MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vineyardmike | 2025-10-04 23:41:34+00:00
> But how do you know what the management perception is of whiat is currently considered to be 'the right problem'

Ask! Literally. But also listen.

Many people in management will repeat over and over that feature X is the thing they wake up thinking about, even though feature Y is important to the PM or director or whatever. Especially if you’re young enough that promotions and performance reviewed are really important for career growth, work on X not Y.

If your manager doesn’t start every meeting with some passive remark that project X is consuming their time, ask them what is important. Ask them what project they’re worried about.

Example:

“Hey Boss, I’ve been working on ProjY, but I also have tasks from ProjX pulled into this sprint. Which one is a bigger priority for the team, because I have 10 days of tasks, but only 1 week left in the sprint?”

… “hi boss, a week ago you told me to prioritize finishing X and not Y. Should I just allocate all of this sprint to the next set of tasks for X?”

… “hi boss. It’s me again asking this question every week “

If you want a good performance review/promotion/etc, usually that starts with your direct manager, so do what they think is important and ignore the rest. You need their trust first, so get it by working on their priorities. With their trust, you can get flashier or more fun work, or you can get them to trust you when you suggest alternative priorities, and you can earn the gossip/news they hear in management meetings from up the chain.

Your corollary is just rage-bait FUD or dysfunctional behavior. Any you can’t control it anyways so ignore it and focus on what matters that you can control. If your CXO doesn’t like what you’re working on, but your manager does, pick your manager, they actually write your performance review.
by magicalhippo | 2025-10-04 23:41:38+00:00
I'm sure there's other work, I came across this in the Physics of Language Model paper[1] on knowledge extraction.

Essentially they found that by presenting the knowledge in a single, fixed way, the model is trained to reproduce that exact sequence of tokens, rather than "internalizing" the knowledge.

By varying the sentences, the model instead manages to separate out the knowledge, so to speak. This in turn drastically improves how well they can extract that knowledge later.

[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5250633
by majewsky | 2025-10-04 23:42:08+00:00
Eevee put it best:

> I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.

From https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/
by frutiger | 2025-10-04 23:42:55+00:00
I was under the vague impression that there is a single moment when the gravitational force in the core of the proto solar system outweighs (ha!) the electromagnetic repulsion of deuterium/tritium nuclei and fusion is achieved.

The resulting radiation pressure clears out the debris from the solar system’s accretion disk, and this process surely is not instantaneous but is relatively fast.
by dmit | 2025-10-04 23:43:04+00:00
>> memory safety is simply table stakes

> Why?

Because it's a stepping stone to other kinds of safety. Memory safety isn't the be-all and end-all, but it gets us to where we can focus other important things.

And turns out in this particular case we don't even have to pay much for it in terms of performance.

> The real underlying comparison statement here is far more subjective. It's along the lines of: "I find it easier to write solid code in rust than in zig".

Agreed! But also how about "We can get pretty close to memory safety with the tools we provide! Mostly at runtime! If you opt-in!" ~~ signed, people (Zig compiler itself, Bun, Ghostty, etc) who ship binaries built with -Doptimize=ReleaseFast
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-10-04 23:43:24+00:00
IMHO, there are two components to "email" that do not necessarily need to be connected

1. receving mail

2. sending mail

Only #2 became difficult

Internet subscribers receive lots of email to which they never reply

Sometimes "throwaway" disposable email addresses are useful^1

Various third parties offer this as a "service", i.e., #1 is disconnected from #2

Self-hosting #1 can provide an alternative to using third parties

Generally, the only cost is a domain name registration

1. Also HN commenters have complained in the past that email sent via self-hosted SMTP to certain recipients, e.g., Gmail recpients, may end up stored on certain undesirable third party servers. This is because the recpient uses a third party for both #1 and #2, a so-called "email provider"
by baobun | 2025-10-04 23:44:57+00:00
Are the examples you mentioned actually banned, as opposed to not actively used in classes? I'd think even where LLMs don't belong in the curriculum, self-studies in various forms as complimentary to the curriculum wouldn't be any of the teachers business?

BTW if you haven't, I encourage reading this.

https://zenodo.org/records/17065099
by FridayoLeary | 2025-10-04 23:45:25+00:00
The industries she killed were zombies on life support. The attitude of the trade unions hastened the inevitable as they discovered that finally there was a prime minister who wouldn't capitulate to them. If you think she was brutal just ask the average guy what they think of the rail unions today. They are probably the most successful possible argument in favour of conservatism. Almost all my sympathy and support for trade unions has been effectively wiped out by them. And i do believe they historically had some success in bringing about positive change.

The economic situation in parts of scotland and the north is pretty dismal, but make no mistake that would have been the fate of the whole of the UK if not for Thatcher. Just look at the depressing state of the economy today after decades of unambitious rudderless governance with absolutely no prospect of improvement.
by mercutio2 | 2025-10-04 23:45:40+00:00
Are you sure Europe has less credit card fraud? When is your data from?

