MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SilverElfin | 2025-10-09 03:35:16+00:00
See this Reddit discussion:

“The same 5 people moderates 500 of the most popular subreddits”

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/gjl27j/the_...

It appears the original post they are discussing was removed. Seems like Reddit banned the original user who collected this data and deleted their posts.

Another discussion about this:

“Six powermods control 118 of the top 500 subreddits”

https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/upda...
by TheBicPen | 2025-10-09 03:35:22+00:00
It's a shame how many platforms are moving away from transparent moderation. I get that there are strong incentives to do so - a user that knows they're banned will immediately try to find a way to circumvent the ban. Shadowbanning delays that reaction if not stopping it outright. But damn does the concept feel dystopian. Like you're being ignored through seemingly no fault of your own. Surely that can't be healthy. And yet the platform is better off because the person isn't trying to circumvent the ban. And don't even get me started on replacing human interaction with AI for shadowbanned users.
by fzeroracer | 2025-10-09 03:36:36+00:00
I think unfortunately this is a massive conflux of many negative rentseeking factors that creates a blackhole of mediocrity.

A lot of local restaurants in Seattle can't afford space rent, but then when they leave those spaces stay empty. The restaurants that do thrive are part of big multinational chains or have to serve the same slop as everywhere else because it's the cheapest. Combined with increasing consolidation, everything converges towards low quality shit.

Fixing this would require, like a lot of our self-inflicted problems, realizing that big corporations and consolidation is slowly strangling everything.
by lovich | 2025-10-09 03:37:29+00:00
I legitimately do not understand the idea that it’s harmful if you simultaneously argue that it has no effect on anyone but catharsis for the poster.

If it doesn’t change anyone’s mind then why care?

If it does change someone’s mind then why argue against it? Unless you mean to say that you think it’s actively changing people’s mind in the opposite direction of the original posters intent
by jraph | 2025-10-09 03:37:29+00:00
There's a place for pushing strong philosophical points. But that's not what this comment is. This comment is practical advice, and I think it misses the point.

"Try to avoid relying on proprietary software" is strong. "Avoid any option that exists to run software you think you need" feels out of touch, especially when it says "I use Mac for X and Y" - which is barely practical: having a whole extra, expensive computer that's not maintained forever is quite the costly workaround for an arbitrary stance like "don't use Wine" that they don't motivate so much in the end (there's no practical explanation in that comment for avoiding VMs or Wine - they say maintenance, but I don't see what's hard to maintain in running Wine).

The comment argues "The good news. Every bit invested in high quality API/ABI on Linux pays off.". I do agree. I don't know about high quality, and it hurts a bit to say it, but it so happens that Windows might be the only stable API/ABI on Linux, with Wine being a completely libre reimplementation of it. If you need to write a program that you are reasonably sure will run on any Linux in 20 years without intervention, Wine might be your best bet (with AppImage probably your second best bet). What would be the fundamental (philosophical, practical, technical) reason to avoid targeting Wine? What makes winelib so different from other libraries such that you should avoid it? Genuinely curious. What real alternative is there? Qt and Gtk break the API each major version and even the GNU libc doesn't guarantee ABI stability. The only reasonable alternative is "maintained free software" (and that's what I happen to rely on).

FWIW, I have no stake in this: I use only free software, I mostly don't use Wine nor contribute to it, and I wish I were wrong.
by dmitrygr | 2025-10-09 03:38:22+00:00
You misread. It causes the crash of the leading plane, not of the following one, so the glider having no fuel is completely irrelevant

As for a system that measures forces, that’s not likely to work either. Transient forces are OK, but the same force over a little bit of time is enough to force a nose down attitude that is unrecoverable. Attempting to draw the line unequivocally between the two is difficult because it depends on conditions, weights, centers of gravity, and many other things.
by tartieret | 2025-10-09 03:38:22+00:00
The business cost with PRs isn't the first review but another developer, it's the number of iterations on a pull request due to defects and change requests. The way I am trying to promote the use of LLMs with more junior developers in my team (I am the CTO) is to use AI-assisted tools (we used Windsurf and recently switched to Github Copilot) for a first pass, e.g asking the agent for a review and catching potential defect before involving the human reviewer.

This doesn't mean the human reviewer will need to spend less time reviewing, but potentially this PR will be merged faster with on average a lower number of iterations and improved code quality.

I do have in my team some senior developers that are excellent, and it's very very rare I catch an issue in their PRs (maybe 1 out of 50). But I also have greener developers for who the ratio is way higher (like 8 or 9 out of 10) and this means repeated context switching for the reviewers.
by Hnrobert42 | 2025-10-09 03:38:52+00:00
The received wisdom is that the Trump administration does big business' bidding. Thus, the FTC rescinds federal click to cancel.

