MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lvl155 | 2025-10-19 13:03:15+00:00
When I was into LEGO a few years back, I noticed there were a lot of bulk items available in Eastern Europe. I always wondered if they were either counterfeits or just grey. I couldn’t distinguish them so I just assumed they were grey because these items were not available in bulk directly from LEGO via bricks and pieces. When LEGO bought bricklink I thought they were going after fake vendors.
by ozim | 2025-10-19 13:04:06+00:00
I liked the article, it is really in depth.

Thing is I am taking the opposite approach because author has different goals.

Author gets to be VP of engineering on company that has multiple product teams and he gets to sit at "the table".

I am engineering lead for a company that has one dev team, I can give my opinions and run stuff however I want but I don't get a sit at the table.

The way I see it if I would like to take authors approach I would be like Scotty trying to go over commanders head - going with the analogy as software engineer I run the ship I am not making decision or being responsible about where the ship goes.

So my approach is that I minimize responsibility of the engineering team and I use scrum to do so. We are accountable for running the ship on time, every sprint gets delivered, every release is delivered like a clockwork. Business gets their input and output - if they have clear requirements that are small enough for the sprint going in, they will get change on production after 6 to 8 weeks.

We cannot promise something will be there in 6 months or a year, we can work on figuring out requirements with business and find out what we can promise to be there in 8 weeks on production.

We guard the process so we have predictable schedule on finished tasks and releases - what is finished or almost finished goes to the release candidate and we promise RC will be in 2 weeks on production and most of the time it works.

Yes we can do an emergency bypass and get someone to work on something ASAP - but it really has to be important, not something "a person" thinks is important.

Prediction is state A of the application + 2 weeks that is fully possible for reasonably well written requirements. If someone wants to hold me accountable for their grand vision I say no, he has to deliver requirements that I can help him with -

so just developers should not let themselves to be pushed around to be responsible for more than they actually should.

Just like captain in Star Trek has no say about how the ship has to be run I don’t want business guys coming over and making me do stuff their way.
by api | 2025-10-19 13:05:51+00:00
I don’t think it’s smart phones per se. It’s social media, and more specifically attention maximizing algorithms.

Those also hit around the same time. People doom scroll on desktops and laptops too.

Honestly just infinite scroll alone is shockingly addictive. Pair it with algorithms that sort content by measured engagement and your brain stem doesn’t stand a chance.

Social media algorithms also prioritize trash content because that’s what maximizes engagement. Think of it this way. One person walks by on the street and says “hi.” Another walks up and strips naked and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken and saluting Hitler. Which one of these maximizes engagement? Which will the algorithm perpetuate? This, IMO, explains the evolution of political discourse over the past 15 years and is why a troll is now President.

Smart phones are just a particularly good platform for these systems, but it’s the systems themselves that are toxic. They work on a desktop screen too. It’s just that laptops and desktops aren’t as portable and are not always with us in the same way, which limits the damage.
by sylware | 2025-10-19 13:06:17+00:00
Yeah, I used ironically the apocalypse word, that to highlight the fact the damage is seriously high. I often push the envelop to call gcc/clang "backdoor generators" (even though nowadays, it seems it is more likely to be hidden in the supply chain/SDK). For me gcc is in /opt, as it's over: this is "open source" not worth more than a binary blob... which generates machine code for EVERYTHING... baw... hurt.

And it seems we are more and more to understand how critical _lean_ is for open source software (and file formats/network protocols), _including the SDK namely the computer languages_. Real-life alternatives or deep customizations are way harder to build without _lean_ software.

A good example: web "app" and web "site". web "app" is javascript requiring one of the massive whatng cartel web engines. web "site" is classic or noscript/basic (x)html (aka basic 2D/table based HTML forms only, with a clean CSS/presentation split).

