MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by renewiltord | 2025-10-15 23:50:42+00:00
Indeed, that's a question you have which I understand you may be eager to find answers to, but I am primarily focused on the original statement of

> ...the excessive use of screens that kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move

Screens killing focus is clearly not backed by evidence. There may be other evidence that shows that when stratifying by percentile achievement, screen use places students at a percentile below where they would be otherwise. But it is clearly false that the use of screens kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move.

Killing focus is an absolute term. You don't have to compare against someone else to determine if focus was killed. If the kids have focus at the end, then it is not killed. And at best it could be slightly reduced.

e.g. If you have the hypothesis that mangoes are acutely toxic and kill people you don't have to sample a lot of people. You are claiming a strong effect size. If even 5 people eat mangoes and don't die then the answer is that they are not acutely toxic.
by OisinMoran | 2025-10-15 23:50:44+00:00
I don't know if it's satisfactorily available anywhere yet though, right? Most VR headsets aren't great at text but yeah definitely agree with you about not wanting to wear any current iteration for any length of time. I can't seem to find a long term comfortable and secure fit for my Quest which is part of why I don't use it a whole lot.

And no I haven't tried working in VR. I do actually just work with one monitor and only have a few terminal tabs running at any one time, but honestly do think there are so many improvements I could make to my workflow before even a perfect VR solution would be worth considering.

Any monitor recs? My current one has started flickering and it's slowly driving me insane
by IanCal | 2025-10-15 23:50:44+00:00
And again you assign a property or not to things that perform indistinguishably. Your definition is useless. It may as well be based on the tin of beans.

> In reality the material difference between a computing machine and a brain is trivial

No it isn’t. You are making the strong statements about how the brain works that you argued against at the start.

> Among other practical differences such as guarantee of function over long term.

Once again ignoring the setup of the argument. The solution to the chinese room isn’t “the trick is to wait long enough”.

I don’t know why you want to argue about this given you so clearly reject the entire concept of the thought experiment.

I find the entire thing to be intellectual wankery. A very simple and ethical solution is that if two things appear conscious from the outside then just treat them both as such. Job done. I don’t need to find excuses like “ah but inside there’s a book!” Or “it’s manipulations are on the syntactic level if we just look inside” or “but it’s just valves!” I can simply not mistreat anything that appears conscious.

All of this feels like a scared response to the idea that maybe we’re not special.
by kristianp | 2025-10-15 23:51:11+00:00
Agreed. Just like the record price of gold never mentions inflation-adjusted figures, news reporters/editors make the minimum effort, maximum "hype" choices.

Ross Ulbricht had more, at over 144,000⁽¹⁾, with additional 51,000 seized from a hacker⁽²⁾.

[1] https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/22/ross-ulbricht-pardon-b...

[2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-h....
by pfdietz | 2025-10-15 23:51:37+00:00
500 deaths at $12M per life is $6B. This is a small fraction of the total cost of Fukushima.

People say LNT overestimates deaths, but what they don't realize is that even if you take LNT at face value the cost of deaths from a nuclear accident isn't really that high. A regulatory regime where reactor operators that have accidents are charged the inferred cost of the expected deaths could work.
by Telemakhos | 2025-10-15 23:51:55+00:00
The first M1 MacBook Pros had both the touchbar and a decent keyboard. I love mine so long as the driver running the touchbar doesn't crash, which it does sometimes necessitating a reboot. My main problem is how few programs actually ever made good use (not just some use) of the touchbar.

As for the dongle issue, that went away when I upgraded to a USB-C monitor at home and USB-C equipment at work. I can dock to a monitor or plug into a projector to give a presentation and charge with the same cable. At this point I don't want an HDMI port, and I'm kind of sad that the next laptop will probably have a dedicated charging cable.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-15 23:52:43+00:00
I don’t believe you are serious that you don’t see the issue with MacOS having

- A 68K emulator

- A PPC emulator

- a 32 bit x86 emulator

- a 32 bit ARM emulator (since ARM chips don’t have hardware to run 32 bit code)

And to think that Windows is a shining example of good operating system design.

Why not include a 65C02 emulator also so you can run AppleWorks 3.0 from 1986?
by greycol | 2025-10-15 23:52:59+00:00
Of course the flowchart that fill that blank has other outcomes than total nuclear war, but you aren't considering how unacceptable those outcomes are to those involved or the feedback loops involved.

Let me ask you this question. Why did Russia use a small nuke on a military target in the middle of nowhere Ukraine? Because the outcome was positive for Russia... but the only way that can be true is if the cost of using a small nuke was better than the alternatives. This either means it was a demonstration / political action or... 1 or more Russian units in the Ukraine are armed with tactical nukes and it was a militarily sound option so by definition you'll see more nuke flying around at least from the Russian side when it's militarily sound. Now due to the realities of logistics that means there is capturable nuclear material on the battlefield.

