MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EPWN3D | 2025-10-27 16:17:59+00:00
Agreed. There is sort of a vicious feedback loop at play too:

1. Large tech firms overhire like crazy

2. Interest rates go up, firms layoff tens of thousands of workers who never should have been hired in the first place

3. Firms pile more work on to remaining people, cut their pay relative to inflation

4. Existing workers threaten to leave, companies let them because "Look at all the talent on the market!"

It's abject lunacy, and companies are all too enthusiastically degrading the quality of their own workforces. The upshot is that this will pry some entrenched talent and experience out of large employers and into smaller companies. But the latest crop of MBA whiz kids are really something special.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-10-27 16:18:12+00:00
""It would be better if they could own up to it," said a current Amazon software developer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. "Even if they said it was a low priority, at least that would be honest.""

HN commentary on water use by so-called "tech" companies usually includes a number of mindlessly-parroted, bad faith "arguments"

One of these is to try to compare the new (additive) water use by non-essential data centers with existing (non-additive) water use by agriculture

Putting aside that (a) data centers are non-essential and not comparable to food, water or shelter and (b) agricultural use is not new, these "arguments" are also ignoring that (c) the so-called "tech" companies are trying to hide the data

Employees of these so-called "tech" companies might be experiencing guilt over this dishonest tactic, but not enough to make them quit

When their employer hides the data this makes accurate comparisons, e.g., to existing water use by other recipients, difficult if not impossible

Does agriculture also try to hide its water use

If it did, then HN comments could not attempt bad faith comparisons

Because there would be no data to cite
by ben_w | 2025-10-27 16:18:29+00:00
> Looking at it solely on rate of learning has LLMs way smarter than humans already which doesn't seem right to say

Sure, but "rate" also has two meanings, both useful, but importantly different: per unit of wall-clock time, and per example.

Transistors are just so much faster than synapses, that computers can (somewhat) compensate for being absolutely terrible by the latter meaning — at least, in cases where there's enough examples for them to learn from.

In cases where the supply of examples is too small (and cannot be enhanced with synthetic data, simulations and so on), state of the art AI models still suck. In cases where there is sufficient data, for example self-play in games of chess and go, the AI can be super-human by a substantial margin.
by prasadjoglekar | 2025-10-27 16:19:09+00:00
The "in violation of Federal Law" is crucial. You can argue it's only there to cover the admin's ass, but Federal Law (the actual statues) already prohibits any favoritism or discrimination on the basis of skin color etc.

The prior admin made it so that their chosen DEI programs fit "Federal Law". This admin has done a complete 180. Courts haven't tested any of this yet. It's all a hammer being wielded by the side in power.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-10-27 16:19:31+00:00
There are a number of legal principles that you are completely, and totally, incorrect on.

The key legal principle is causation. The poster's false statement was the direct cause of the farmer's losses. Under general tort principles, a person who makes false statements that cause foreseeable harm to another can be held liable for damages, regardless of whether they participated in the actual harmful act.

Negligent Misrepresentation: The poster could be liable for negligently spreading false information without verifying its accuracy. Even if there was no intent to harm, the law recognizes liability when someone carelessly disseminates false information that a reasonable person would know could cause harm.

Proximate Cause Doctrine: The legal reasoning follows the principle that the poster's false statement was the "but for" cause of the theft. Without the false Facebook post, hundreds of people wouldn't have descended on the farm believing they had permission to take the potatoes. The intervening acts of the potato-takers doesn't break the chain of causation because the mass theft was a foreseeable consequence of the false post.

I don't know if all of these exist in Polish Law, but they tend to hold across most western legal systems in some form or other.

To bring it down to the "its a prank, bro" defense you are invoking. The accepted counterargument is "doesn't matter if it was a prank, bro. The actions of the poster were the direct cause for the damages."
by pbronez | 2025-10-27 16:19:49+00:00
Regardless of how you feel about the specific issues here, it’s a good example of why public policy works best when it targets one issue at a time.

If you want to buy cyber security, just do that. Linking cybersecurity payments to social issues reduces how much cybersecurity you can get. Sometimes you can find win-win-win scenarios. There are values that are worth enforcing as a baseline. But you always pay a price somewhere.

Anyway, I signed up to be a PSF member.
by michaelsbradley | 2025-10-27 16:20:02+00:00
Unless by the early 1950s the US and possibly others were launching objects into orbit, and their doing so has been a closely guarded secret even until now. The nuclear tests would have offered natural PR cover.