Also, I should be able to bootstrap, and that reasonably, a full elf/linux based OS with a simple C compiler (assembler+linker), for instance cproc/scc/tinycc/etc. gcc being now c++ broke everything, and I cannot believe the MIT media lab/"gcc steering commitee" did not know that, and the rumors of B.Gates interfering at "MIT medialab" via Epstein funding would explain open source quality obvious sabotage decision making.

All that said, I think it is game over, and we should move toward RISC-V assembly written programs sided with high-level languages (python/ruby/shell/javascript only engine/etc) with RISC-V assembly written interpreters, with a very conservative usage of macro preprocessing (because some preprocessors may reach c++ and similar complexity and that would not be much better than the current state). I am currently coding basic rv64 assembly (no pseudo-instructions, only core ISA, using a basic C preprocessor). I have a littele rv64 interpreter to run them on x86_64... well, until the programs stay simple enough.
by the_duke | 2025-10-19 13:07:49+00:00
People keep spouting this, but I don't see how the AI bubble bursting would be all that devastating.

2008 was a systemic breakdown rippling through the foundations of the financial system.

It would lead to a market crash (80% of gains this year were big tech/AI) and likely a full recession in the US, but nothing nearly as dramatic as a global systemic crisis.

In contrast to the dot com bubble, the huge AI spending is also concentrated on relatively few companies, many with deep pockets from other revenue sources (Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle), and the others are mostly private companies that won't have massive impact on the stock market.

A sudden stop in AI craze would be hard for hardware companies and a few big AI only startups , but the financial fallout would be much more contained than either dot com or 2008.
by Arch485 | 2025-10-19 13:08:06+00:00
I definitely believe that the modern internet, computers, and phones are bad for us, but this argument is entirely unconvincing. Most of the data _seems_ to be U.S.-specific, which means that this data does not indicate if this is a global phenomenon. Further, a lot of the trend lines don't start in 2007 and could be easily attributed to other causes.
by a022311 | 2025-10-19 13:10:05+00:00
> More importantly, it was missing some features I considered essential for a truly viable alternative.

As others here noted, I can't find any noteworthy addition (actually none? maybe I'm not very observant) to the features the actual HN has. I'd appreciate a more thorough explanation of this.

A UI refresh is certainly not a bad idea (although the existing content density is hard to match), but this "modern" UI looks like the average Bootstrap website from 10 years ago with a few extra shadows and transparency. I enabled Javascript to test the theme switching and discovered that scrolling becomes very laggy (on a phone). Perhaps you're accidentally running some animation? It feels very unnatural.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-19 13:11:32+00:00
Somebody really needs to put a stop to what Uber and the like are doing.

They are doing their best to destroy basic labor protections, by circumventing employing their workers. Why are countries just allowing them to clown on established worker protections?

If you want to pay someone to do something employ them. The roll out of the gig economy is only viable because it allows companies to push costs on to the labor force.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-10-19 13:12:40+00:00
>limiting life outcomes of millions around the globe

The US is such a small sliver of the world population, as is the west to some extent. ACT scores and such are extremely US centric.

Smartphones were a positive revolution for so much of the world. Consider the hundreds of millions of children (more than the entire US population exclusively used in this argument) growing up in rural poor households surrounded by illiteracy. They suddenly had access to the wider world. They had the opportunity to take initiative in ways they didn't have before. They had access to limitless education, and an easy way to pick up a global language. When kids left the village for a city they could video chat with family instead of going months of no contact.

To some extent, I'm talking about the final leg of the internet revolution, not phones specifically, but in many areas of the world where electricity is intermittent, it was phones that finally drove wider internet penetration.

Are there downsides? Certainly. is smartphone addiction and social media a problem? Research says that it probably is, but for a long time I've felt that the positive impacts on a global scale are being downplayed, especially in the US. Not everyone who gained cell phone connectivity had a PC at home with a steady power supply as a baseline, and schools stocked with computers. We have a huge wave of new people growing up who had access to far more information than the previous generation. If I'm going to make a casual, broad-sweeping generalization of impact, I'll hazard to guess that the positive impact is being greatly underappreciated globally.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-19 13:13:21+00:00
A bit rambling and meandering, but some decent points in there I guess. Lost me on the elephants.