If it's a demonstration/political action what do you think it was meant to accomplish? Either the consequences will be less detrimental than the military gain and so Russia can use tactical nukes and will do so if it improves the military situation... or the consequences will be at a level detrimental to Russia.

See the premise of the question is flawed in that Russia doesn't just use one Nuke in the middle of nowhere, because everyone already knows Russia has nukes. Russia is trying to demonstrate it will use them and so the actions from that are either a Ukraine alliance capitulation, Russia can continue the war just the same but with whatever ever extra political consequences of using 1 nuke, or continue the situation using Nukes.

You see the issue right? Should the Ukraine alliance surrender to a single tactical nuke when it hasn't to the threat of strategic nukes? Russia can't fire that first Nuke without being a country willing to use tactical nukes on the battlefield and what did they gain if not the use of those nukes to ensure a military victory because it hasn't ensured a diplomatic one.

So the statement becomes: Russia uses tactical nukes across the battlefield. ____. Everyone is firing nukes at eachother.

That last sentence is synonymous with "Strategic nukes being fired by ICBM" which is incredibly likely when 1 non scheduled ICBM is fired. While you're right that 1 tactical nuke in the middle of nowhere wouldn't ensure MAD, it is not a massive assumption that the realities around that 1 nuke being used would.
by nerdponx | 2025-10-15 23:53:16+00:00
Numpy ships built-in type hints as well as a type for hinting arrays in your own code (numpy.typing.NDArray).

The real challenge is denoting what you can accept as input. `NDArray[np.floating] | pd.Series[float] | float` is a start but doesn't cover everything especially if you are a library author trying to provide a good type-hinted API.
by tatrajim | 2025-10-15 23:53:53+00:00
The AVP has greatly enhanced my productivity through access to a large virtual mac window inside a variety of environments, facilitating deep focus while reclining, sitting outdoors, or traveling. And the 3D image conversion of treasured photos is remarkable. On the whole, I've used it near daily for over a year and a half, and marvel at how many naysayers there are.
by nzeid | 2025-10-15 23:54:22+00:00
Gonna pile on: you really really really have to go all in on coding exercises. These infuriating and stupid coding assessments are just that. But you absolutely will make it past that hurdle.

And if you're gunning for senior positions, you'll have to suffer the system designs as well.

Keep practicing and don't let a single day slip by without training. If you need a change of pace, code something on the side that's genuinely fun and zero stakes. It will all come together eventually.
by john01dav | 2025-10-15 23:54:39+00:00
> It's amazing to me how the use of a UPS is not as ubiquitous at home.

Most users don't see enough failures that they can attribute to bad power to justify the cost in their mind. Furthermore, USPes are extremely expensive per unit of energy storage, so the more obviously useful use case (of not having your gaming session interrupted by a power outage) simply isn't there.
by dwd | 2025-10-15 23:54:45+00:00
Very interesting, will have a read in depth.

Wondering if you have any ideas on this, which can be quite jarring when it happens?

You are thinking about something, and then walk through a doorway into another room and suddenly completely lose track of what you were thinking.

The closest idea I've seen for that is: Jeff Hawkins in his Thousand Brain Theory of Intelligence made a statement that learning is a function of navigation and the world models we construct are set in the context of location we create them.

--------

Edit: Just read your piece on Faith: "Faith, as it’s traditionally understood, is trivial bullshit compared to the towering, unseen faith we place in the empirical all day everyday."

Absolutely correct, and the traditional understanding of Hebrews 11:1 I don't believe reflects what the author (supposedly Paul) was trying to convey.

Ἔστιν δὲ πίστις ἐλπιζομένων ὑπόστασις, πραγμάτων ἔλεγχος οὐ βλεπομένων

πίστις: Pistis can be translated as confidence, as in: I'm confident this chair won't collapse when I sit on on it. Much stronger than belief or faith.

ὑπόστασις: Hupostasis is also a much stronger word than assurance, it conveys substance, as in your past experience backs up your confidence.
by jrm4 | 2025-10-15 23:55:00+00:00
This really is confirming my theory that the problem here is that "serverless" is so ill-defined that even it's own name is nonsensical.

Like, there are still servers.

Appears just about as intelligent as calling them "electricity-less." I mean, yes, I no longer think about electricity when deploying things, but that doesn't tell me anything meaningful about what's going on here.
by somesigmaperson | 2025-10-15 23:55:02+00:00
The one thing they taught me about jobs and the future in the C.A.C.C (California cadet corps) was that the more you help out/volunteer the more likely you are to get a job over someone else who didn't do anything this can also apply to stuff you did in high school depending if you did stuff in high school or not could also help :p
by tennisflyi | 2025-10-15 23:55:20+00:00
Take a gander here, https://www.reddit.com/r/Millennials/comments/1o7fcfc/nobody...

