MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-15 08:55:25+00:00
> I did not say nor mean to imply that genetics do not have anything to do with IQ or intelligence.

Please explain what "Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems don't mean that intelligence is inherited in the genetic sense." means because it sure looks like an argument that the genetic component isn't real.

Especially because you posted that in response to someone talking about heritability in very general terms, so your comment can't be interpreted as a nitpick about which evidence goes where. And I can't think of any third interpretation.

> this is a thread about how to structure educational environments and about certain specifics of the military

The idea being presented is that it's easier to run good schools when you have smarter students with smarter parents.

So the inheritability of intelligence over a single generation is critical to the argument.
by rldjbpin | 2025-10-15 08:55:45+00:00
i see both sides. while some core tech made decades ago might be tedious to adapt to today's needs, i HATE the fact that modern code is not designed to be sustainable.

<rant> speaking of ai, there was a startup acquired by google in 2017, whose core features remain unchanged. however, their sdk and branding got switched around every 18 months or so. incredibly annoying how you cannot run the same code anymore despite having the libraries cached because of the cloud and its moody deprecation cycles.

recently had a similar situation with azure and their (yet another) copilot rebranding had existing work being phased out by the end of the year, when the actual sdk did not get changed besides the package name! </rant>

having said that i have come to appreciate things that were well-designed and lasted that long. change is not bad, but only when it is not just for the sake of it.
by knotie | 2025-10-15 08:56:20+00:00
I had the pleasure/pain of maintaining a Delphi 2 app for 6 months in 2014... It was buggy as hell and crashed all the time. All the things you've mentioned were indeed included out of the box. The IDE was pretty much a direct recompile of the of the Delphi 1 IDE with some minimal additions to support Win32. Oh, there was no interfaces (or COM, obviously).

The only reason the company hadn't moved off Delphi 2 was that they hadn't bought the code for a couple of 3rd party components before the 3rd parties went bust... So they were stuck. I had rewritten chunks of it to remove those dependencies before I left, after I had fix the hundreds of thousands of hints and warnings (!).

Delphi 2 was late, and it was rushed out before it was finished. Delphi 3 was rock solid and was the true successor to Delphi 1.
by danman114 | 2025-10-15 08:56:35+00:00
Actually, I don't mind it - I like it - I feel like Mac OS - and especially iOS - got _very_ boring and felt really "conservative" / stocky to me. Everything the same as it always was...

So I am happy for a fresh breeze. I don't mind it. I actually enjoy having some movement in my computers' appeareance, and I feel it's really cool and tastefully done... for my use. Just to mix it up a bit. I'm happy about it. Be a bit whimsical from time to time. Is gudd!
by sixtyj | 2025-10-15 08:58:17+00:00
I’ve tried JSON, YAML, and TOML for storing data. Last time, I ended up with an 8,000-line JSON file. And I had to write an editor for it, because text-based editing caused more syntax errors than I expected (what a surprise :).

But each of formats seemed nice at first.

So I understand that sometimes it’s easier to invent a new format. But compatibility with other formats can definitely be a problem lately.

My question is: how does the proposed system handle multiple editors working on the same text file?
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-15 08:58:55+00:00
VoLTE roaming isn't quite as easy as "log in to the network and connect to the local SIP server". There's a lot of interplay with the home carrier: https://moniem-tech.com/2024/01/01/what-is-volte-roaming/

It's perfectly possible for VoLTE not to work in regions where no carrier provisioning information is available while foreign SIM cards work fine.

In theory a phone can just be provisioned by the network to use VoLTE, but in practice the spec allows for all kinds of incompatible configurations. Carriers and phone manufacturers won't just apply an untested configuration, and for good reason. Software upgrades have broken telecommunications from iPhones to Androids, sometimes edge cases such as calling 111/112/911/999 turn out not to work.

Falling back to 3G or even 2G on unknown networks in unsupported markets will get you voice calls, at least for the coming years.
by jogu | 2025-10-15 08:59:02+00:00
It's quite interesting to see this data, but I can't help but think that there's some overloading of the words and a bit of a false comparison. The overrepresented categories could be seen as such when focusing on the aspect of "cause of death". But murder, terrorism, etc. as topics aren't simply that someone died but that another person caused it. A sad reality, but the news tends to highlight the criminals, not the victims.
by Grimburger | 2025-10-15 08:59:07+00:00
> That's 45% off (our top marginal tax rate)

Can people please not listen to this terrible advice that gets repeated so oft, especially in Australian IT circles somehow by young naive folks.

You really need to talk to your accountant here.

