MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by defrost | 2025-10-02 02:34:47+00:00
That's highly variable - a significantly large volume of coal mined globally is via bucket-wheel excavators / mobile strip mining machines.

That's overburden removal followed by near surface bed extraction with machines - no underground mining, underground being the mining domain that sees high injury and death rates.

Regardless, fuel from oil or fuel from coal is still fuel from dead and buried organics, from resurfaced long buried carbon products, and still introducing more CO2 into the atmosphere which is counter productive toward any goal of reducing the insulation factor of the atmosphere.
by throwup238 | 2025-10-02 02:35:01+00:00
> Spinning and weaving had always been done by a relatively small portion of society.

This is very, very incorrect. Egregiously so. All evidence from antiquity to pre-modern Europe contradicts it.

Up until the mechanization of textiles, spinning and weaving took up the majority of women’s work time. Even noblewomen were painted doing the act. Annual labor hours were comparable to unskilled men in agriculture, even after mechanical innovations.

If you’d like I can give you academic citations but acoup.blog written by an actual historian just ran an entire series on this topic: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-an...

Subsistence for a small family meant nearly 1800 hours a year of work on just textiles, accounting for a single woman’s labor over an entire year. That’s just 200 hours short of a modern 9-5 work year. On just textiles.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-02 02:35:08+00:00
To be fair, the BBB is one of the worst pieces of legislation ever created. Period. Not even just fiscal legislation - legislation in general. Anyone who even tries to support it is either actually evil or completely clueless.

Not only does it raise our deficit by trillions we actually get negative stuff in return.

We're literally paying people to steal from us. Thats how incredibly shit this legislation is.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-02 02:37:07+00:00
I'm not sure which part of their set of approaches this stems from, but loading the page on my screen with standard DPI and zoom makes the article font a hard to read (due to size) 39.2 px. Zooming out to 25% it does get to a down reasonable effective size but the calculated font size became a silly 121px at that level.
by dckimGUY | 2025-10-02 02:37:30+00:00
Thanks for joining in on this discussion. I know the wiki is a little bit rough at this point, though it does have some pictures of the keyboard layouts.

I would like to point out that the program does have 'drag-edges' now, so that should be a good 'selling-point' for new users.

What I am really hoping for is some input on what the menu should have...

For example, I know it needs to have font, just right off the top of my head, font selection is pretty crucial.

Of course, you can still do that from the console in the browser simply because the entire software is browser-based.

On that note, I would also point out that it is fully-offline and has no external dependencies. This is a super great point for anyone who likes to keep there own work private and have full control over their intellectual property.
by DecoPerson | 2025-10-02 02:37:39+00:00
Old websites still run very well.

Is there any reason to believe that a major new browser tech, WASM, will ever have support dropped for its early versions?

Even if the old versions are not as loved (i.e.: engine optimized for it and immediately ready to be executed) as the old versions, emulation methods work wonders and could easily be downloaded on-demand by browsers needing to run "old WASM".

I'm quite optimistic for the forwards-compatibility proposed here.
by armchairhacker | 2025-10-02 02:39:42+00:00
Designing programming languages is hard. I think every nontrivial programming language has at least a few "semantic messes"; even Scheme (R6RS) has a long specification with edge-cases (ex: https://www.r6rs.org/final/html/r6rs/r6rs-Z-H-6.html#node_se...). Meanwhile, C++ is a semantic mess that contains at least a few programming languages.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-02 02:40:09+00:00
So your one thing that we've gotten is... Many more billions of tax payer dollars spent on the border and... ???

Because that's not a benefit. You just described the government taking more money from me.

Nothing is actually improved in my life, or your life, or anyone's life.

People have gotten so brainwashed that they're legitimately arguing that what's good for them doesn't matter. What matters is how many random people they don't know they manage to hurt.

Unbelievable.
by alex77456 | 2025-10-02 02:40:11+00:00
I am, and ironically it prevented me from being able to enjoy this; too many inaccuracies and absolutist perspective frustrated me.

Like others said, skipping breakfast should not be that big of a deal for a reasonably healthy adult, we didn't evolve having 3 meals a day. Intermittent fasting is a thing too.

