MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-10-02 16:52:46+00:00
It's not a binary choice between a civil war surgeon's saw and an immaculate cleanroom, safety exists on a spectrum. Better safe enough than so incomprehensibly safe that the procedure is unaffordable and the doctor has 1/10th the experience and 100x as much paperwork!

Imagine, for a minute, that there's a physical lever at the FDA that controls the amount of cost, bureaucracy, and triple-checks that occur in hospitals. Think one of those steam engine throttles, with the big pawl release lever, it's set in front of an angle gauge with colors from red to green. One side is marked "Anarchy" and the other is marked "Better safe than sorry". Right now, that lever (or the metaphorical regulatory lever, the physical lever doesn't actually exist AFAIK) is as far over to the "safe" side as I can imagine it possibly being. The US lags behind on many modern medications and procedures, health care is unaffordable for somewhere between many and most, it's so miserably difficult to enter the field that we're not educating and training enough people, and the people that we do have trained are spending too much of their time doing paperwork and fighting the insurance system to take care of people. If you or a loved one have ever gotten a refusal of treatment or needed to wait for your disease to get worse before you can get care, you know how real this lever is.

If you ever get access to that lever, please, bring it at least one click back off the limiter. Maybe two. The potential harms that you imagine could caused by contamination and human error, at the moment, are less than the actual harms that are happening right now due to lack of affordable access.

People are going blind, in pain, or dying right now because it's too far towards the "better safe than sorry" side. If you were on a fixed income and found yourself unable to afford a $8000 cataract surgery as the world slowly grew dim, you'd wish you could visit an efficient practice and get it done for $150, even if that meant there was another patient on the other side of the OR.
by kraig911 | 2025-10-02 16:53:05+00:00
I just can't understand why Microsoft can just remove all this shit from windows 11. Guys we don't want adds, one drive and all that crap I know you make money on it but let people come to it naturally when it's forced it turns us a way. I keep hearing stories of entire medical offices, small businesses going mac/linux for the sake of not being forced to candy crush it up.
by in_cahoots | 2025-10-02 16:54:09+00:00
The overloading of the term autism has had a real damaging effect on some people. My cousin is profoundly autistic: he's nonverbal, and will never live independently. In the 90s most autism research was focused on helping people like him. He was involved in some pioneering studies at John's Hopkins University.

Today most of the money and advocacy is for high-performing or moderately-performing people with autism. Not just in relative terms, the amount of funding for people like my cousin has gone down. It makes sense; they are the larger group by volume and are able to advocate better than people like my cousin.

I wish it weren't a zero-sum game, and we recognized that autism is just a word for a broad series of conditions. It would be like if we called everyone with poor eyesight 'blind': yes, your vision is impaired. But the solutions you need are very different than the solutions Stevie Wonder needs.

See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/health/autism-spectrum-ne...
by mc32 | 2025-10-02 16:54:19+00:00
Unless we find Utopia some day, the economic system does not matter. People will have to work whether they be nomads, fishermen or fisherwomen, live in Neoliberal economies, live in Socialist economies, Communist economies or a loaner in the jungle. People have to produce: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" as they say. It's expected people who have the ability to produce to produce. It's not Wall-E land where you get plugged in and can veg out to your heart's content. We have the same phenomenon in the non-political animal kingdom. You hold your weight or you're out. We have little more ruth as a species... but not that much more because it's hard to afford more --you see even if we evenly spread the wealth from billionaires evenly, it would not amount to much for each individual -just over a thousand dollars per person and it would be a one-time thing.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-10-02 16:54:29+00:00
That's how describe AI code agents to non-coders. If you ask it what 2 + 2 is, it will say "5". And if you tell it that's wrong and ask it to do it again, it will say, "You're right! My last answer was incorrect. The correct answer is 2 + 2 is 5."
by koverstreet | 2025-10-02 16:54:41+00:00
> In the comments on HN around any bcachefs news (including this one) there are always a couple throwaway accounts bleating the same arguments - sounding like the victim - that Kent frequently uses.