It's probably under 25% in deduction at double the median wage, little bit over @ triple, and that's *only* if you are using the device entirely for work, as in it sits in an office and nowhere else, if you are using it personally you open yourself up to all sorts of drama if and when the ATO ever decides to audit you for making a $6k AUD claim for a computing device beyond what you normally to use to do your job.
by ckuehne | 2025-10-15 08:59:22+00:00
“Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.” David Deutsch
by soganess | 2025-10-15 09:00:34+00:00
It’s not just whataboutism when the comparison points to a broader systemic process of eroding rights and worsening conditions. It is also an observation of this next stage in that process and how it departs from the last.

Ultimately, I think it’s self-serving/pointless Daily Show “gotcha” finger-waving trying to face down a steamroller of hate, but it’s more than whataboutism.
by ruszki | 2025-10-15 09:02:12+00:00
There are studies about this. A lot. Many of them garbage, because their reference points were garbage (like 2008), or flat out lied, but it's quite clear that even if it matters on C-level jobs, it's miniscule. It was studied a lot because of Norway, and the following countries in Europe. Either it was pure sexism to have a distorted sex distribution, or C-level jobs don't really matter for companies outlook. I don't think that it's the latter. Btw, these studies also show that "experience", and "qualification" were distorted for no good reason.
by vidarh | 2025-10-15 09:02:37+00:00
Managing database backups is fairly straightforward. Postgres + a base backup + long term wal archiving in a blob store is very easy to set up and monitor. It could be easier, and if you don't want to manage that using RDS is certainly a valid choice, but it's a tradeoff - I often have customers that help addressing performance issues with RDS they simply wouldn't have if they sized a bare metal setup with enough RAM and NVMe and configured it even halfway decently instead, and the end result is often that they end up paying more for devops help to figure out performance bottlenecks than they'd spend putting the same devops consultant on retainer ensuring they have a solid backup setup.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-15 09:02:46+00:00
If you want to do this really well I'd do it like A/B updates on Android work.

1. Have two directories for the app: A and B. One contains the "current" version and one contains (possibly) the "next" version.

2. Have the actual app you start be a separate launcher program that just picks which version to launch.

3. While the app is running, periodically check for updates. If an update is available download and unzip it to the A or B directory that isn't currently in use.

4. Next time the launcher program starts it can say "an updated version is already installed, would you like to use it" (or you can just do that automatically if you - or your user - decide that's the best option). If so it marks the appropriate A/B directory as "current" and launches that one.

Zero delay for users, works on all OSes, works with "always use the latest version" as well as "ask the user to update".

I've never tried this tbf - just an idea.
by adrian_b | 2025-10-15 09:04:48+00:00
The press is full of contradictory information, so it is hard to guess which is the truth.

This information about misdeeds of the CEO looks like a very convenient excuse for the Dutch government, while another article published in the press claims that, according to newly published court proceedings, already at a meeting in June between US officials and Dutch officials USA had requested the removal of the Chinese CEO by the Dutch, as a condition for not enforcing export controls over Nexperia.

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-pressured-the-netherlands...

Both claims could be true, USA has pressured Netherlands to remove the Chinese CEO, then the Dutch have investigated the CEO to find a reason to intervene and they have found this dubious deal where he bought a double amount of wafers compared to the actual needs.

This deal may be abusive, but it looks rather mild in comparison with how most CEOs mishandle the assets of their companies. I doubt that there are many CEOs against whom a thorough investigation would not find such deals. Here at least he got usable semiconductor wafers, but many such deals are for valueless software or consulting.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-10-15 09:05:38+00:00
To state the obvious (sorry):

(1) Command lines lack the discoverability element of GUIs (and TUIs), where the available choices are typically laid out in front of you. Just look at the command "firm -c list contact" in the screenshot in the linked readme - no doubt it's sensible, but you wouldn't just type it in out of nowhere. You could argue that good docs fix this, but they'll never be a substitute. (Silly analogy: imagine if your toaster had buttons just labelled "1", "2", "3" and you had to refer to the manual for which meant toast, defrost, extra browning.)

(2) Command lines lack the visual persistence of the data you're operating on (like a list of files in a directory, or project/people data like in this program). If you rename a file and you then re-run ls and now everything appears in a slightly different place on the screen (because the previous listing had shifted up when you ran "mv") it's visually jarring in a way that just operating directly on the data isn't. Not-silly analogy: it's like how no-one today would dream of operating on a text file using a pure line editor like ed. (Even command-based editors like vim persist the file data in the main visual area.)