I'm really torn, TBH. Plenty of people do, indeed, get on with F/MAANG/whatever out of college and make that 150. Plenty don't. It's jut bleh
by decimalenough | 2025-10-15 23:55:27+00:00
Almost as crazy as email and HTTP being designed without encryption, amirite?

SS7 dates from the early 1980s, as do SMTP (1981) and HTTP (1989). In all three cases people build the simplest thing that works and then hacked on it as new requirements arose. The main problem is that the telco world is very conservative and closed-source, so while we've had HTTPS and encrypted IMAP etc for a while now, SS7 hasn't gotten similar upgrades.
by zaruvi | 2025-10-15 23:55:43+00:00
I would add that no highlighting would be applied to this mistyped word as it would not be recognised as a variable or a keyword. This may depend on the way syntax highlighting is handled. A common solution like treesitter would sus out that no variable with the name retunr exists, probably causing the mythical base colour to be applied, heh. That is arguably a big highlight in a colourscheme that rarely uses its base colour.
by almostaboomer | 2025-10-15 23:56:12+00:00
I've read all the comments in this thread and I will be frank with you.

You are arrogant and entitled. You are not as great as you think you are. If you were, you would have what you want. But you don't. And even if you were great, you (or anyone for that matter) shouldn't be arrogant or entitled. It's a terrible way to live. Insulting those who are trying to help you by calling their advice "boomer cope" is beyond asinine and just the topping on the cake.

Your problem is that you think you deserve something. You don't. In the strictest sense what you "deserve" is exactly what you have right now, which is nothing. "Deserve" is meaningless word anyway. As if there is some universal objective truth about what the state of your life "should" be.

If you want to get out of this rut, humble yourself, get whatever software job you can get (assuming you want to stay in this industry), and slowly work your way up over the coming decades. That's reality.

It's also clear that you have no true sense of ownership or responsibility. You have a victim mindset. It oozes out of everything you say. Some examples:

Q: "Why can you not pass tech screens? You mean leetcode questions?"

> I don't really know, none of this was a problem when I got my last job in tech (as a non-founder).

Who cares what the state of the world was when you got your last job? Clearly you're not cutting it today. Does living in the glory days of your past put food on your table now?

> My best guess is they thought my skills weren't advanced enough for my age or found it weird I was bald.

No hiring manager cares that you're bald. That's just you blaming them for your lack of skills.

> I'm legitimately going to just move to another country if one more boomer tells me I just have to "wait for the stars to align" one more time.

You won't have to wait until another "boomer" tells you that (how do you even know who is a boomer, and why does it matter if they are?). Your current crappy attitude will all but ensure you will fail and be forced into such a situation.

All that aside, I hope you fix your attitude and improve your life. Good luck.
by GuB-42 | 2025-10-15 23:56:22+00:00
> And regarding reporting, how many times can you write the same thing "american's are fat"? Or are you supposed to cover every heart attack on a news story?

The article addresses your point with: "A newspaper that constantly covers heart disease and kidney failure would be a boring one that soon goes out of business."

The last paragraph is about whether or not the bias matters, and I find the conclusion particularly interesting: "But there’s one final reason why this bias matters. It makes it hard for us to understand how causes of death are changing over time."
by a_conservative | 2025-10-15 23:56:42+00:00
Don't worry about the money too much. You're trying to solve multiple equations at the same time. Focus on getting your foot in the door somewhere in a job you like. It would have been great if you could have picked up 150k/year job as easily now as in the past, but the market has turned south.

It is easier to get a job when you have one already. You don't have to solve all the problems at once.
by olooney | 2025-10-15 23:56:48+00:00
This is going to sound a little weird, but I think trust is part of the problem.

Canadians have a high-trust culture, but their stock market is historically full of scams[1], and some analysts think its causally related. (It may just be because TSXV is a wild west, or because companies would IPO on NYSE or Nasdaq if they were legit, but it could be the trust thing. Fits my narrative, anyway.)

When I look at politics, crypto rug pulls, meme stocks with P/E ratios over 200, Aum[2] and similar cults, or many other modern problems I don't see negotiations breaking down because of a lack of trust; I see a bunch of people placing far too much trust in sketchy leaders and ideas backed by scant evidence. A little skepticism would go a long way.

That's why I emphasize robust coordination: more due diligence, more transparency, more fraud detection, more skepticism, more financial literacy, more education in general. There's a cost associated with all this, sure, but it still gets you into a situation where the interaction is a coordination game[3] and the Nash equilibrium is Pareto-efficient. Thus, we fall into the "pit of success" and naturally cooperate in our own best interests.