And every time something like this comes up, I end up with every sort of accusation pointed at me, and no one seems to be willing to look at the wider picture - why is the kernel community still unable to figure out a plan to get a trustworthy modern filesystem?

> This is your problem to fix.

No, I've said from the start that this needs to be a community effort. A filesystem is too big for one person.

Be realistic :) If the community wants this to happen, the community will have to step up.
by rubyn00bie | 2025-10-02 16:55:01+00:00
Nebula just didn’t have enough content I cared about. I happily paid for it, but outside of one or two creators it was “meh.” Half of it felt like content specifically for elementary schoolers. So I, being childless, eventually canceled it. That said, I should probably give it another go, to see if that’s improved at all.

Personally, I really don’t think the problem is subscriptions at this point. I think it’s just having enough content to justify the subscription. Netflix probably costs 4x what Nebula does but certainly has at least that much more content.

I subscribe to Disney/Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube premium. I’ve tried others but there’s not enough content to justify the monthly expense unless I’m actively watching something. And Disney/Hulu is next on the chopping block because the content sort of sucks, there are large periods of time where nothing I want to watch is released, and the whole thing with Kimmel.
by tptacek | 2025-10-02 16:55:04+00:00
Sure.

In the standard practical analysis of quantum threats to cryptography, your adversary is "harvesting and then decrypting". Everybody agrees that no adversary can perform quantum cryptography today, but we agree (to agree) that they'll plausibly be able to at some point in the future. If you assume Signal is carrying messages that have to be kept secret many years into the future, you have to assume your adversary is just stockpiling Signal ciphertexts in a warehouse somewhere waiting so that 15 or 20 years from now they can decrypt them.

That's why you want PQ key agreement today: to protect against a future capability targeting a record of the past. (It's also why you don't care as much about PQ signatures, because we agree no adversary can time travel back and MITM, say, a TLS signature verification).

To understand the importance of a PQ ratchet, add one more capability to the adversary. In addition to holding on to ciphertexts for 15-20 years, assume they will eventually compromise a device, or find an implementation-specific flaw in cryptography code that they can exploit to extract key material. This is a very realistic threat model; in fact, it's of much more practical importance than the collapse of an entire cryptographic primitive.

You defend against that threat model with "forward secrecy" and "post-compromise security". You continually update your key, so the compromise of any one key doesn't allow an attacker to retrospectively decrypt, or to encrypt future messages.

For those defenses to hold against a "harvest and decrypt" attacker, the "ratchet" mechanism you use to keep re-keying your session also needs to be PQ secure. If it isn't, attackers will target the ratchet instead of the messages, and your system will lose its forward and post-compromise secrecy.
by uaghazade | 2025-10-02 16:55:22+00:00
Just launched SupaRedd, Reddit marketing with power of human-like AI. SupaRedd finds the best subreddits and hottest posts, then helps you promote your product naturally with human-like AI. Our AI doesn't sound robotic. It understands context, tone, and community culture to create authentic comments that blend naturally into conversations.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-02 16:55:30+00:00
> Democrats in Congress just helped shut the government down

Eh, Democrats crapped their pants in Texas. Crapped their pants in March. Haven’t yet excised Biden elements who straight up lied to the electorate from the party. The Constitution is being shredded, yet you wouldn’t know it from the generic ballot [1].

Bring back the Bull Moose Party. Between the death of conservatism in the GOP and the loss of a backbone outside the left among Democrats, there is room-maybe a need—for a Teddy in our politics.

[1] https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/state-of-the-union/ge...
by 20kleagues | 2025-10-02 16:56:05+00:00
SalesJack | Data Engineer | Hybrid (Hamilton/GTA Canada) | C$130K-C$150K + equity and benefits | salesjack.com

SalesJack is a sales software platform (CRM, Prospecting Service) for independent businesses in the construction supply industry. We are growing quickly and profitably. Our founding team and customers are based in the US, and we aim to grow engineering capabilities in Canada.