Command lines are much better than GUIs/TUIs for some applications, for example when called from a script, or where you might need to compose a complex command and then tweak and re-run it (in fairness, that might apply to OP's project). But I think techies sometimes get a bit carried away. GUIs are sometimes a legitimately better choice.
by godelski | 2025-10-15 09:06:02+00:00
> they’re mapped to vectors of real numbers

Yes, I'm in agreement here. But you need to tell me how

a - a + a = b

Use what ever the fuck you want for a. A vector (e.g. [1,2,3]), a number (e.g. 1), an embedding (e.g. [[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]), words (e.g. "man"), I really don't give a damn. You have to tell me why b is a reasonable answer to that equation. You have to tell me how a==b while also a!=b.

Because I expect the usual addition to be

a - a + a = a

This is the last time I'm going to say this to you.

You're telling me I'm lost in abstraction and I'm telling you is not usual addition because a != b. That's it! That's the whole fucking argument. You literally cannot see the contradiction right in front of you. The only why it is usual addition is if you tell me "man == woman" because that is literally the example from several comments ago. Stop being so smart and just read the damn comment
by pjc50 | 2025-10-15 09:06:39+00:00
> What is important is crime rate given exposure. Not crime rate.

Exposure to what?

> What matters is interventions and policy in reaction to each observation

Responding to individual incidents usually produces terrible legislation. It's hard to get legislators and the public to back off and stop demanding harmful and expensive reprisals, to instead do something that actually works.

e.g. the very successful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Reduction_Unit
by BubbleRings | 2025-10-15 09:06:42+00:00
Wow, thank you for this link!

TheGauntlet.news here has several well-written articles about what went wrong with the US’s response to COVID.

It’s like someone swept their arm across the kitchen table, tossing of all the junk, and said “let’s just lay out everything we know about how COVID went/is going, but only put down the science based and common sense stuff.”

I was trying to convince people to use real masks instead of surgical masks since basically day 1. I understand that at first there was a shortage of N95s, but not for that long. I totally agree with the article that it quickly became “I don’t wanna”.

But I never thought fully about what it would have been like, to be a parent that HAD to take a sick child to the hospital for treatment unrelated to Covid, and see lots of doctors and nurses wearing surgical masks when they could have been wearing 95s. That would have been infuriating.

And one of the articles also had great info on the fallacy that “getting COVID multiple times is good for children’s immune systems” type messages. It is becoming clear that is not true at all.

Really great, critically important journalism there!
by Deestan | 2025-10-15 09:06:43+00:00
What is 12+12?

> The answer is 24! See the ASCII values of '1' is 49, '2' is 50, and '+' is 43. Adding all that together we get 3. Now since we are doing this on a computer with a 8-bit infrastructure we multiply by 3 and so the answer is 24.

Cool! I didn't understand any of that but it was correct and you sound smart. I will put this thing in charge of critical parts of my business.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-10-15 09:07:01+00:00
>we don't want to give up privacy for whatever "security" some, completely uninformed, want to promise

You'd be surprised how easily people give up their rights for the made up security promises, without putting up a fight.

Let's go through a short list I experienced during my lifetime in my country, off the top of my head.

-2001 Invasive airport checks after 911 -2015 mandatory registration with ID of prepaid SIM cards after islamist terrorist attacks -2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments

None of these saw any kind of major disruptive backlash against the government to convince them to backtrack, so chat control and digital ID to access the internet and comment online is only a matter of time, all it needs is another black swan or even a false flag event.

Sure there was the famous trucker protests in Canada against mandatory COVID pass, but the government cracked down on that, so your protests against systems of control are irelevant. Chat control is inevitably gonna happen with or without your approval.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-15 09:07:15+00:00
> No one buys pixel devices anymore

From the numbers I've read, Pixels are doing just fine: https://www.phonearena.com/news/google-top-five-premium-smar... and https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/google-pixel/google-pi... both claim Pixel sales shot up this very year.

Google will lose maybe one percent of sales on GrapheneOS dropping Pixels, but that's not going to make a dent into their sales figures.
by pas | 2025-10-15 09:07:31+00:00
people followed Stallman because the GNU stuff was interesting and good, then we got decades of endless dick-measuring about whose freedom is more free, GPL2 or GPL3 or MIT or AGPL or ...

and while the differences have consequences in the grand scheme of things what mattered is what the trillion dollar corporations wanted, because the FSF didn't manage to do shit, not even the feminine coordination (nor the masculine rallying cry to arms!)
by lifthrasiir | 2025-10-15 09:07:45+00:00
For Windows, there is an alternative approach: simply rename the running application to a different name (e.g. app.exe to app-old-timestamp.exe). This frees up the file name which can be overwritten to any other executable. The only problem I'm aware of is that this process may leave app.exe non-existent for a moment [1], but in return a need for keeping two executables vanishes.

[1] Technically speaking I believe this can be solved with transactional NTFS (deprecated but still available as of Windows 11, AFAIK).
by close04 | 2025-10-15 09:08:13+00:00
> Some people are always upset with change

You defended "change" in general, not in this particular case. "Change could be good so this change must be good" is a weak argument that can be used to defend any change. This is a shallow dismissal of the complaints instead of a solid defense of the change.