But now CA passed its own click to cancel. Surely other states will follow.

How is fighting dozens of different statutes better than working around one in federal courts that are backed up by the business friendly Supreme Court? Businesses are greedy but they aren't dumb. What am I missing?
by noitpmeder | 2025-10-09 03:39:13+00:00
But .. what .. why??

Sure you could use an AI agent to write that code, but it wouldn't actually being that AI agent in the hot loop constantly coordinating your UI interactions with the poker engine...

Comments like these make me feel a bit safer from AI in my engineering job. People think it's a perfect no brainer fit for so many inane situations.
by ls612 | 2025-10-09 03:39:46+00:00
I literally built a NAS this past weekend and put TrueNAS on it and man has it been humbling learning to administer it. I’m able to get basic stuff working now after drowning in permissions hell for a day but I’m basically getting myself out of that by doing the linux equivalent of running more and more things as administrator in Windows until I stop getting errors. I might well have been a Synology customer before they did this nonsense but now I’m going to end up learning how to run a Linux server at least semi competently.
by vesche | 2025-10-09 03:39:50+00:00
Curious if Meta will ever recoup its investment into VR/AR? A quick Google search indicates Meta has invested north of $100 billion into this tech. The public just doesn't seem that interested in VR/AR. A very small percentage of my family and friends even own a VR headset. Most people are busy and don't have time to strap on a headset when they get home. If gaming / "the metaverse" is the cornerstone of VR, why are almost all gamers playing on a PC or console? And on the AR front, has anyone actually seen anyone out-and-about wearing those Meta AR glasses? Anyone remember Google glass? What happened to Magic Leap?

It's unsual, if you would have asked me 15 years ago- I would have told you _absolutely_ VR/AR would be huge. It just hasn't been the case. People don't want to wear headsets and there's nothing that the AR glasses can do that my phone can't. The whole thing has become a money blackhole.
by zenmac | 2025-10-09 03:40:31+00:00
Oh this just seems like the typical financial dealings that City of London invented to obfuscating ownership of holdings half millennium ago. Some would event argue this obfuscation what transferred power from the military to bankers. And it is how we end up in this transnational corporation where the public really have no idea who is owning what and who is actually running the show here.

Now we are just transferring the power from bankers -> tech/AI.
by SilverElfin | 2025-10-09 03:41:50+00:00
I remember this. If I resell, Saudi Arabia was ready to formally recognize Israel and establish mutual diplomatic relations. A huge deal, and the timing of October 7 seems too exact to be coincidental. The attack did work - polls show the citizenry of Saudi Arabia is overwhelmingly aligned with Hamas, with over 95% denying the atrocities (murder, rape, mutilation) of October 7.
by rgthelen | 2025-10-09 03:42:10+00:00
Oh man, yeah, big pivot.

We still are Rownd (https://rownd.com); but we see the writing on the wall. SaaS Software that helps with "hard code" problems is going the way of the dodo.

What used to take a few weeks and was hard to maintain can be down with Codex in the background. We are still bringing in decent revenue and have no plans to sunset, we are just not investing in it.

We all have IBM backgrounds - not sexy, but we are good at running complex software in customer datacenters and in their clouds. AI is going to have to run locally to extract full value from regulated industries.

We are using a services + support model, likely going vertical (legal, healthcare, and we had some good momentum in the US Gov until 1 October :)).
by em-bee | 2025-10-09 03:42:15+00:00
oh, i feel stupid now, the reason bat worked and highlight didn't was because bat had access to the filename extension. if highlight is called with a filename argument it can detect the syntax too.

so really bat and hightlight are equal, and it's not just a useless use of cat, but using cat here actually breaks the syntax detection. and it does so in bat too, obviously.

so this means highlight almost wins because it has pike support already, whereas for bat i had to add it, except that it turns out that if highlight can't detect the syntax it produces nothing, and you need --force to fix that, and if it is given multiple files as arguments it writes the output to files too, which is practically never what i want so i need to fix that with --stdout.

bat it is.
by advisedwang | 2025-10-09 03:43:13+00:00
In CA websites are already required to respect the opt-out setting implemented in the Global Privacy Control [1] extension. It's basically the same thing as do-not-track but starting from a clean slate so that the meaning of the setting in law is clearly defined.

This bill basically allows the regulator to make sure everyone in CA gets this extension automatically.

[1] https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa/gpc
by katabasis | 2025-10-09 03:44:48+00:00
I think Vue.js has done a great job of avoiding a lot of the churn while staying competitive with other projects in terms of features and performance.

The core library of React seems well managed, but the accompanying ecosystem of 3rd-party tools for styling, routing, state management, etc seem to be constantly changing.