There's nothing wrong with empathy, altruism, or charity, but they are very far from universal. You need to base your society on a firm foundation of robust coordination, and then you can have those things afterwards, as a little treat.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver_Stock_Exchange

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game
by tallowen | 2025-10-15 23:57:18+00:00
It's nice to see an open sourced implementation of the US tax code! This was part of the IRS Direct File codebase that allowed people to file their taxes for free, directly with the IRS. It was canceled earlier this year by the Trump administration. It looks like the Fact Graph was already opensourced a couple months ago and that version of the factgraph lives here: https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/tree/main/direct-f...

I'm curious why a second repository was created for this.
by rockemsockem | 2025-10-15 23:58:03+00:00
IMO it's always been a red flag if a company doesn't do coding screens, even if someone at the company says they're good. There's just too many awful programmers out there to be willing to move forward with a candidate on word of mouth alone.

It really sounds like you just need to brush up on your interviewing skills, maybe some leetcode practice, maybe you just need someone to stare at you while you solve problems to get over the nerves of the situation.

I used to practice in an environment without even basic autocomplete because I felt like it was more effective, maybe something like that would help you.
by dunham | 2025-10-15 23:58:30+00:00
Nice work, thanks for taking the time to write it up. I regret not doing that for my projects.

I also did something similar back around 2014 in https://github.com/dunhamsteve/iwork but I didn't get much further than tables on the Numbers side before taking a break. There I translated iwork files to HTML. That code has been largely neglected since then, and I never wrote up my process. Like the other commenter, I based this on https://github.com/obriensp/iWorkFileFormat

For ObjC programs that don't embed the descriptors, I wrote a python script that reverse engineers protobuf schemas from disassembled code: https://gist.github.com/dunhamsteve/224e26a7f56689c33cea4f0f... I don't remember what project that was for, but maybe it's useful to someone.

And for Notes.app, I reverse engineered the description from the binary protobuf data. Since there is ambiguity between binary data and nested objects, my script would build a tentative schema and then refine it against further examples. I later learned that the full schema, in text form, was embedded in the web version of the application. That project is at https://github.com/dunhamsteve/notesutils and also is neglected. I believe the table format has changed enough that tables are no longer working.
by evil-olive | 2025-10-15 23:58:30+00:00
as a 10+ year Sublime user, Zed is the best of the more "modern" GUI editors I've tried.

I haven't fully switched over to using it as my daily-driver because Zed's heavy reliance on GPU rendering means that it locks up every time I suspend & resume my Linux box [0,1] but I'm optimistic about the progress they're making on it.

0: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7940

1: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/23288
Show HN: An AI agent for high-security art storage brokerage
by marctossip | 2025-10-15 23:58:49+00:00
Finding the right climate-controlled, insured, and high-security vault for a valuable art collection is a slow, opaque, and high-friction process.

We're building an AI agent that automates this. It takes an asset's requirements (e.g., oil on canvas, specific humidity, location in a freeport) and instantly matches them against our curated database of vetted storage facilities. The goal is to turn a weeks-long manual brokerage process into a 2-minute, data-driven query.

Here are the complex challenges our agent is designed to solve (in French): https://www.stockage-courtage.fr/stockage-oeuvres-art
by tickettotranai | 2025-10-15 23:58:51+00:00
No I believe he's basically formally correct.

You need to be able to "wrap" values and then also "wrap" functions in the way you expect. That's literally it.

Btw, the list monad example is stupid imo and borderline misleading. The promise/nullable/Either examples are better. you "wrap" a function by putting it as the only value in a list, and "map" pretty much acts as your function wrapper, but technically this you need to jump through a couple hoops to make it monadic, and I'm just not sure the metaphor is helpful here
by IanCal | 2025-10-15 23:59:14+00:00
> It’s fairly evident that they are not functionally identical

Then you could tell the difference and the thought experiment is broken. The whole point is that outside observers can’t tell. Not that they’re too stupid, that there isn’t a way they could tell, no question they could ask.

> but is also believed to produce other output that cannot be measured with current technology

Are you suggesting that Searle was saying that there was a difference between the rooms and that we just needed more advanced technology to see inside them? Come on.
by 0xTJ | 2025-10-15 23:59:20+00:00
It can be valid without being peer-reviewed, but it isn't automatically reliable. Regardless of whether it has been tested, it could be fundamentally invalid. I don't know that it is, I don't know enough about the field to understand what's being said, my point is that the standards to have a pre-print aren't high. They're meant to keep out garbage, not to make sure that something is reasonable.
by matt-p | 2025-10-15 23:59:41+00:00
you can get 64GB on the mini with M4-Pro so that lays credence to no technical reason, but at the same time if the business reason was strong, why allow it on the mini but not in a macbook? I think this is equally likely to be due to reducing SKUs or something. E.g they found that most people buying 64GB ram do also buy the upgraded processor.