MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lynx97 | 2025-10-21 19:40:03+00:00
No. Democracy is not about reducing cruelty, or any other vaguely activists points of views. It is about having people choose where they want to go. It might be that these choices unveil that humanity, statistically speaking, is actually a cruel bunch. And, what you think is cruel, might be just fair to someone else. Democracy is about surfacing the human nature.
by godelski | 2025-10-21 19:40:17+00:00
The problem is as soon as everyone returned to office they did care. Even while remote many employers acted like they were being cheated because employees would work less or distribute their work throughout the day.

We have a tendency to scream crisis while stock prices and market caps rapidly rise. Every little downturn is evidence for the cry, but that doesn't change the trend. They keep saying that the share holders are the real customers and they seem to be doing perfectly fine regardless of if it's a hiring spree or firing. Regardless of if it's even a global pandemic.

There's 4 companies worth more than $3T, one more than $4T. 11 are worth more than $1T. It's only been 7 years since we broke that $1T barrier. Most of the growth has happened recently too. Even Apple has had bigger swings since the pandemic.

Idk, I don't think these companies are in trouble anywhere near what they claim. More concerning is this rapid growth in value without corresponding game changing products. Sure, we got AI but it hasn't changed the game like the iPhone did. I'd give up AI a lot sooner than I'd give up my smartphone, even if all it did was make calls, play music, and have a web browser. A pocket computer is very handy
by zahlman | 2025-10-21 19:40:22+00:00
I would argue that nowadays the libraries and frameworks are more to blame than the languages. We aren't creating the right elegant DSLs. But more importantly we're still expecting people to inherit from library classes — perhaps multiple levels deep — to swap functionality in and out. We could just use functions as first-class objects but instead we have to understand this unnatural intermingling of code and data that's based on "modeling" a supposed concept in the problem domain (rather than the solution domain) that barely makes any sense in and of itself. Like Rich Hickey explained (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4), things become complex because you complect them.

You can get a lot of APL / LISP feeling out of carefully written Python or JavaScript. Not the metaprogramming stuff, sure. But a lot of that in LISP depends on homoiconicity, which is one of the biggest things making the language "not usable by average developers".
by bredren | 2025-10-21 19:40:51+00:00
OpenAI picking up where Apple Intelligence continues to severely lag.

I'd prefer these features were bundled into MacOS.

Where possible, process using FoundationLLM, and having Apple reach for their own privately hosted instance of a frontier model when needed.

It seems obvious to me the company must transform macOS's capabilities here as quality AI assistance is enmeshed in the operating system's UX as a whole.

I think Apple Intelligence probably has good bones to begin with but is vastly underpowered in the local model and needs to hide frontier model usage completely in its tech stack.
by crmd | 2025-10-21 19:41:10+00:00
One of the first things I do after getting an inquiry from a recruiter or friend referral is lookup the MX record for the company’s email domain. It is an anonymous one-command check to see if they’re a Microsoft shop.

If they are, it’s enormous personal red flag. MSFT is very popular so I’m only speaking about my own experience, but I have learned over the course of 20 years that an MSFT IT stack is highly correlated with me hating the engineering culture of an organization.

I know I am excluding a lot of companies with great engineering culture where I would thrive and who just happen to use Outlook/Sharepoint/Teams, etc. but it has had such better predictive power of rotten tech culture than any line of questioning I have come up with during interviews that I still use it.

I don’t mean any disrespect to MSFT-centric engineers out there - it’s not you it’s me.
by necovek | 2025-10-21 19:41:18+00:00
I see you build a case for traditional MS product in Exchange, yet this issue is about Sharepoint.

Just like with Windows, Microsoft has built a moat with Exchange, but the question is why do all the companies buy into their full ecosystem, especially for anything relating to web technologies (you even bring up Exchange Web Services), because this they do really badly, and Sharepoint seems to be the worst.

However, I am certain there are big Postfix/Dovecot installations scaling easily to 150k people, but we probably wouldn't know about them. Eg. here a couple of accounts of people doing that: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/comments/32fq67/how_woul...
by lsy | 2025-10-21 19:41:21+00:00
No doubt it's a profit margin game, but I wish the big e-reader companies (Kindle, Kobo) would take a foray into this form factor. The friction of navigating through an Android interface into an app is just enough to negate the convenience benefit of a pocketable device. But the mainstream e-readers are unfortunately just big enough to require a jacket or a bag to carry them in.
by aspenmayer | 2025-10-21 19:41:25+00:00
It’s possible that the (un)timely demise of the individual involved also had a HUMINT element as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games#Histor...