Meanwhile in Vue land, the critical packages have remained fairly stable and are all maintained by the core team. You get support for styling and transitions out of the box; for most other things (routing, state management, etc) there is one well-maintained library (as opposed to a bunch of options of varying quality that you need to sift through).

I've been using Vue.js for 10 years at this point, and have been using the composition API for the last 5. The older options API is still viable as well.
by McGlockenshire | 2025-10-09 03:46:33+00:00
There was a time when a previous employer looked like we were going to go down in flames -- 2008. I wrote such a love letter in the main include file (yay PHP) that told them how to figure out how the application worked and gave a credit blurb to all the previous devs and how they helped build the application.

We didn't go under quite yet and it was my extreme pleasure to allow two more devs to write their own blurbs and edit the letter to help future others. The company later went under and was acquired by a competitor, so I'm sure they've seen the letter in order to figure out how to extract data from the system. Effort not wasted.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-09 03:47:58+00:00
What's the difference? Even if it's not anthroprogenic it is happening and it will destroy large parts of the ecosystem. The cause is irrelevant. Unchecked climate change will inflict trillions in economic damages and billions of lives.

If you don't agree with the fact that this is happening and that we must do something about it, you're a climate denier. Whether we caused it or not (and we absolutely, definitely did) the effect is the same and the solutions are the same.

Jackass.
by m463 | 2025-10-09 03:48:59+00:00
I regularly use it with searches, and it really cuts through the nonsense.

Sort of like an information desk. The person there might not be a nobel laureate, but I don't know anything and they usually have enough knowledge to be immediately helpful.

Like "compare expedition max vs platinum"

(notice I didn't know max meant extra length, while platinum is a trim level)
by KPGv2 | 2025-10-09 03:49:18+00:00
> The better the computers hooked directly into the exchange get you mean.

I need you to understand that HFT makes decisions based on human-defined parameters. It's not AI-driven. What's the difference between a human saying "these are my parameters, now CPU, go trade based off those" versus "these are my parameters, now underling, go trade based off those"

the only difference is speed, plus i suppose those underlings might suck at following their boss's directives compared to a computer
by toast0 | 2025-10-09 03:51:19+00:00
> Would you check the certificate for each link going there, and trace it down, or just assume Citi is up to their shenanigans again and paste the password manually?

What do you get from checking a certificate? Oh yeah, must really be citibank because they have a shitton of SANs? I'd guess most banks do have a cert with an organization name, but organization names can be misleading, and some banks might use LetsEncrypt?
by dimgl | 2025-10-09 03:51:26+00:00
I'm permabanned on Reddit for saying stuff that the mods didn't like on /r/games on multiple accounts. That website is beyond gone and it's depressing, because it was my favorite site. But the mod situation is seriously out of control. I used to buy Reddit Gold (when that was still a thing) so I found it to be incredibly stupid that this source of revenue was shut off.

And yet Reddit still lives on. Somehow.
by 4bpp | 2025-10-09 03:52:04+00:00
Your post does not really do much to dispel the negative picture that the opening article paints of you. You say their decline is "predominantly an industry problem". Is this also the case for your own company, Formation? You went on the record comparing Codesmith to a sex cult and accusing it of deceiving and exploiting its students and evidently consider criticising them to be a mission worth years of near-daily dedication, and the only example you have to offer to justify this in a thread where people question your motives for this is... some random anecdote about them having an IT fuckup?

This doesn't read as if you have a coherent case that Codesmith is bad to an extent that justifies your single-minded effort to spread this message, but as either an attempt to throw more FUD at the wall in the hope that something sticks even in this forum, or an indication that you are not quite well.
by simonw | 2025-10-09 03:52:33+00:00
I just realized I picked up a new superstition quite recently involving ChatGPT search.

I've been asking it for "credible" reports on topics, because when I use that word its thinking trace seems to consider the source of the information more carefully. I've noticed it saying things like "but that's just a random blog, I should find a story from a news organization".

But... I haven't done a measured comparison, so for all I know it has the same taste in sources even if I don't nudge it with "credible" in the mix!
by noitpmeder | 2025-10-09 03:52:43+00:00
UV has provided easy solutions for engineers that are easily frustrated by a lack of easy solutions.

There's nothing wrong with easy solutions, but any python engineer worth their salt has long since solved and moved on from the issues that UV claims to solve.

I believe UV provides value, even significant value, to lite python users, but for those working with python day in and day out, maybe you're using a new tool, but life has not changed significantly for the better. Or you just sucked and didn't reach for any of the perfectly usable solutions to all of these problems that existed before UV showed up.
by SafeDusk | 2025-10-09 03:53:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I hope someone will find this useful.

