitly, wouldn't

email.bulkSend(generateReminderEmails(getExpiredUsers(db.getUsers(), fiveDaysFromNow)));

get all users and then filter out the few that will expire in 5 days, on a code level? That doesn't sound like it would scale
by buserror | 2025-10-28 07:49:44+00:00
Pro tip: Do not use on your internet router if it is ALSO the DHCP server, as the JetKVM is by default DHCP (with no backup fallback to a LL address) so if your server somehow needs serious attention...

Well yes, your JetKVM no longer has a lease.

Don't ask me how I discovered this one :-)
by phicoh | 2025-10-28 07:50:35+00:00
As an open source software vendor I can say two things: 1) The CVE system allows vendors to deny CVEs that relate to their product. I don't know the exact rules, so I don't know if it applies in this case. We take anything that can crash our software seriously. 2) For users without a support contract, your priority does not automatically become out priority. If you want your issues fixed then make sure we have the money to do so. Just because you got a free download doesn't give you any rights to support.
by theK | 2025-10-28 07:51:02+00:00
> When someone’s standing in front of a potential buyer trying to look professional, a slow-loading app isn’t just an annoyance. It’s a liability.

I've been there myself as a Dev and later on as a manager. You have to really watch out not getting locked into local minima here. In most cases its not bundle size that wins this but engineering an app that can gracefully work offline, either by having the user manually pre-load data or by falling back to good caches.
by kelnos | 2025-10-28 07:51:37+00:00
If boys always get 4 cookies at home, and girls get none, and then we go to school and boys get 1 more cookie, and girls get 3 cookies, I'd think it was pretty weird that boys get 5 cookies and girls only get 3.

> No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa).

In our world, men do know that women face barriers to entering STEM education and STEM careers that men do not face. Many men seem to ignore that fact, though, or pretend it's not true, and I will continue to roll my eyes at their annoyance about "Women in STEM" programs.

What a bizarre analogy...
by lugu | 2025-10-28 07:53:04+00:00
The argument they are making is that if a bug is discovered, the agent will not debug it, instead a new test case is created, and the code is regenerated (I suppose if a quick fix isn't found). That is why they don't need debugging agent twice as capable as coding agent. I don't know if this works in practice, as in my experience, tests are intertwined with the code base.
by solumunus | 2025-10-28 07:53:20+00:00
The test loop is integral.

It’s kind of annoying hearing all this skepticism from people putting in the least effort into optimally using the tool. There is a learning curve. Every month I’ve gotten better results than the last because I’m constantly context building and refining, understanding how, what and when to prompt.

It’s like hearing someone say database suck but they haven’t bothered to learn about or use indexes or foreign keys.
by symbogra | 2025-10-28 07:54:27+00:00
It goes back to the old arguments about free software vs open source. Maybe by restricting devs in certain ways the users are actually more free. But then maybe the system to lock the users in gets built with wholly proprietary software and there's less adoption overall of the FOSS software. I don't really have a good answer. I recently switched to grapheneOS but it feels like fighting a losing battle, and lots of apps don't like that I'm using a non official android build.

I worked at a big company where GPLv2 software could be used in our systems but not GPLv3. Is it better that that GPLv3 software didn't have more users? The company didn't contribute much back so maybe it's not a big loss.
by simoncion | 2025-10-28 07:54:54+00:00
> ...I don't use Debian or Ubuntu...

Neither do I.

I've been using Gentoo for twenty-three years (since 2002). I stopped looking for equally-well-managed alternatives somewhere between 2012 and 2015. I have enough local compute that the build times for everything other than Chromium aren't a problem. If I didn't, I could use the official prebuilt binary packages that have been around for a few years.

> ...I don't think it's a good idea to only support [.deb or .rpm packages].

If you can do more, you should, yes. However, -as a hobbyist open-source programmer- I recognize that other hobbyists only have so much time and giveashit available.

The absolute best thing they can do is provide a source tarball that builds and installs correctly with './configure && make && make install' [0] or the language-specific equivalent. Any competent distro package management system will make it somewhere between trivial and pretty easy for others to package projects like this up. [1]

If they have more time and giveashit available, make prebuilt .deb packages so that your software is trivially installable for the most users out there. If you find yourself with more spare resources, then write packages for other OS package managers to get the remaining small fraction of Linux users.

The absolute worst thing to do would be to assume you MUST package your software for every distro out there (lest someone whine at you on the Internet), decide that that's way too much work, and not publish anything. As someone who has many, many unstarted projects because they seem like way too much work, I can tell you that that's a totally real failure mode.

[0] Perhaps with an optional side-trip to 'make test'.