'Masking' parameter misses the point in my opinion. Picking what I would personally realistically do (having adapted over the years) causes it to drop to 0 over a few days. Picking what i think author wants me to pick, same result. Yet somehow I managed not to get fired in 3 days irl.

I get it, it's an illustration of 'autism is hard' for 'normies'. But it was painfully close to being realistic/enjoyable too.

Not to say it's not useful, ADHD popups were 10/10, general vibe was spot on, will probably forward it to a few friends; it's just not nuanced enough to not annoy me personally.

One of rare times where I can be blunt honest and hopefully not come across arrogant.
by deet | 2025-10-02 02:41:00+00:00
Avy | Staff Engineer / Startup Polyglot Engineer | San Francisco | Onsite (Hybrid) | Full-Time | https://www.avy.app

We are an early-stage, well-funded startup making humans and computers work together more efficiently. Experienced team from Apple AIML and other great companies.

We're looking for a polyglot "startup engineer" at the Staff+ level can help with the end-to-end implementation of new features and capabilities and who can move between different components, be creative, be flexible, take ownership, and get things done. We have a complex, challenging product, but one that's amazing to work on and that will soon change how people think about working with each other and with AI.

You'll enjoy this role if:

- You like going 0 to 1 with high ownership: moving features and products from idea on a napkin, to prototype, to engineering UI, to shipped and polished product

- You are innovative, get satisfaction out of learning new things, and thrive in an environment of uncertainty and opportunity

To succeed, you should:

- Have the wisdom to know when to take the fast route vs when to step back and clean up your mess

- Be capable and excel on your own, but be humble and communicate well with others as projects require more collaboration

- Be versed across many programming languages (e.g. from C++/Java/Swift to Go to JavaScript or Python)

- Have worked on many types of projects and software -- have you built servers, written games, shipped native apps, and vibe-coded (kidding) web apps? If so, you're a fit.

- Be versatile and work both high level and low level, on old tech and new. Have you both prompt-engineered an LLM AND tweaked the code that decodes tokens in your own local LLM runner? If so, you're a fit.

https://www.avy.app/careers.html?gh_jid=4007253009

Email us at jobs@avy.app
by worik | 2025-10-02 02:43:14+00:00
> Tenure is not how people gain notoriety

Being over looked because of your gender does not gain you notoriety either, otherwise notoriety would mean something completely different! There are so so many

But fighting back as Digg did, suing and campaigning - that is how you get notoriety, and help the people following in your footsteps.

A pox on their bigoted hierarchies.
by mrheosuper | 2025-10-02 02:43:41+00:00
I have no specific compaints, but here one example i saw online, and i'm talking from a C dev perspective.

let x: Option<Result<Vec<i32>, std::num::ParseIntError>> = Some(Ok(vec![1, 2, 3])); let flattened = x .map(|r| r.unwrap_or_default()) .unwrap_or_else(|| Vec::<i32>::new());

I have no idea what the code is doing here, but while reading python or JS code, i can make an educated guess what it's doing.

I have no experience with Rust so it makes sense i dont understand, but i also have no experience with Python or JS.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-02 02:44:03+00:00
The BBB doesn't cut shit. It just cuts trillions of dollars.

Do y'all actually hear yourself or what?

Also: it's not JUST the cutting that's the problem.

We're doing these cuts and getting NOTHING in return. Literally nothing.

Do you know how much money we're saving? -2 trillion dollars. You are actually paying to lose money. Its legitimately unbelievable just how shit this fiscal policy is.
by kibwen | 2025-10-02 02:44:05+00:00
> design decisions explicitly contrary to design decisions of C/C++ style languages even though Rust is meant to replace it

Yes, but that doesn't have to do with whether they "like" C++ or not. What they "liked" is a programming model that could possibly be theoretically proven safe by any sort of tractable static analysis, and that inevitably means making decisions contrary to C/C++. Achieving their design goals was more important than adhering to C++'s mistakes for sentimental reasons.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-10-02 02:44:08+00:00
I get that. On the other hand, by making the buckets smaller, you're forced to specify the corresponding phenomena a lot more. Which might actually help people understand what applies and what doesn't, better. Understanding something is pretty much a prerequisite to communicating it.