This role is responsible for leading our data pipelines development. SalesJack operates data ETLs from sources like client ERPs (enterprise resource platforms) and municipality open data to power our CRM features. You will collaborate directly with founders and lead engineers at the company and help:

- Enable scalability in our pipelines as we onboard more customers and data sources

- Setup visibility, monitoring and alerting in all parts of our ETL processes

- Allow plugging in AI led transformations at the right stages of our pipelines, and enable this to be done easily

- Lead RnD effort for AI toolings that transform a lot of manual work in the industry

We are looking for:

- 3+ years of data wrangling and pipeline scaling experience. We prefer if you have done so with a focus on reliability and efficiency (both in terms of compute and costs) in the past.

- Someone who loves experimenting with data, regularly tries out new tools, and enjoys exploring the possibilities of AI and machine learning—especially large language models (LLMs)—we want to hear from you.

Our hiring process will be:

1. Initial call with our founding engineer to briefly discuss your experience and introduce SalesJack ~ 30mins

2. Technical Exercise (this will a live coding on a screen-sharing call where we will ask you to work on some problem) ~1.5 hours

3. Call with one of our founders to see cultural fit ~ 30mins

4. Offer

We aim to have the full process take no more than 2 weeks from the initial call.

This is a hybrid role, with in-person 2-3 times a week in Downtown Hamilton, Ontario.

Apply at https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/salesjack/5645b4c3-dc1b-4021-83d4-2... and mention Hacker News
by ankit219 | 2025-10-02 16:57:08+00:00
The headline is provocative. The issue is simple: Meta has a recommended feed and another feed which is reverse chronological. The option is hidden and not default, and all the NL judge is asking is for that option to be preserved and not be reset everytime user opens the app/website. Instagram never had this option, this does not say whether they have to implement it too.

I would be curious if the order stands as for curation as well. Someone could have 1000s of friends, and you cant show posts from everyone in a reverse chronological order for a good ux.
by yoyohello13 | 2025-10-02 16:57:16+00:00
I do agree high level math isn't as useful for dev work. I have a masters in math and started working as a data analyst. I moved to programming years ago and I basically never really need to use the math stuff I know anymore.

Weirdly my math background is actually more useful as a 'soft' skill in my current work. I am the go to person for talking to the data analysts in my company, and having a statistics background is pretty helpful for interfacing with managers or people outside the dev department.

Every once in a while I remember an algorithm for doing something I can include in our app and feel like a God, lol.
by MarkusWandel | 2025-10-02 16:57:40+00:00
Just a data point on the "modern suspend" feature. I have a Win11/Fedora dual boot laptop. Fedora doesn't do modern suspend, at least on that machine. Found that deep, deep down in the "BIOS" (yes, I know, UEFI) menus - so deep that you have to do a secret keyboard dance to even get that menu - is a "enable S3 sleep" option. Figured OK, I'll just get good suspend in Linux and whatever in Windows.

Surprise! Windows 11 likes S3 suspend just fine. Push the button, instant screen off and winking power light... push it again, instant wakeup. So if by some miracle your hardware/UEFI still supports it, you're good. This is a 5-year-old-ish Acer Swift 3 for what it's worth.

Oh, wait, you mean Windows update toggles that setting back? Whoa.
by 542458 | 2025-10-02 16:58:10+00:00
There's no evidence that "fake blue rich light" at normal exposure levels has any effect, and not for lack of investigation. Ironically, "real sunlight" which you highlight as a benefit is actually a risk factor, given that UV-B and UV-A damage the lens - which is why sunglasses are recommended.

I'd highlight that much of the publicly-perceived "dangers" of blue light are, at best, exaggerations of weak evidence by lens manufacturers who want to upsell blue light blocking spectacles or IOLs. It's not like there's some big medical conspiracy to keep the dangers of normal levels of blue light a secret - the medical manufacturers would love for it to be true so they could sell you more products.
by ant6n | 2025-10-02 16:58:29+00:00
The forced reinstalls for updates is the worst. Sometimes when working on some Excel file etc at night, I went away without saving (e.g. crying kid needs attention, and I never returned). Auto-saving only works when you store files in OneDrive. So then windows Update will shut down Excel, and Excel often won't create an AutoSave, and then hours of work are lost -- totally intentionally, deliberately, all using Microsoft products that are apparently specifically designed to make you lose hours of work.