> Dutch engineer Erik van Sabben allegedly infiltrated the Natanz nuclear facility on behalf of Dutch intelligence and installed equipment infected with Stuxnet. He died two weeks after the Stuxnet attack at age 36 in an apparent single-vehicle motorcycle accident in Dubai.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_van_Sabben
by dlcarrier | 2025-10-21 19:42:04+00:00
This event was unsafe, despite being wholly within the regulations, but in the comments of this post, the CEO of the company has made a promise to do better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45656044#45659295

Government regulators have failed, but at least the company is making an effort to prevent this from happening again.
by lordnacho | 2025-10-21 19:42:36+00:00
Truly, the ideas in this essay are reflected in this comment section.

It's like that trope of the little angel and demon sitting on the protagonist's shoulders.

"I can get more work done"

"But it's not proper work"

"Sometimes it doesn't matter if it's proper work, not everything is important"

"But you won't learn the tools"

"Tools are incidental"

"I feel like I'm not close to the craft"

"Your colleagues weren't really reading your PRs anyway"

"This isn't just another tool"

"This is just another tool"

And so on forever.

I'm staying to think that if you don't have both these opposing views swirling around in your mind, you haven't thought enough about it.
by philips | 2025-10-21 19:42:40+00:00
The difference is that I know the sum ahead of time and can object in the moment at the bank.

A vote recount and/or judicially called audit can take months to resolve. This can lead to a loss in confidence in the outcome and for political shenanigans (e.g. Bush v. Gore).

I feel far more confident in a system where the software is open source because it increases trust for free. As a citizen having the software be open source is only upside to me.
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-21 19:42:41+00:00
It's amusing to me that this is really quite a pedantic observation yet it's driving very earnest engagement from hackernews. Myself included. Absolutely nothing in this article is riding on if its 1 or 2 problems - it's an aside at best. Yet I'm still trying to think through if it's 1 or 2. I mean, the "and" is right there - that clearly suggests two. It's almost comical even, to say "Here is one problem: X and Y." Yet in another way it seems like 2 sides of the same coin.

I guess there is a rather fine line between philosophy and pedantry.

Maybe we can think about it from another angle. If they are 2 problems databases were designed to solve, then that means this is a problem databases were designed to solve: storing data persistently.

Is that really a problem database were designed to solve? Not really. We had that long before databases. It was already solved. It's a pretty fundamental computer operation. Isn't it fair to say this is one thing? "Storing data so it can be retrieved efficiently."
by no_wizard | 2025-10-21 19:42:44+00:00
Hopefully we never have the pleasure of discovering Prothean style ruins on a nearby planet and Pluto isn't actually a frozen mass relay. That one never ends well.

Though I personally love the idea of advanced, civilized extraterrestrial life. I hope it exists (statistically feels likely but yet to be confirmed). Even if it turns out we humans are at a near lockstep with another civilization it'd be game changing if we could communicate especially.

All that said, maybe there's a "galactic civilization onboarding" program once a species meets a sufficiently advanced criteria independently, with no outside intervention. Perhaps the universe will turn our ideas on their head, and assumptions may not apply.

Our understanding of the world, for however great it is, is still likely full of things we can't fathom and unknowns we don't know. Its fun to speculate but the reality is we are only basing most of our knowledge on how things might be in the universe based on our singular planet's path of evolution.

It makes it truly hard to think of what alternative life forms may exist.
by _wire_ | 2025-10-21 19:42:44+00:00
The President of the U.S. is posting vids of himself as a fighter jet pilot with a gold crown, wearing an oxygen face mask fit like a Covid chin diaper, flying over no-kings protests and literally taking enormous shits that rain down upon the people below.

At the NYT this is regarded as politically innovative, fair & balanced.

A more sage take is clinically insane.
Show HN: GitCruiter – AI tool that evaluates developers by GitHub activity
by vladpowerman | 2025-10-21 19:42:52+00:00
GitCruiter analyzes public GitHub data to estimate a developer’s technical level and habits. Each profile generates a detailed report with metrics like Algorithmic Thinking, Code Quality, Project Organization, Testing Practices, Documentation, and Problem Solving, plus an overall score (e.g., Senior 80/100).

You can browse developers by region, language, or framework — for example, “Python devs in Canada” or “React engineers in Eastern Europe.”

We built it to make developer evaluation more transparent — no résumés, no mystery algorithms, just interpretable metrics from real repos and commits. Would love feedback from developers on whether these evaluations feel accurate or how they could be improved.
by okanat | 2025-10-21 19:43:09+00:00
That's an inquisitive 7 year old. Definitely reward them. Let's explain. A good voting system needs to guarantee

- Secrecy of who voted for whom

- Transparency of everything else. The names of everybody in the process, the process itself and all the statistics should be verifiably public.

Being an observer to your polling station must be a guaranteed voter right. Similarly all participating parties must have the right to send representatives to observe the entire process.