EDIT: I misread your comment earlier, ignore the above paragraph. I definitely get how exhausting it might be to list off everything. I suppose I feel the Autism label is too big at the moment to communicate effectively though. See the following, I think it still applies.

It also helps people on the other end. If someone says they have "Misophonia, Aural sensitivity, and Rejection Sensitivity" I would understand a lot more about their situation than if they simply said they're mildly Autistic.
by michaeld123 | 2025-10-02 02:46:01+00:00
Location: Takoma Park, MD, USA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, Swift, JavaScript, semantic networks, WebGL, LLMs, system architecture Site/Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com Email: m5@inotherwords-studio.com

Was #1 on HN this summer with semantic analysis mapping 110M connections across 1.5M words. Turned that into award-winning word games (IndiePrize, Apple Arcade finalist, NSF funded).

I judge for leading games and educational games awards (MagFest, GEE, CODiE, Serious Games). This gives me sharp insight into what makes consumer apps and games succeed.

My strength is leading technical and creative teams to transform complex systems into experiences people love. Career highlights: invented Time.gov at NIST, created SpicyNodes visualization platform (315K creators, 40M users), pioneered semantic wordplay games. After 25 years of architecting systems and leading teams up to 40 people, I also ship production code with AI tools.

Seeking: Head of Product/Design, VP Product, or problems worth solving

Latest: https://www.inotherwords.app LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/
by array_key_first | 2025-10-02 02:46:19+00:00
This literally just does not exist. There's no middle ground here or anything - this is just made up.

We don't spend federal dollars like Medicaid or Medicare on illegal immigrants. We literally just don't.

If you think we do, remember: we don't. That doesn't happen. You are misremembering. That has never happened.

If someone tells you that is happening, remember: they are wrong. They are lying. They don't understand what they are saying.
by theamk | 2025-10-02 02:46:40+00:00
this is messed up

> The decoding performance slowdown of Wasm is minimal (10–30%) compared to a native implementation.

so... you take 10%-30% performance hit _right away_, and you perpetually give up any opportunities to improve the decoder in the future. And you also give up any advanced decoding functions other than "decode whole block and store into memory".

I have no idea why would anyone do this. If you care about speed, then wasm is not going to cut it. If you don't care about speed, you don't need super-fancy encoding algorithms, just use any of the well-known ones.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-02 02:46:54+00:00
Apple hardware can work, so long as the business isn’t dependent on any legacy desktop windows stuff (but there’s always VMs or RDP in that case).

But it is still somewhat a competition problem. Google workspace has better collaboration/live editing IMO but still lacks in some areas. Microsoft’s compliance/DLP stuff is better, InTune while not the best has actually shaped up to be a pretty good MDM and works on all OSes both desktop and mobile (including Linux), and you get endpoint EDR bundled as well as zero trust VPN (global secure access).

Google has no answer to a big chunk of what locks big enterprise into M365, but workspace is fine for medium and smaller companies that don’t need all of what MS has.

But I think those smaller companies are where the disruption will start.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-02 02:48:24+00:00
But why go through the trouble of building and shipping a software decoder for a platform you know has no devices which need such a thing? On the other hand it's not too hard to find ARM64 Linux devices which need an efficient software decoder (either because there isn't a hardware one at all, there one that is there is limited in feature support, or the one that is there is hybrid but written so poorly a good software decoder is more efficient).
by dgfitz | 2025-10-02 02:49:45+00:00
I agree with you, but I also don’t do webdev. Docker seems neat, I’ve dabbled just to understand the stack and how it works. Not much of a container person I realized. Closest I get is spinning out yocto images and flashing them to hardware. Same image every time with updated versions of software. So maybe kind of like docker in the abstract sense, I suppose.

I’m mid-way through my career at this point and I’m hoping to skip the web/cloud bit, I just don’t enjoy it as much as I do hw/sw integrations.
by metadat | 2025-10-02 02:50:08+00:00
For the uninitiated (like me!):

TL;DR: An old testament reference to the "malevolent god". E.g. "god in the old testament wasn't so nice or forgiving.."