Who designs these antipatterns!?
by suzzer99 | 2025-10-02 16:58:41+00:00
The problem is unless you know what "third-party accounts" means, it's ambiguous as to which account is being connected to and which account is doing the connecting over POP. "Gmail will no longer support checking emails from [thing I'm unclear on] over POP."

The whole sentence hinges on knowing that Gmail itself can (or could) become a client and go out to other email accounts and fetch emails over POP. In my mind I'm wondering, "Are they talking about something like where Slack connects to gmail?"
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-10-02 16:58:55+00:00
I am a blue collar layperson (who only understands IPv4's limitation as a lack of total available IP addresses) that disables IPv6 (at the router level) for this exact reason — I feel like I am losing the little bit of control that being "behind NAT" allows on a private IP range/network (e.g. firewall; port mapping).

Obviously I still use Windows 7 Pro 64-bit as my only Microsoft computer — also have an Ubuntu dual Xeon (for LLM/crypto) and several Apple Silicon products (for general browsing).
by rraghur | 2025-10-02 16:58:59+00:00
haven't run windows in ages (15yrs). Can't even make sense of windows anymore since at work moved to Mac. Unfortunately, looks like I will need to now since for a laptop (thinkpad - AMD - sleep/suspend might be a dead end)

So what's the 'best' edition of windows ('best' for privacy/least crapware/adware/AI slop)? I can get any version.
by morkalork | 2025-10-02 16:59:19+00:00
It's kinda like mental health issues go through their own hype-cycles. Autism now is where ADHD was in the late 90s / early 2000s. I say this as someone who went through the Ritalin treatment a long time ago, but that was after my parents were at their wits end tried drugging me with gravol. If that were today, it'd probably be some neurospicy autism diagnosis and treatment.
by sim7c00 | 2025-10-02 16:59:25+00:00
guessing tokens (or something similar) i think humans grasp at more than 1 type of straw.

Edit: no ok i get u. ensemble learning is a thing ofc. maybe me n other poster reasoned too much from AI == model..but ofc you combine em these days. which is more humanlike guesser levels. (not nearly enough models now ofc)
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-10-02 16:59:32+00:00
In general, some incentive structures allow managers to retain stock and 3% of unspent division budget as a year end bonus. Thus, they naturally cut every possible cost rather than risk growth liabilities.

Perhaps someone will come up with a better incentive structure, but those people were fired years ago. As process-people often eventually win over creatives due to their singular focus. lol =3
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-10-02 17:00:09+00:00
I think even this argument is over-complicated.

My primary argument is human nature: If you give people the lazy way to accomplish a goal, they will do it.

No amount of begging college students to use it wisely is going to convince them. No amount of begging corporate executives to use it wisely is going to convince them. No amount of begging governments to use it wisely is going to convince them. When this inevitably backfires with college students who know nothing, corporate leaders who have the worst code in history, and governments who spent billions on a cat video generator, only then will they learn.
by eesmith | 2025-10-02 17:00:24+00:00
Let me see if I have it right.

You don't like Python's use of IEEE 754 float64 for its "float" type because it's already so slow that you think Python should use a data type which better fits the expectations of primary school math training.

Then to demonstrate the timing issue you give an example where you ignore the simplest, fastest, and most accurate Python solution, using a built-in function which would likely be more accurate than what's available in stock Rust.

If accuracy is important for the first, why is it not important for the second?

Are you aware of the long history of compiled versions of Python (PyPy, numba, and more), plus variants like Cython, where the result has near Rust performance levels?

Were the core float be a non-IEEE 754, those compiled versions would either be dog slow (to be compatible with Python's core float) or give results which are different than CPython's.

Even if they did not exist, there would be a lot of questions about why a given program in C, Rust, Pascal, or any other float64-based system, gives different answers when translated to Python.