Setting goals on estimated value vs measured value is the difference between a process goal and an outcome goal.

I guess the idea is you can’t control outcomes, but you can control your process inputs.

In baseball, for example, if you want to be a good hitter, don’t set a goal to hit .300, set a goal to do the things that will make you a .300 hitter. “I want to take 50 swings in batting practice per day. I want to workout once per day. I want to spend 30 minutes watching films of the next pitcher I’ll face…” etc.

In reality, it’s probably a little of both. For example, Sales teams are often compensated on revenue generated (outcome), but what if you did a good job (process) but didn’t hit your numbers because the market was just really bad in your vertical? A good leader will recognize this and still compensate you (i.e. hold you accountable) appropriately rather than punishing you for the outcome.

If one leader hits their targets in an easy environment, and another misses but comes close in a really challenging environment by being really creative and scrappy and clever, the second leader should be the one with the big reward.

You should be judged on how well you play your hands, not solely whether you win the game.
Warning: Gmail client can misrepresent bounce message content
by chrisjj | 2025-10-19 13:14:11+00:00
Here's the original-message part of an bounce message: https://i.vgy.me/0KpICY.png

Here's the Gmail web client (Windows, Chrome) display of it:

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Chris Jordan <chrisjj@xxx> To: Chris John Jordan <chrisjj@xxx> Cc: Bcc: Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2025 10:32:03 +0100 Subject: Test Test 2

Gmail has fabricated Cc and Bcc fields!

And "Bcc: <blank>" is in this case incorrect, given the real Bcc field has two addresses (which the bounce generator did not include, of course).
by skydhash | 2025-10-19 13:14:25+00:00
One of the things I'm learning away from is "magic". Magic methods, reflection, and configuration with code (JS world, Gradle). Especially when such magic is powering conventions. The only exception is lisp macro as it's mostly code that produce code with a simple mechanism: quoting.

IDEs are places you'll find such magic. To write a simple mobile app, you'll need GBs of SDK because they couldn't bother coming up with a simple solution first.
by shironandonon_ | 2025-10-19 13:14:58+00:00
in most regions Uber drivers are being paid an hourly wage so yeah I think this makes sense.

They can answer support calls too.

Despite getting an Uber hourly wage many game the system by taking DoorDash and Lyft orders while on the job.

Should your employer tolerate you working another job while you are being paid to do yours?
by api | 2025-10-19 13:14:59+00:00
This is perhaps the most terrifying idea I’ve encountered in the last 10 years. Humans evolved in a lower CO2 environment. Our lungs are adapted for optimal gas exchange in that environment. At what point do we start literally suffocating?

And this would creep up on us very slowly. Not only would we not notice, but we’d lose our ability to notice. It’d be like the whole species slowly descending into dementia.

Most of what I’ve seen suggest that the effect starts really kicking in around 1000ppm. But as outdoor levels rise, indoor levels, which are usually higher, rise too. They can already hit those levels.

If we keep burning more and more carbon outdoor levels could hit that by the 22nd century.

If we start getting here we need to put away the green moralistic finger wagging and start looking at ways to suck CO2 out of the air like it’s an emergency. Things like ocean seeding or huge scale industrial scrubbers powered by solar or nuclear power, or all of the above.

This is a far scarier possibility than just climate change. The only thing scarier than this is the clathrate gun, which luckily seems to be considered unlikely by most climate scientists (at least unless we get to really insane CO2 levels like thousands of ppm).
Warning: Gmail client Show Original can omit lines of the original
by chrisjj | 2025-10-19 13:15:14+00:00
Gmail Download Original produced:

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X-Received-x-me-csa: (Received x-me-csa header removed by phl-mx-03.messagingengine.com) none

This is a MIME-encapsulated message.