> In Gnosticism, the Demiurge is the lesser creator god who fashioned the material world and is often seen as the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh. Unlike the supreme, unknowable God, the Demiurge is ignorant, imperfect, and sometimes malevolent, responsible for the flaws of the physical world and the imprisonment of the divine spark within humans. Gnostic beliefs see a spiritual journey not as submitting to the Demiurge, but as a process of escaping his creation to return to the true, good God.

See also: https://gnosticismexplained.org/the-gnostic-demiurge/
by thorum | 2025-10-02 02:51:42+00:00
The article’s advice section is actually quite practical, and directly addresses your point:

> It should go without saying that the best way to increase your practice surface area in a given field is to be obsessed with that field. Obsession makes quick work of formal and bounded training sessions, and it doesn't need "tips" on how to do so.

> So the question then becomes, "How do I increase my practice surface area if I'm not already obsessed?"
by lazy_afternoons | 2025-10-02 02:52:54+00:00
This is pretty interesting.

I wonder why in my 30 years of lived experience (in India), I never met or heard of anyone being autistic or needing meds for mental health, even amongst the software engineers. But this seems to be fairly prevalent in the US.

It might be under diagnosis but medical services and pharma are extremely cheap and fairly competent, at least for the engineers.

May be they don't openly talk about it due to stigma.

I can't imagine what they would go through here, it's a extremely social culture where you are socially forced into group festivals, gatherings and frequent visits from relatives.
by woodruffw | 2025-10-02 02:53:05+00:00
> OOBA’s are the thing that attackers most want to do, and Rust, Fil-C, and almost all of the other memory safe languages solve that with runtime checking.

On browsers and other high-performance codebases? I would have guessed UAFs and type confusions would be higher on the attacker priority queue for the last 15 years. Rust prevents those statically.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-02 02:53:39+00:00
That's different. Those are a data structure defining annotations that are meant to be stored externally. They're not part of an HTML file like PDF annotations are. They're meant more for live collaborative commenting within a shared online space, not for making private portable annotations like PDF does.

And it's not a Chrome thing. I don't think any browsers support it, do they? It's not really clear there's a need for it, when collaborative editors already handle document annotations in their own ways.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-02 02:55:07+00:00
> The body does not need cancer, but it does need LDL to transport fats around the body.

Of course the body needs cancer.

Cancer is your own bodies cells. They're essential for you being alive. And, cells with damaged DNA train and hone your immune system.

You have millions of cancer cells in your body right now. Your immune system is killing them as we speak.

If a few happen to slip through, then that's we would say you have cancer. Why might they slip through? Your immune system makes mistakes. Because everything makes mistakes.

> What was it that he did that proved him immune to the ravages of smoking?

Um, nothing?

Is this your first day on Earth? Life is not an algorithm.

Everything is risk, everything is probability. Smoking increases your risk. It doesn't give you anything.

Your HIV and AIDS argument is just fucking stupid. Sorry to be blunt.

Yes, SOME things are A -> B. That is an extremely rare exception to the rule. Extremely. That almost never happens.

Like, if I drive fast, I might die. Might. Its not a garuantee.

I can drive 150 every day and live, or drive 10 and die immediately. That's life. Welcome to risk and probability. That's just how things work.

Having LDL and no heart disease doesn't prove anything to anyone. That doesn't prove LDL doesn't cause heart disease.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-10-02 02:55:08+00:00
"Slow is relative."

Correct. Relative to the languages I prefer, Python is slow

Python encourages people to write long scripts and large projects comprised of many scripts

Are these "run once" programs

Python is one of the least energy efficient languages

There seems to be an enormous amount of effort spent on trying to make Python faster. To me, this implies it is slow or, at least, not fast enough, but others may see things differently. The language has a devoted following, that's for sure

For me, the startup time makes Python unusable
by theamk | 2025-10-02 02:58:29+00:00
It's "the future work". But possibly, allowlists might help:

> Security concerns. Despite the sandbox design of Wasm, it still has vulnerabilities, especially with the discovery of new attack techniques. [...] We believe there are opportunities for future work to improve Wasm security. One approach is for creators of Wasm decoding kernels to register their Wasm modules in a central repository to get the Wasm modules verified and tamper-resistant.
by bangaladore | 2025-10-02 02:58:36+00:00
You are confusing problem 1 (memory / thread safety) with problem 2 (being distinct from C/C++). I'm not here to argue about changes made that are necessary to solve problem 1, but I'm also not here to pretend that all the differences Rust has compared to a C-style language like C/C++/C# is largely due to supporting memory / thread safety.
by woodruffw | 2025-10-02 02:58:38+00:00
> Now you might say, why not rewrite all the deps in Go or Rust? The funny thing about that is you sort of can’t do that today since neither of those languages has dynamic linking.

I don’t know about Go, but that’s certainly not true for Rust. Dynamic linking is the norm in Rust; you can run `ldd` on any stock-built binary to see that it dynamically links to glibc (or libSystem or similar).

(It’s also common for Rust libraries to be distributed as shared objects with C APIs/ABIs — to my understanding, this is how virtually every incremental adopter of Rust has chosen to adopt it.)
by neverkn0wsb357 | 2025-10-02 02:58:47+00:00
The comments in the threads are interesting. A surprising amount of people are saying they don’t get it.

I can shed light into the food thing (I don’t think of myself as autistic but the people around me do, my kid is diagnosed - I was the last one to clue in “that’s just being a kid” I would say); so food, making yourself a proper breakfast is self-care, and self care takes energy. Making yourself breakfast is a lot of work, so you do it and it eats your energy, or you don’t do it and you feel shittier later because you didn’t eat.

It’s a shitty catch-22.

And some days you’re tired from the day before; I love that the sim carried over the energy levels from the day before because sleep does help but there’s no real reset, the day before carries into the next day so you’ll be like “I know I should make myself food, but I’m exhausted” so you avoid it and it turns out worse, or you do it and now you’re tired for the next task.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-02 02:59:00+00:00
Sysadmin here and this is the unfortunate truth. This is already disabled in my tenant along with the million other “features” MS shoves down our throats monthly.

But, we remain and businesses have no appetite to exit Microsoft, not that there’s an equivalent bundled competitior to everything a 365 license gets you.

So I keep tabs on what’s coming out of Redmond, curse at them inside, and then disable the crap and move on with my job.

MS knows no one is leaving so they continue to get away with it.
by TomasBjartur | 2025-10-02 03:00:10+00:00
Hi. I am the author. If anyone is interested in following my writing, especially those not often on LessWrong, consider subscribing to my Substack: https://tomasbjartur.substack.com/

I plan to mirror any future fiction there.

I haven't written much but my next-best stories are likely these:

The Maker of MIND: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/H4kadKrC2xLK24udn/the-maker-...

The Liar and The Scold https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/duF4Qh9pn7Y5imhsm/the-liar-a...

Of the two, I prefer The Maker of MIND. Both got similar karma on LessWrong and were written ~2021.
by btilly | 2025-10-02 03:00:27+00:00
That's just somewhat sloppy.

Unicode is not an encoding of text to bits. It is an encoding of text to numbers. There are a variety of encodings of text to bits based on how those numbers are to be encoded into bits.

Though technically Unicode isn't even quite that. For example "é" can be encoded as U+00E9 or as U+0065,U+0301. Going the other way, "水", U+6C34, is drawn differently in simplified Chinese, Japanese, and traditional Chinese. Unicode calls this, "language-sensitive glyph variation".

Which means that the correspondence between text and Unicode is many to many both ways. And then the Unicode can show up in bits and bytes again in multiple ways.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-02 03:00:42+00:00
What is reasonable about the claim that we should be allowed to take naked pictures because it's inevitable?

Why is it inevitable? I reject that conclusion. Inevitability isn't an argument, it's a belief system.

I can say anything is inevitable. Shooting someone in the face is inevitable if guns exist. Okay, sure.

But shooting someone in the face is still illegal, no matter how inevitable it is. The solution isn't to make people good - because that's not reasonable.

I'm frustrated because this argument is so intrinsically and fundamentally flawed, and in such an obvious way, but I still have to argue against it.

I feel like I'm arguing that the sky is blue. Is this for real?