The US has a much less secure system specifically because there was much less credit card fraud in the US than in Europe.

Chip and PIN was an attempt to combat the rampant fraud in Europe.

It may be true at this point, I haven’t been tracking recently, but it wasn’t in the past.
by Retric | 2025-10-04 23:47:40+00:00
Bad “anti-aging” treatments definitely won’t do it, but they also won’t provide indefinite lifespans.

> it isn't the "primary cause

Only if you’re using an inaccurate definition of aging. If everyone over 20 should have the same risk of cancer as 20 years olds the total number of cancers would drop by more than half.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-04 23:47:45+00:00
It depends on the purpose. If the objective is maximum scale and performance then Zig. The low-level mechanics of userspace I/O and execution scheduling in top-end database architectures strongly recommends a language comfortable expressing complex relationships in contexts where ownership and lifetimes are unavoidably ambiguous. Zig is designed to enable precise and concise control in these contexts with minimal overhead.

If performance/scale-maxxing isn't on the agenda and you are just trying to crank out features then Rust probably brings more to the table.

The best choice is quite arguably C++20 or later. It has a deep set of somewhat unique safety features among systems languages that are well-suited to this specific use case.
by gerdesj | 2025-10-04 23:48:03+00:00
DR: MX and retry

email has easily one of the best responses to failure modes ever and its ancient!

Most smtp daemons will put outbound emails in a queue and run the queue. If the other end is unavailable then it will generally retry on a schedule with some sort of increasing period and then give up after a week or so.

You can easily define multiple inbound relays via your MX records which predate SRV and generic TXT and are supported everywhere.

I've run a lot of other people's email, including my own vanity domains for decades. It really isn't rocket science.

Google and MS and Co really don't screw you around if you follow the rules and that largely involves only SPF being compulsory and the rest (DKIM n that) are nice to have. If you do send spam then you will be crucified and rightly so.

Email is not a critical (its important) service because of course you have several other means of communication starting off with the SIP n RTP server you also run ... 8)
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-10-04 23:49:06+00:00
I'm not reading this as saying that pianists can manipulate timbre after the hammer is released, only that pianists can intentionally manipulate timbre with very fine motor control while playing, and listeners of all levels can hear the intended timbre.

Which is trivial, as you say. (The examples of bright/dark aren't encouragingly subtle.)

The article is very poorly worded and ambiguous.

It's not even clear if they were measuring acceleration at escapement directly at the hammer, or somehow inferring it from the key velocity.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-10-04 23:49:06+00:00
It depends on the length of the extension cord, construction, and gauge.

10awg single conductor THHN can handle 50 amps but when it's in NM-b (house wire/romex) it's 30 amps.

Extension cords can get really hot as they often have the conductor insulation, some packaging material for support, and the outer coating. It also greatly matters if it's 10ft vs 100ft due to resistance.

I've seen extension cords that were used for ACs melt carpets
by Aurornis | 2025-10-04 23:49:36+00:00
> but I’ve also been owned by VPs and directors that are much better at politics than I am.

One surprising thing I learned when I became a mid/upper manager: It's very easy to spot lower level employees playing politics.

Part of it is because most ICs or even 1st level EMs are overconfident in their ability to play politics. They commonly overestimate their own level of social/political intelligence relative to their managers.

The other part is that they just don't have as much insight and communication within the company. They think they're persuading or manipulating (depending on intentions) a certain stakeholder to form some alliance to push an agenda, but 5 minutes after that conversation that stakeholder sends a message back to their manager giving them a subtle heads up about the politicking going on. I can't count how many times we, as management, watched clumsy office politicking attempts play out while doing our best to gently keep them contained without bursting someone's bubble and making them angry.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-10-04 23:49:43+00:00
The government does the things that organized voters care about. And the most organized voters are homeowners afraid of living next to someone poorer than they are, or a building taller than theirs. So they lobby the government, as they have for the last 100 years, to implement a raft of land used laws that make it all that impossible to do anything but sprawl on the edge of the city, or demolishing & evicting apartments and to build slightly taller apartment buildings.

Wherever you live, I guarantee the largest bylaw in your municipality is the one that is composed of the government listing the residential buildings you aren’t allowed to build on most of the land in the municipality.
by runarberg | 2025-10-04 23:50:25+00:00
Permanent exponential growth is very rare in nature, and even rarer in biological systems. What we observe as exponential growth is usually only a partial observation of a logistical curve or is missing a system collapse at the end of the curve.

We have no reason to believe alien (or even human) civilization will continue to grow and expand forever. Heck even the human population curve has started to slow down and is now revealing it self to be a logistical curve.