Before opening the polling station all ballots are counted by multiple observers from all sides. This is recorded into files / documentation of each observer. So the number of possible ballot papers that can be voted on is documented.

Then each ballot paper needs to be stamped with a official local seal. This is also observed by every observer. The number of stamped ballots is also counted and documented. The number has to match the original ones.

The number of people who can vote in that voting station is determined by a population survey. In bigger cities each region must have roughly the same number of constituents.

The number of ballots that are stamped must match the number of eligible voters in the polling station. A voter can request to change a damaged ballot paper. The replacement should be done in front of all observers and the voter. The replaced ballot is destroyed in front of everyone.

After putting their ballot into the box, the voter has to sign their name in multiple printouts of the list of eligible voters of that polling station. These printouts of the lists are held by observers from multiple sides. The number of signatures has to match the number of ballots in the box.

Everybody can observe the count. All the numbers are checked against each other.

If you think that this is infeasible, I come from a country of 80 million people and live in a similarly sized one. Both of them use the same system. It works. It scales since it is an almost trivially parallelizable problem. We get the election results in the same day of voting.
by ericmay | 2025-10-21 19:43:57+00:00
In Ohio we have early voting, and then we also have absentee ballots which I think solves both of those challenges. We even have what's called curbside voting for folks who can't get out of their car.

I guess in some sense I'm arguing for the existing system [1], and not to move to any sort of electronic voting, but adding in a new federal holiday for the actual Election Day. It should be a celebration of democracy, a day of reflecting on our republic, and an opportunity to be patriotic with special programming and events, parades, etc. Just a hope/dream there.

I guess the main thing I'd like to say is, I think we should have the day off from work and we should all get together as much as possible as a society and celebrate this damn thing we have instead of sitting at home on the Internet just complaining and doing nothing all the time.

[1] Today we have ballot markets which electronically mark and print the ballot. I'm not quite as concerned about those being hacked (from a layman's perspective not any expertise), and then we have the actual ballot that was cast by the citizen that we can reference. When I think about open-source voting systems, electronic voting, etc. I think of doing it through your computer.
by ianbicking | 2025-10-21 19:44:08+00:00
I think the player freedom and simulation elements of a text adventure are mostly an illusion. I don't think a typical text adventure has more degrees of freedom than a point-and-click adventure.

Doing experiments with LLMs and text adventures was revealing for me in this sense. An obvious thing to consider is using the LLM to parse the text... but if you try this you'll quickly realize that the parsers are mostly limited by what the parser _can parse into_. That is, the representation of a command is so limited that there's not a rich set of alternate inputs that would map to any valid command.

Before LLMs this also struck me in the voice assistant / NLP space, especially "natural language understanding" (NLU). The parsing wasn't great, but the thing-you-parse-into was also incredibly limited. Like you could parse "set an alarm for 8:30" into some template structure. But "no, change that to 8" didn't have a template structure, didn't have any structured representation.

What we've discovered is that the representation that actually fits these concepts is the chat log, or the somewhat magical discernment process of the LLM.

Unlike the point-and-click adventure, the text adventure has poor discoverability. This creates a fog where the player can imagine all kinds of possibilities. But the actual choice points are on the same order of magnitude as the hotspots, verbs, and inventory that define the choice points of a point-and-click adventure.

What I think the text adventure DOES accomplish (and the point-and-click adventure also accomplishes) is giving the player freedom of focus. You can look anywhere. You are usually in some open series of spaces where you can explore at leisure. The text adventure in particular offers a kind of tesseract opportunity, like in the flashback sequence shown in the article.

(Writing this, I am now thinking about a kind of LLM-driven game that discards all pretense of action or puzzles, but instead the player is a ghost free to view their environment, free even to view the internal thoughts of characters, but unable to change anything.)
by nine_zeros | 2025-10-21 19:44:29+00:00
> I see some violent protesters, but I don’t see a violent coup. You’re welcome to call that distinction without a difference, but it’s really not. We’ve had years of violent protest, that’s not what a coup is.

The motive and the location of the protest matters. They motive was to stop certification, but storming inside and blocking the certifiers - that is what separates a protest from a coup.

> From what you said, it was unplanned, but also run by the president of the United States of America. Who is incompetent, but who also secured the presidency not just once, but twice.

None of this takes away from the attempted coup.

> Either way, it doesn’t matter. He won again, with the majority of the vote. It doesn’t seem like the American people believe there was a coup attempt — or they don’t care. He’ll serve out his term, and the same arguments with different actors will play out all over again in 2028.

It matters. Why? Because the narcissist man has demonstrated that he is willing to egg people on to storm elected representatives to get his way. This is how Erdogan, Putin, Maduro operate. It might not matter to you - but maybe you care more about having Trump in office than the constitution. But this is not how a large number of people feel. You can keep pointing at election results as a definitive verdict of the people but elections are about the opposition too - not just about the person. The coup was about the person.