The poor contrast of the UI strains the eyesight, all the transparency and glass effects are distracting and tiring, so are many of the animations which just introduce a delay for no reason, and so on. I unlock my phone and the top row of icons is "thrown" on the screen with a big delay and a very ample motion to the point it was disturbing.

These aren't useful changes, they cause a loss of practical value to many users even if they bring esthetic value to others. The changes most brought up in complaints are objectively worse that what we had before. It's form over function and tells the world the designers had no ideas how to practically improve the UI so they added visual bells and whistles, flashes and sparkles.
by verisimi | 2025-10-15 09:08:17+00:00
Using the example of a laser - you can have a powerful laser that can burn through metal. A far weaker laser (many magnitudes weaker) could still damage eye sight. Alternatively, water erodes mountains eventually.

I don't think you can argue that ultrasound imaging is harmless or a treatment/dose. It might be that it does nothing. It might also be that it does something (like when it destroys cancer cells) only its far milder, and not an obvious observation.

PS I know there are mild ultrasound devices to aid muscle recovery. These devices do something, presumably. If mild devices are acknowledged to impact muscles etc, some (mild probably) effect is occuring. Given there are occasions where these devices are known to have an impact on adults, why should we presume that there is no impact on the technology when it is looking at a developing foetus?

PPS Even in studies that say there is 'no effect' from ultrasound imaging, there is a tolerance of up to 10% difference between the control and the subjects.

PPPS And of course, sometimes the control is 'children who have only had 1 ultrasound' vs 'children who have 2 or more ultrasounds' - ie the control is not 'children who have who have had no ultrasounds' - ie we do not get true control studies.
by novoreorx | 2025-10-15 09:10:04+00:00
To me, this kind of stuff is like bloated boilerplates such as "full-stack e-commerce SaaS NextJS boilerplate." I never use them because I want more control and fewer unpredictabilities. They seem to save you some time, but you will pay a lot more for it later when you encounter deep bugs or need to refactor. For this reason, I won't use prompt templates for agentic coding tools either. There have been enough suggestions to write your own AGENTS.md and not overcomplicate the prompts.
by lukeh | 2025-10-15 09:10:27+00:00
Also, you can only deduct it in a single financial year if you are eligible for the Instant asset write-off program.

I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this, but this common misunderstanding about tax deductions does remind me of a certain Seinfeld episode :)

Kramer: It's just a write off for them

Jerry: How is it a write off?

Kramer: They just write it off

Jerry: Write it off what?

Kramer: Jerry all these big companies they write off everything

Jerry: You don't even know what a write off is

Kramer: Do you?

Jerry: No. I don't

Kramer: But they do and they are the ones writing it off
by BrenBarn | 2025-10-15 09:12:35+00:00
I don't disagree that this is a huge problem and you're right that too many on the left seem unwilling to acknowledge it. I think the same is true of a variety of other issues as well.

I guess where I'd disagree with the article you linked is at the end where it says race relations are "the dominant factor" in inequality. I agree more with what it says just before about "disingenuous and superficial takes on race relations that distract from the systemic reforms that two-thirds of Americans desire." It is those systemic reforms that are most important. I tend to think that we cannot solve the racial problems (or nearly any problems we have) until we can fix the nuts and bolts of our political-economic system. The challenge is to avoid letting race relations derail those reforms, while still remaining mindful of the work that does need to be done on race, and alert to opportunities to do what we can without derailing those systemic reforms.

In the end though you are right that a lot of people are just dug into certain mindsets that should not be accommodated or conciliated. That's why I don't have a lot of hope that things are going to get better without some form of "hitting bottom".
by tastyface | 2025-10-15 09:13:03+00:00
Words do have meanings. That comment may be cruel, but nothing in it is dehumanizing -- unlike, for example, this quote:

"Mere weeks before his death, Kirk reveled in Trump's deployment of federal troops to DC. 'Shock and awe. Force,' he wrote. 'We're taking our country back from these cockroaches.'"
by rldjbpin | 2025-10-15 09:13:16+00:00
> I wish the project were more ambitious in terms of actually improving on Android in terms of usability, features, and overall experience.

i agree with the sentiment, but not for the features part. just getting the core functionality working across devices (securely of course) is already a lot of tedious work. just look at the dearth of supported devices that do not run a specific soc or from a famous brand.

for vast majority of features, one can personalize themselves by getting apps. most don't need rooting or any technical know-how. it will be unproductive to spend time ricing the os for users when they got their own personal preferences regardless. which is why it is fine to focus on getting the core things right first.