On a side note: if you're already using Try and would like to see this incorporated, I've opened an issue here: https://github.com/tobi/try/issues/40. Give a like or comment to make this more possible!

Am keen to hear TUI tips for coding agents parallelization as feedback for improvements. How are you guys doing it?
by KPGv2 | 2025-10-09 03:53:49+00:00
> The point isn't to make something 'wall street hates' it's to make something that doesn't get money eaten away by automated computers in the middle so that it's the best option for people making trading decisions on people time scales.

Why is this desirable? It seems like an argument designed only to serve the interests of a small class of person who insists on doing manual trades themselves.

The rest of what you've written just sounds like "I lost money because computers are better than me at the task." I'm not sympathetic to that concern. Computers are better than me at lots of things, so I just don't try to compete at those things. I pay people with access to the computers to do them for me, and then I focus on the things I'm good at instead. Division of labor and all that.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-09 03:53:53+00:00
> Should we really care what the rendering engines want?

Yes. Let’s use Web MIDI as an example. This was proposed by Google, and implemented by Google. It was initially rejected by both Mozilla and Apple on privacy and security grounds. Mozilla eventually gave in and implemented it. Then it came to light that porn sites had been using Web MIDI to fingerprint and track users.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23679063

I think Apple made the right call there. Just blindly saying yes to functionality is not good for the web.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-09 03:54:15+00:00
I think there is a clear argument to be made that this is provably false. For instance the median income in 1960 for a worker was $5,435. [1] The GDP/capita at the time was $3002 [2]. So a median worker was getting very nearly 2x a share if the entire national GDP was equally distributed! And note that is for people with any income. That census did not collect data on 1960 for college educated full time workers, but based on trends from later years it was about 3x higher on average!

This is why the older generations were initially so aloof about the economic state of the US. They grew up in a time where they could go to college, graduate debt free, have a decent car, and even enough saved up for a down payment on their [first] house - all on income from a part time job.

You literally could not get a much more fair compensation for labor, because that's a huge chunk of the entire GDP being derived from median wages! Of course now we live in a time when the median wage is something like $50k and the GDP/capita is $90k. And many critical things, like housing, have increased in cost way beyond the rate of inflation, to the point that a median house is now something like 7 years of median labor which is just lol stupid driven by funny money that, again, mostly did not exist before 1971.

But getting back to 1960 - how would this, in any way, seem to suggest an out of sync labor value? If anything the flaw in my argument is that labor compensation was perhaps unsustainably high, because wages that high were only possible when you had a relatively large chunk of the population not working. On the other hand if we're going to create a society with a sustainable fertility rate and well raised children, then it's completely sustainable.

This is the context for Kennedy stating things like, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Now a days even a pretty ardent nationalist would have to hold back a groan on hearing things like that, but it was a different world in the 60s.

[1] - https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED128674.pdf

[2] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD
by fragmede | 2025-10-09 03:54:37+00:00
Also, this was remarkably hard to find. Might I suggest if the logged in user is looking over their own comments, eg me viewing https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fragmede, that a flagged dead comment with a moderator responding shouldn't be collapsed by default? If that's intentional then nevermind, but as I am truly grateful for this site and you and DanG's (and everyone else's) hard work, I want to point out that it was hard to find and wouldn't have come across it if I didn't have a program running that hits the Firebase API and notifies me on replies. Someone who didn't have such a program could easily miss mod responses.
by lurk2 | 2025-10-09 03:56:33+00:00
I don’t know if you can still see them without an account but even a few years ago this was well-known and you could verify it yourself by looking at the moderator list of almost any default subreddit; we’re talking about less than a few hundred users. There was no limit to how many subreddits you could moderate for most of Reddit’s history so in the early days a few users created as many subreddits as they could. A bunch of these moderators effectively shut down Reddit over changes to the API a couple of years ago. Steve Huffman compared the system to a landed gentry:

> “If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said.

> “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
by tobias2014 | 2025-10-09 03:57:36+00:00
Meanwhile companies exist that have built essentially layers in front of chatbots, masking or filtering sensitive data, then forwarding the masked query, then unmasking it when giving back to the user(e.g. https://www.liminal.ai/ ).

Ideally you shouldn't paste sensitive information into the chat in first place. But when such companies can guarantee certain compliance types, it might be better to offer this rather than letting people use chats uncontrolled in companies.
by anakaine | 2025-10-09 03:58:04+00:00
You nailed it. Im a tech nerd by day, rather occasional casual gamer, and besides that - I dont want to interact with more technology than needs be. The thought of having additional nonsense overlaid on my view is actually nauseating.

It could make sense selectively during construction, mining, etc, but even then its a sometimes thing and it needs to be completely unobtrusive. Meta dont seem to be aiming towards or catering to this.