[1] Unless they're using something godawful to package like NodeJS.
by luma | 2025-10-28 07:55:31+00:00
Was trying to remember where I had heard this org's name: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42690473

This org has gone to some dubious lengths to make a name for themselves, including submitting backdoored packages to public npm repos which would exfiltrate your data and send to a Synk-controlled C&C. This included the environment, which would be sending them your username along with any envvars like git/aws/etc auth tokens.

This might give them some credibility in this space, maybe they stand a decent chance of scanning MCPs for backdoors based on their own experience in placing malicious code on other people's systems.
by contrarian1234 | 2025-10-28 07:56:00+00:00
i dont understand what the dogma is... yes, it may become economically infeasable to grow nonGMO plants. What's the problem?

if the seed price is increased then either it will become feasible again, or the price of the crop will increase

but this is just extremely basic capitalist market forces... has no relation to GMO. The end result is cheaper food for everyone
by deivid | 2025-10-28 07:56:03+00:00
I've had this project idea in my list for a while, I even implemented thr software side (an option rom for the pci card) but the hardware side is quite difficult to get started. My plan was to get an FPGA with a hard pci core to do this, but I don't even know what to buy.

I got a cheap Tang Mega 238k but I never managed to even get the PCI examples working (and couldn't even adjust BAR settings)
by lelanthran | 2025-10-28 07:56:11+00:00
> the correct philosophy is "Generic core, specific shell."

> Nothing else matters really. Functional vs imperative is a very minor point IMO, mostly a distraction.

I'm torn on this. This really is the faster way to higher quality.

OTOH, if more developers knew this, I wouldn't be so much more faster when I create my systems for clients. I'd just be a "normal 1x dev".

I like implementing features, sans AI-assistance, in my LoB applications faster than devs with Claude code doing so on their $FRAMEWORK.
by dustypotato | 2025-10-28 07:56:17+00:00
>start meeting people in real life.

Depends on the country and person I guess. When I did try approaching women a few times, it was 10% angry looks, 30% awkward, 30% basic polite conversation to fulfill social obligation, and 30% friendly conversation. Unfortunately I'm not keen enough to pursue that 30% of friendly conversations by wading through the rest.
by atoav | 2025-10-28 07:56:28+00:00
Which is why we pepper and salt our hashes.

If you store the blood type of a patient hashed, the problem is that there are only so many blood types. So the same blood type will have the same hash value and attackers could (1) just infer statistically which are which, (2) crack one and get the rest and (3) group users even without cracking the hash.

That means we need to ensure the input values are getting more complex by prefixing them with secrets from elsewhere.

If you have one secret (e.g. stored in an environment variable) that would be the pepper. Adding pepper just makes cracking harder, but since it is the same for each value, it is not enough. But since it is not stored next to the input value it makes attacks harder.

A salt would be a per value secret that is stored for each blood type and prepended on hash.

The two in combination make it much harder to get from the hashed value to the input value without having both salt and pepper.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-28 07:56:53+00:00
> Ask a question one way, you get one answer. Ask it another, you trigger a different heuristic. You’d call that “intuition” if it came from a person.

No, This is the person who aces certain types of exams but doesn't know how to apply any of that "knowledge" in the real world because it was built upon rote memorization and not a true understanding. They're not looked upon favorably and I'd quietly question their intelligence.

> A human chef could have told you the exact same wrong thing with the same misplaced confidence

You're missing the point. The problem is that the answer changes depending on how the question is presented.

Chefs are indeed often mistaken in their understanding of how salt and yeast interact and how vulnerable yeast is to being killed by salt. The difference is that their answer doesn't flip like this. Their answer is fundamentally based upon an underlying understanding (however wrong), it's not simply a statistical continuation sequence of the words in my question.

This has serious implications because when a chef's understanding is corrected, they will update their underlying understanding and automatically apply that new knowledge in every scenario that relies on this understanding, where as an LLM can't do that, it can never be corrected without rewriting every instance of the training data where this falsehood comes from.

> You ask “where” and “by whom” the Turing test was passed, as if it’s some formal event with a ribbon cutting

No, I expect a research paper where the test design and its results are documented.

> The tools are shipping code

Yes I've seen the code they "ship", that's why your grandiose claims ring hollow.
by sebastix | 2025-10-28 07:57:03+00:00
To me ATProto has not proven yet to be really distributed / decentralized. In terms of "censorship resistant" you can also think of a 100% uptime of your code / work (your repository). Or always available for anyone with a internet connection. In the context of a federated network (aka fediverse), that's often not the case (if a federated instance is unavailable, many assets will be missing leading to a unuseable application or service).
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-10-28 07:58:03+00:00
Given that it was technically illegal (but IMO very common) back then, it's hard to quantify. Usually, they were smart enough to not put the most blatant parts in writing, and of course the same HR departments pushing this were also doing outreach.