But regardless of this, space is very very very big. And there are a lot of extremely hostile worlds out there. Any civilization will experience biological limitation to which worlds they can (and will want to) colonize. Likewise they will experience both economical and physical limitations to how far they will send their machines. Lets say an alien species is lucky and has a habitable world inside their solar system which they will colonize. I think this is likely. They also spot another world in a nearby solar system which takes them 200 years to travel to, eager colonists travel in a generational ship, and 600 years later the colony is thriving. Now they run out of nearby habitable worlds. There is a world of questionable quality 500 years away and they are unable to persuade enough people to fill a generational ship. Also they learned the stories of the passengers in the generational ship, their lives kind of sucked, we have it much better on this world. So it is better to just stay here. This might happen after 1 or 100 successful colonizations, but I think space is so freaking large, it will happen to all civilizations. At some point they will run out of worlds to colonize, and they will never expand far outside of some local area near their home world.
by conductr | 2025-10-04 23:50:26+00:00
Arguably was the key word you missed. I don’t think anyone has made this argument before but I personally believe it could be made successfully to a jury.

1) denial of care resulting in death has already has case law for murder, it’s typically geared towards people with a legal responsibility like a grossly negligent parent and does typically get treated as manslaughter but there have been extreme cases where murder was charged. This is where I think an attorney could sway a jury that insurers have a legal obligation to their insured. And particularly where the insurer is objecting to a medical practitioners recommendation/diagnosis/etc.

2) premeditation can be determined because the auto-deny decision has been made and programmed into their business systems.

There are jurisdictions where that’s basically all you need
by leptons | 2025-10-04 23:50:45+00:00
>massive database where people's movements can be correlated and tracked across the country.

Video (and audio) recording isn't even the best way to track someone, everyone has a cellphone these days, and turning them off doesn't always stop the tracking.

It's not recording in public that is the problem - that is a right - the separate problem is mining that data and making connections where there aren't any.

Some people say "both parties are the same", but I disagree. With the current administration, they are all-in on mass surveillance, they love Anduril and Palantir, and any attempt to protest their overreach will be met with force, and they are using these technologies to track protesters. The Democrats on the other hand will respond to protests, and we can push them in the right direction. I guess I'm trying to say, be careful who you vote for.
by jagrsw | 2025-10-04 23:51:02+00:00
> as long as it's not intentional

I think this could be considered intentional, because in most countries, connecting this inverter to anything (source, sink) would require certification (+tests), as it doesn't have standard electrical outlets (it varies from country to country, but in the countries I've seen, either certification is required or connecting wall/ceiling lamps is exempted from this, but verification must be done afterward).
by majewsky | 2025-10-04 23:51:40+00:00
Sora 1 is slightly more expensive than Veo 3, at $0.50/second: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-... (select "US East 2" as region; not all regions have Sora).

Though again, caveat: Those are API prices. The real prices could be both lower (if there is a profit margin) or higher (if they are subsidized).
by OJFord | 2025-10-04 23:53:15+00:00
Oh I see. It's kind of just reversed here then - it's not paid, but if your employer doesn't pay you (i.e. gives you unpaid time off for it) then you can claim capped loss of earnings.

Seems like it would be easier in US case just to reduce pay though, time off at 80% or whatever rather than full and then request it paid back...
by vineyardmike | 2025-10-04 23:53:52+00:00
What is their angle with this?

Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years? I’m sure the researchers there would love to do more research, with more compute, faster, but 20+x growth is not a practical expectation.

Is the goal here to create a mad rush to build data centers, which should decrease their costs with more supply? Do they just want governments to step in and to help somehow? Is it part of marketing/hype? Is this trying to project confidence to investors on future revenue expectations?
by esubaalew | 2025-10-04 23:54:17+00:00
You're right—and the same applies to Kotlin. Swift is more like Rust, C, and C++ in that it compiles directly to machine code. So yes, Swift is currently listed under the wrong category.

As for Kotlin, it could reasonably be placed under either "Web & scripting" or "Compiled," depending on how it's used. Since Kotlin can also compile to JavaScript, its classification depends on the context. If we're talking about Android development, then Kotlin is clearly a compiled systems language.

To clarify: Swift is a compiled, statically typed systems language, much like Rust, C++, or Go. Its core toolchain (swiftc) compiles code into native binaries.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-10-04 23:54:35+00:00
Hardware drivers not certified by the Microsoft lab will not install. No longer can folks dismiss the nag screen to run some bespoke piece of hardware.

This is apparently being done to improve kernel security and reliability. It could be a PR disaster depending how it is rolled out...

People can blame things like the old generic PC-case-bling LED driver CVE people and even its original author lost patience with years ago... lol =3
by refulgentis | 2025-10-04 23:56:27+00:00
> Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years?

He does, or at least, he believes if its plausible they should attempt to.