--2DB008F1C68.1760866326/octagon.interface.co.uk

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Gmail Show Original produced:

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X-Received-x-me-csa: (Received x-me-csa header removed by phl-mx-03.messagingengine.com) none

--2DB008F1C68.1760866326/octagon.interface.co.uk

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One line missing.

I have not yet tested to find what's missing from Download Original /and/ Show Original...
by alex_hirner | 2025-10-19 13:15:39+00:00
I'd love to make it work with flightsql or HTTP endpoints returning arrow IPC [0]! Did you consider using perspective for last-mile charting [1]? Building your own seems like a huge chunk of work. Well done!

[0] https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/clients/wasm/data_ingestion#a... [1] https://github.com/finos/perspective
by Topfi | 2025-10-19 13:16:28+00:00
Isn't the dot com bubble a far better proxy? Notably, todays spending is both higher and more concentrated in a few companies that a large part of the population has exposure to (most dot com companies weren't publicly traded and far smaller vs MSFT, Alphabet, Meta, Oracle, NVDA making up most investment today) by way of pension funds, ETFs, etc.?
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-19 13:16:53+00:00
An example I just found worked very well with fine-tuning: I wanted to extract any frame that contained a full-screen presentation slide from a various videos I've archived, only when it's full-screen, and also not capture videos, and some other constraints.

Naturally I reached for CLIP+ViT which got me a ~60% success rate out of the box. Then based on that, I created a tiny training script that read `dataset/{slide,no_slide}` and trained a new head based on that. After adding ~100 samples of each, the success rate landed at 95% which was good enough to call it done, and circle back to iterate once I have more data.

I ended up with a 2.2K large "head_weights.safetensors" that increased the accuracy by ~35% which felt really nice.
by strangescript | 2025-10-19 13:17:21+00:00
This entire thing has been pretty disingenuous on both sides of the fence. All the anti-AI (or anti OpenAI) people are doing victory laps, but what GPT-5 Pro did is still very valuable.

1) What good is your open problem set if really its a trivial "google search" away from being solved. Why are they not catching any blame here?

2) These answers still weren't perfectly laid out for the most part. GPT-5 was still doing some cognitive lifting to piece it together.

If a human would have done this by hand it would have made news and instead the narrative would have been inverted to ask serious questions about the validity of some these style problem sets and/or ask the question how many other solutions are out there that just need pieced together from pre-existing research.

But, you know, AI Bad.
by api | 2025-10-19 13:18:06+00:00
That’s also the problem with the 1971 version. It’s a site popular among gold bugs who think fiat currency and the collapse of Bretton Woods is to blame, but many things happened in 1971. You’re right that many things also happened in 2007-2008.

Socioeconomic systems are complex. Most things have many causes and causes interact through feedback loops. It’s very hard to understand what’s happening. People keep pretending it’s easy and fixating on singular hypotheses that are almost certainly wrong.
by sokoloff | 2025-10-19 13:18:31+00:00
> If you want to pay someone to do something employ them.

There is a purpose for casual/contract labor. If I want my lawn mowed, some basement junk hauled away, or my house painted, I want someone on contract/gig to do something for me, but I sure don’t want to hire an employee.

How that person chooses to relate to an employer (whether to be self-employed or work for someone else) is their business, not a concern of mine.

However, from a policy standpoint, I certainly don’t want to prohibit them from being a solo entrepreneur or similar.

So, there’s a reason to allow contract work, even with individuals. Whether you extend that to Uber transportation or to Uber’s new business is a fair question, but “employ them” is not the universal answer to Uber and non-Uber.
by alphazard | 2025-10-19 13:19:02+00:00
The reverse Flynn effect should be by far the most concerning thing on this page. As others have pointed out, some of these trends are specious, but the Flynn effect has held up for a while, and is highly replicated. Even just the disappearance of the Flynn effect would be significant.

An adjacent phenomenon that needs investigation is "Adult ADD". Extending the theory of adolescent ADD to adults doesn't add up. It's surprising that these are considered by default to be the same condition, especially in people who didn't have issues during adolescence. The increase in prevalence demands a non-genetic explanation. Better explanatory theories are: 1. We've collectively decided that this is how we dispense amphetamines to consenting adults. 2. It's a fad (when will prevalence decrease?), and 3. It's the smartphones/apps.