FWIW, I, like others, could not reproduce your 20 seconds timing. Python is indeed slow for this sort of task, but even for explicit iteration my code is an order of magnitude faster than you reported.
by rockercoaster | 2025-10-02 17:00:26+00:00
Seconding all this.

I'm worry that somewhere out there there are kids hearing adults go "high school has to do [shitty thing] to get you ready for the 'real world', which is even harder!" (LOL no it fucking isn't) or "enjoy it, these are the best days of your life, adult life is so much harder" (what the actual shit are they smoking? Harder stuff than weed, for sure)

I had a relatively good high school experience, and even so, if people saying that stuff had been correct I'd have surely killed myself by now, probably before age 30. There is no possible way I could have tolerated decades more of life as unpleasant as high school, let alone worse. Harsh and short deadlines, general inflexibility of expectations, begging to be allowed to take a piss, the equivalent of multiple hour-long presentation meetings every single day, very-early starts, lots of rooms with shitty lighting and no windows, terrible seating that you're in all day long, complete assholes common and you're just stuck with them, they're not gonna get kicked out (this goes for teachers and students alike), and no realistic ability to leave and find something better.

Luckily, I had a part-time tech job in high school (I did later work a couple very-low-paid non-tech jobs for a while, so I'm not writing this "no really high school is far worse than adult life" perspective from an entirely privileged perspective) and could see that something was wonky about what these people were saying. Then I go to college and it's like a goddamn vacation. On to the "real world" and there are hard times but it's nothing like the 4-year marathon rigid-schedule grind of high school. Those tend to be more like, oh this week is rough, or this month, or perhaps this quarter. And I have so very much more freedom of action to fix things that aren't going well.

Adult life is far easier than high school. High school is insane. Like it's an actually-crazy thing to subject kids to.
by tstrimple | 2025-10-02 17:00:31+00:00
Indeed. As someone who deals with the exact same issues as the original comment and have been fighting with sleep issues for over a decade, it's pretty fucking insulting to think we haven't tried to vary caffeine intake. Apparently we're too fucking stupid to think that the drug most known for wakefulness might be what is keeping us awake! It's like when I talk about crippling executive disfunction they chime in with the ever helpful, "have you tried setting a five minute timer to get started?"

I can guarantee that folks who suffer from these symptoms have read far more about mitigation than the average drive by commenter who doesn't suffer from them. Our whole lives at some point becomes about mitigation. So the "just drink less caffeine" is stupid and insulting and unfortunately way too common.
by anigbrowl | 2025-10-02 17:00:32+00:00
Oh come on. This is just a stub article, saying two drones had crashed and police are investigating. It's clearly going to be a story of strong local and general interest, and they have limited information and a couple of photographs so the story is only a few sentences long for now.

Ranting about deeper meaning of the words in such a minimal bulletin is nonsensical.
by Spivak | 2025-10-02 17:00:36+00:00
I like the distillation of aliens but I think that undersells the risk because aliens are individuals with their own goals and motivations. It's more like robots with 300 IQ who unquestionably obey the person or group that made them, even when they're serving others. And look, the 300 IQ thing isn't even a major point to the argument. The fact that the robots by virtue of being machines naturally have capabilities humans lack is enough. As long as they're smart enough to carry out complex tasks unattended is more than enough to cause harm on a massive scale.

The problem then isn't really the AI, the robots are morally and ethically neutral. It's the humans that control them who are the real risk.
by BeetleB | 2025-10-02 17:01:02+00:00
The whole article seems like a strawman.

I have not yet heard one person worry about AIs taking over humanity. They're worried about their jobs. And most people who were worried 2 years ago are much less worried.

And a better scenario is Aliens with IQ of 300 are coming. And they will all be controlled by the [US|Russian|Israeli|Hamas|Al-Qaeda|Chinese] government.

Edit: To be clear, I was referring to people I personally know. Sure, lots of people out there are terrified of lots of things - religious fanaticism, fluoride in the water, AI apocalypse.

And "huge economic disruption" is not "AI taking over humanity". I'm interpreting the article's take on AI doing damage as one where the AI is in control, and no human can stop it. Currently, for each LLM out there, there are humans controlling it.