We live in odd times. It sort of reminds me of Feb 2020. All you really needed to know was the Rt and rest was just math. Who knows if it'll matter or pencil out in a decade, but, it's completely reasonable at these growth rates and with the iron laws known to keep scaling.
by neilv | 2025-10-04 23:57:50+00:00
Everyone has heard the phrase. It doesn't necessarily mean what the person saying it thinks it means.

For example, you can't legally photograph people in certain ways in public in some US jurisdictions. (Because "no expectation of privacy" perverts

There are also restrictions on secret audio recording without consent under circumstances that some people would try to claim are public.

For another example, there are restrictions on how you use that "no expectation of privacy", US-wide (e.g., commercial use of photographs, or cyberbullying).

And that's before we get into common decency, or arguable conflicting laws or principles.

But of course, every single time there is an opportunity for some new person to dismiss a good point with "no reasonable expectation of privacy!" such a new person materialize. And so someone else has to spend their time responding.
by andy99 | 2025-10-04 23:58:09+00:00
I'm not entirely sold on the methodological soundness. It seems like they went into it looking to confirm something, and designed and experiment that probably would. Maybe it's more rigorous than I got from reading the first part of the article, it doesn't come across that way.

I do think the conclusion makes sense, I'm just not sure about how well this demonstrates it.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-10-04 23:58:21+00:00
With atproto if you use did:web, if you lose or change your domain you are fucked. That's one of the main reason people say "don't use did:web". But with atproto using did:plc, if you lose your domain, your handle stops working but your account works just fine (since your actual account id is a did:plc identifier) and you just change the handle to a domain you have control of (or live without @s by refusing to set up a handle).
by bjackman | 2025-10-04 23:59:45+00:00
> you get spatial memory safety which iirc is more common for security problems than temporal.

No, at least in the Linux kernel use-after-free is the biggest memory safety issue by a long way.

Maybe this isn't true in some other system software? Like if you are dealing with parsing. But, you don't really need memory safety for that usecase, fuzzing is unreasonably effective.

(Obviously for greenfield dev, safe languages are the way to go. But setting up a dank fuzzing pipeline is easier than migrating to a new language).
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-05 00:00:23+00:00
> Iran's GDP PPP is 1.75 trillion

Granted. We're still talking about a 3x difference, advantage to Iran, in the face of a lot more territory to defend, population to manage and a technical deficit.

> if the main strategic hit was to destroy 200 trucks

MRBM launchers are not trucks.

> You may be confusing the guidance mechanisms of early ballistic missiles

Guided vs unguided refers to the ability to course correct en route. An unguided missile is a lobber rocket. A guided missile has reaction controls onboard.

> What does that have to do with anything?

That it's a complicated machine you can't whip up in a garagd.

> while Iran uses weapons that simply exhaust interceptors

A strategy undermined by collapsing launch rates.

> If that works and if they can scale production, the advantage Israel has in being very concentrated and densely protected turns into a liability

Absolutely. I'm not saying Israel is indefinitely invulnerable to Iran. Just that in the last war, it neutered Iran's capacity to hurt it.
by ares623 | 2025-10-05 00:01:18+00:00
We give a lot of shit when LLMs get lost in context, digging themselves deeper and deeper into illogical trains of thoughts.

But is this sama doing the same thing. He CAN NOT stop and MUST NOT slow down. The slightest display of hesitation and doubt will make it all come crashing down.

And everyone else is doing the same. It’s an international game of chicken.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-10-05 00:01:44+00:00
Hardware drivers not certified by the Microsoft lab will not install. No longer can folks dismiss the nag screen to run some bespoke piece of hardware.

Again, that's been the case since Windows 7. You have to go out of your way to boot the system in "Test Mode" to install an unsigned driver. Either that, or use Zadig to self-sign the driver. (Maybe they're no longer allowing that?)

Signatures were enforced only for 64-bit drivers in Windows 7, but Windows 10 enforces them for all drivers.
by commandersaki | 2025-10-05 00:01:50+00:00
I agree with that aspect of DR; I guess I was more thinking of availability, in that I can probably handle a few hours of not receiving emails, but if it goes longer than a day or so then I'd be pretty miffed. Like I said it's all doable, but it requires a lot of effort, and is probably best not left to someone running a one man show, and once you have more than one person you likely now have to deal with trust and expenses.

I've run a lot of other people's email, including my own vanity domains for decades. It really isn't rocket science.

Again, so have I, and as I said the happy path is always easy, it's when things go wrong, and I'm not even talking about IP reputation or any of the usual issues that people bring up running email.

Email is not a critical (its important) service

Really depends; I still have many services such as banking where I need to use auth codes, also a lot of security is tied to my email in terms of private comms and recovering services.

Suppose your email service went down and the people you run email for complain, do you tell them "oh don't worry it's not a critical service, you can still communicate over other mediums"? Would that work for say gmail?