Personally, I think it's mostly 3, with the infinite scrolling apps having a huge effect on attention and executive function, but also some of 1 given the information economy.

This should go without saying: if an intervention is working for you, or a disease theory has given you explanatory power, you should stick with both.
by steveBK123 | 2025-10-19 13:19:25+00:00
Used to work next to this tower, was always oddly empty. The only movement you ever saw were maids cleaning the occupied units. Many units were unoccupied concrete shells, 7 years after sales began and 5 years after construction completion.

It also raises the issue of new dev condos in NY in general - there are always problems and stakeholders are often busier trying to allocate blame than fix them.

The $100M repair bill sounds staggering, but put against a $2.5B sell through price for 125 units.. we are talking 4%.

The facade photos are scary for such a young building, this thing is not going to age well, clearly will be a public safety issue soon. This is what the city's otherwise overzealous facade inspection schedule is made for.
by dusted | 2025-10-19 13:19:42+00:00
My music listening speakers have two built in power amplifiers (one for the tweeter, one for the woofer) and have a DSP feeding right into a DAC, feeding right into those amplifiers.

There's a control box that comes with them, and when you plug a calibrated microphone into that box, and put it in the listening position, you can get it to do some frequency sweeps, one at a time, then they calculate a correction curve for each speaker, based on the actual response of the particular speaker in the particular room, and program that curve into the DSP of the speaker.

It's like night and day toggling the calibration on and off while listening to music.

And yes, as he says, the best hi-fi is just professional audio gear..

My music listening setup is simply a USB->AES converter box that feeds directly into the monitors, the monitors are a pair of Genelec 8050, and then the GLM box and volume knob. Never heard "hi fi" coming even close to it, not at the price, not at five times the price.

Same goes for headphones, you can't get much better than the simple and cheap DT990 (or 770 if you want them closed), sure, you can pay about 10 times as much for some Sennheiser hd800s, and those are pretty good, and I do have a pair of HE1000se, which are not only cheaper, but actually sound better too. But I'd never recommend anyone who's not as stupid as myself to buy anything "above" DT990.. And yeah, I EQ my headphones with a dbx 231x two channel 31 band EQ, and while that's not as scientific as the calibrated monitors, for a headphone listening experience, it gets pretty good.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-19 13:20:37+00:00
Penrose’s target is the linear, always-unitary dynamics of quantum mechanics at mesoscopic scales, not the SM’s particle content. If objective reduction is right, you get departures from linear superposition when the gravitational self-energy of a mass distribution in superposition is large enough. That is a modification of quantum dynamics, not “new SM particles.”

The core OR argument is a physics claim about the tension between quantum superpositions and general relativistic spacetime. Orch-OR is the separate move that tries to tie OR events to consciousness. You can reject the neuroscience and still take the collapse model as a testable physical hypothesis.

The search isn’t “blind.” OR gives a quantitative target: a collapse timescale on the order of ħ divided by the gravitational self energy of the superposed mass. That points directly to masses, separations, and coherence times where interference should fail or excess diffusion or heating should appear. That is exactly what the tabletop program probes.

Penrose argues that linear QM should break at some mesoscopic scale set by gravity. Whether today’s experiments reach the right regime is an empirical question.

Penrose objects for reasons beyond his consciousness theories. He has long argued that standard QM is incomplete and needs an objective collapse law tied to gravity, and he has broader critiques of mainstream frameworks. The tabletop predictions come from the OR physics, not from the consciousness story.

Penrose’ treatment by the physics establishment goes far beyond kindness.

He regularly convinces working physicists to work with him. He has even convinced world renowned physicists to publish entire chapters in his books debating him. This isn’t something that happens to someone dismissed as a crank. World renowned physicists don’t engage with crank physics.