All that I can say is that the form of DEI that I, myself, saw and experienced certainly included a lot of the "bad" form, people were justifying it (and some still are in this thread), and it was very clear that daring to criticize it would be a career-limiting move. You can look at the rest of the thread to see both personal anecdotes and further sources showing other large companies doing this.

The way it usually worked was that metrics for diversity hiring were set top down, without specifying how they should be achieved, and then the company openly turned a blind eye to such "bad behavior".

Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.

I suspect it works so well as a "culture war topic" because many people have personal experiences not just with such practices, but also with being silenced and gaslit (told that what they experienced doesn't actually happen and is just a culture war topic) when trying to speak out against them.
by delbronski | 2025-10-28 07:58:05+00:00
Before starting new projects I would always do research like this and try new things. But I’ve stopped looking at what is out there. I have landed on Django/React(vite). I have mastered this and can go from idea to app running in production in a matter of hours. I know there are better, faster, and more modern alternatives. But I just don’t care anymore. Maybe I’m just web framework jaded. I rather learn something else than look through the docs of yet another web framework.
by throwup238 | 2025-10-28 07:59:17+00:00
It allows them to maximize the value they extract from the whole enterprise and defend their competitive advantage. In short: greed and fear.

The long answer is more complicated. For example corn, soybeans, and wheat aren’t generally planted as F1 hybrids so farmers can (and do) save seed so the manufacturers walk this tight rope between crops where it really matters and ones where they don’t, but have to defend their whole system regardless.
by tomhow | 2025-10-28 07:59:18+00:00
We've asked you recently to avoid breaking the guidelines. This comment breaks them them again, notably these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously...

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

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Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

The guidelines apply equally to everyone and when people break them repeatedly and ignore our requests to stop, we have to ban the account. Please take a moment to remind yourself of the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by Gibbon1 | 2025-10-28 08:01:27+00:00
The existence of wire wrap tells you a lot how painfully tedious it was to layout PCB's at the time. I did a couple of wire wrap boards. But eventually just started soldering wire wrap wire to the sockets. By the early 90's it was faster to layout a PCB and have it fabbed. Bonus you could outsource that and use the 3-4 weeks to do less tedious things.

This is just around the time that programmable logic became readily available. It'd be much easier to iterate with that than wiring up logic gates. Last 30 years you can do all this debugging with simulations and then test using FPGA's.
by roenxi | 2025-10-28 08:01:54+00:00
I personally agree with the PSF that the risk of weird political things happening is too high to risk taking the money under any circumstances. And I have no objection at all if they want to have whoever at PyCon. But there is a double-perspective in the situation you are describing - if this is an unbiased selection process that could reasonably turn up 98% male speakers could be classified as a DEI program. 98% male isn't very diverse.

But on the other hand if the PyCon is achieving 40% female speakers, how could it not be said that there is some pretty heavy bias going on introduced by the outreach process? Unless I turn out to live in a very isolated community of programmers (and internet for that matter) the Python community is far more male skewed than that. Diversity of gender at PyCon almost has to be excluding the actual Python community from the speaker selection process if it has that sort of gender balance. Might be good or bad, but if that is a neutral sampling process then it'd be really interesting to learn where all these python girls are hiding because they aren't applying for developer positions.
by probably_wrong | 2025-10-28 08:02:17+00:00
If you haven't read the article (or even if you have but didn't click on outgoing links twice) the NYT story about how ChatGPT convinced a suicidal teen not to look for help [1] should convince you that ChatGPT should be nowhere near anyone dealing with psychological issues. Here's ChatGPT discouraging said teenager from asking for help:

> “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” Adam wrote at the end of March.

> “Please don’t leave the noose out,” ChatGPT responded. “Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”

I am acutely aware that there's not enough psychologists out there but a sycophant bot is not the answer. One may think that something is better than nothing, but a bot enabling your destructive impulses is indeed worse than nothing.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai...
by tomhow | 2025-10-28 08:02:31+00:00
> I don't want to bring politics to this sensitive conversation

That would have been sufficient. The guidelines are clear that generic tangents and flamebait are to be avoided.

Edit: Looking at our recent warnings to you and the fact that, from what I can see, close enough to all of your activity on HN in recent months has involved ideological battle, we've had to ban the account. If you don't want to be banned, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and indicate that you plan to use HN as intended in future.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727983.