Anyway, I can't convince someone who can delude themselves when evidence is staring right at the face. But like someone else pointed out, this country is truly broken when 2 people look at the same video and cannot agree on the truth.
by mmooss | 2025-10-21 19:44:35+00:00
> Difficult to say

It's not difficult to say. They are behind schedule and everyone, not just Duffy, is talking about it and have been for awhile.

I don't care - beyond how getting to the moon will help future space exploration - and risk is high when developing new tech, but I also don't care about SpaceX. It's very possible Starship won't work out; that's risk and I'm sure SpaceX and NASA people understand that. Why must people on HN defend SpaceX at every turn, like a PR agency. Does anyone point out a genuine, significant, negative about Starship? Why might it not work? What are the risks?

I think more competition is great and hope they reopen the contract. Private industry competing on what is now prosaic space technology, such as orbit and even the moon, is great. Let NASA do the cutting edge stuff like flying to Europa or looking back to the beginning of time or investigating climate change. (Notice that private industry still can't land on the moon reliably - 56 years after NASA demonstrated it.)
by pastage | 2025-10-21 19:44:54+00:00
Agree it is very bad for everyone to think like this. The problem is that on subject that divide you will always have two sides. Some times you need to tone down articles too much to not be biased to either way. So I also agree that there is a place for multiple articles on the same subject.

Also Wikipedia has the problem of being one type of article many subjects really need a other way to explain it.

Even facts can be slander.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-10-21 19:45:04+00:00
To be clear, I have not tried it with any sophistication. Its just as DM/GM, and if you can get the LLM to accept that DM/GM is the last word, aka GOD,, then you can maintain the world..keeping things on the rails better. But its something I am thinking about for alpha play-testing tabletop modules. My brother and I have a side business (Hexbrawler Games [1]) and we are currently writing a Maussritter[2] mouse TTRPG adventure hexcrawl set in 1930-50's Appalachia.

[1] https://hexbrawler.com/

[2] https://mausritter.com/ A great game!
by steveklabnik | 2025-10-21 19:45:12+00:00
Magit is great, and yeah, the jj team is aware that a lot of people wouldn't switch until there's an equivalent tool.

It's true that there's more to jj than just the stuff magit gives you, but also, people should use the tools they find useful. If you're happy with magit, it's totally reasonable to keep using magit.
by cameldrv | 2025-10-21 19:45:18+00:00
Weirdly eightsleep apparently is sending 16GB of data per month worth of telemetry. It's been pointed out that that's about enough for a live audio stream of everything that happens in your bedroom. It can't be cheap to process that much data.

These wifi based smart home devices just fundamentally don't serve their customers.

1. You pay money for a device

2. You pay money for monthly service

3. They sell your private data on the backend, not to worry though, it's "anonymized", but of course it gets sold and then deanonymized

4. AWS goes down and your house doesn't work

5. Eventually they go out of business or get bored and you have to buy and install all new stuff.
by emerongi | 2025-10-21 19:45:25+00:00
Within the past 2 months, as I've started to use AI more, I've had this trajectory:

1. only using AI for small things, very impressed by it 2. giving AI bigger tasks and figuring out how to use it well for those bigger tasks 3. full-agentic mode where AI just does its thing and I review the code at the end 4. realising that I still need to think through all the code and that AI is not the shortcut I was hoping it to be (e.g. where I can give it a high-level plan and be reasonably satisfied with the final code) 5. going back to giving AI small tasks

I've found AI is very useful for research, proof-of-concepts and throwaway code of "this works, but is completely unacceptable in production". It's work I tend to do anyway before I start tackling the final solution.

Big-picture coding is in my hands, but AI is good at filling in the logic for functions and helping out with other small things.
by vict7 | 2025-10-21 19:45:28+00:00
That’s a really interesting argument that I hadn’t considered. The US certainly has the unenviable position of being the world’s “policeman” for lack of a better term. Other countries wanting help from the US, yet also maligning it. Which… is probably more fair now than before to be sure.

> Ironically it's the fact that our economy is forced to be large enough to pay for everyone else's defense that forces the economy into more inequality than there would be were America only responsible for its own sovereignty.

This is the part I’m not fully understanding. Are you saying it’s because the US is forced to spend more on defense leaving fewer resources to reduce inequality? I don’t see how suspect people like Musk are a necessary outcome of this paradigm... I do get that there is an insane amount of money pumped into the military-industrial complex though.

If you take the (naive) perspective that returning to a higher level of taxation on the most wealthy would increase government income, reducing inequality is just a beneficial side-effect there.

Edit: I apparently missed your point about inequality correlating to the size of an economy. Are you saying it’s not possible to have an economy as large as the US with less inequality than is currently present?