If we rule out ETs for the sake of argument, and if these weren’t atmospheric effects or artifacts from the nuclear tests themselves, then small objects were in orbit at the time and either they were launched from Earth or the planet happened to be crossing paths with them.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-27 16:20:48+00:00
Once again, it cannot be "pro-Hamas" if he doesn't even acknowledge they exist. His comments are wholly non-rhetorical: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rhetoric

You cannot quote a single part of the article you listed where he argues in-favor of Hamas, because he does not mention them at all. You are casting aspersions that do not exist, much in the way the White House has to resort to defaming former presidents instead of setting a morally-consistent example.
by drstewart | 2025-10-27 16:20:54+00:00
I am going to going even further than you and suggest if you are an American do not support America First, that means you instead support America Last.

If you believe that, you should think about what other countries and groups support those kinds of things, and what kind of company supporting terrorist groups puts you in.

No, there isn't a legitimate reason not to want America First.

Yes, it's important we call out anyone and stand against people who want to tear down America and fully pursue all applicable laws that apply to this destructive behavior.
by marcuskane2 | 2025-10-27 16:22:01+00:00
For years, we've talked about how much of the workforce was "bullshit jobs". HN would be full of incredulous comments from people confused by the headcount at various companies, wondering what all those people were doing every day.

Now we're in the worst case scenario- hundreds of thousands of middle-class "bullshit jobs" are disappearing, but rather than being replaced by a wave of productive jobs (say, in clean energy, non-polluting manufacturing, regenerative agriculture, medical technology, biotech, public transportation infrastructure, housing construction, etc) we're just seeing unemployment, underemployment and government policies that are openly hostile to anything helpful for society.

America could probably still be saved by a "Green New Deal" type of program which spurs massive investment and employment in industries which have positive externalities. Things don't exactly look like that's likely in the next few years, but maybe the 2024 election was the wake-up call the Democrats needed to reorient away from the "woke" social issues and reengage with the average American voter.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-27 16:22:11+00:00
> If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?).

Statements about not breaking specific existing laws are common in government contracts in the US (at all levels), functionally, they make violating the law a breach of contract. This enables the government to declare a breach and cancel the contract without the litigation that would be required for even a civil penalty for breaking the law, forcing the contractor to litigate for breach of contract (claiming that they did not breach the contract so that the government cancellation was itself a breach) instead.

Using a fantasy (“discriminatory equity ideology”) with an initialism collision with a common inclusivity practice (DEI), combined with recent practice by the same Administration, is clearly a signal of where the government intends to apply the guilty-until-proven-innocent approach in this case.
by TYPE_FASTER | 2025-10-27 16:22:22+00:00
> However, there is an increasing userbase whose first experience of computing was in these locked-down tablet and smartphone environments. They aren’t so demanding about little things like proper filesystem access or the ability to run unsigned code. They might not blink if that goes away.

I would also suggest that there is another user base who has been using computers for a long time, before GUIs existed, is fed up with fighting malware, welcomes the protection of a sandboxed, protected system, but doesn't understand the importance of having the option of escaping the sandbox. These users might not see the loss of not being able to install a kext on Mac OS without booting into Recovery Mode. But they will notice the loss when, at some point, we can't run anything that isn't signed on any platform.

Google and Microsoft are slowly moving towards the Apple model because it works as far as decreasing support costs go.

When the day comes that there isn't any hardware we can purchase that we can't install OpenBSD/Linux/whatever we want, it will be too late. We have to push back before then somehow.
by hypeatei | 2025-10-27 16:22:36+00:00
No one is arguing about the practicality of speaking out under this regime or that it'd be unwise to do so in other countries as a guest.

What is being argued is that the government doing this goes against our values as Americans. It's interesting to observe the same side (right-wingers, libertarians) hold water for these actions while they were painting social media bans as censorship and a violation of their First Amendment rights.

Maybe you didn't do that, but your comment certainly reads like a "well, technically their visa can be revoked" argument which is true, but misses the spirit of the First Amendment.

EDIT: there might be legal issues too depending on the reason for revocation but I'm not a legal expert. Most things in our constitution apply to people and not just citizens so someone visiting the US also has free speech rights.
by qnleigh | 2025-10-27 16:22:37+00:00
Ugh just looking at their list, this paper gets a hard no from me. Intelligence isn't mastery of some arbitrary list of mathematical subjects. It's the ability to learn and apply these subjects (or anything else) after minimal exposure to the topic.

For a bar as high as AGI (and not just 'the skills of an educated person,' which is what this paper seems to be describing), we should include abstract mathematical reasoning, and the ability to generate new ideas or even whole subfields to solve open problems.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-27 16:22:38+00:00
12 px (13.333 px when in the adapted layout) is a little small - and that's a perfectly valid argument without trying to argue we should abandon absolute sized fonts in favor of feels.

There is no such thing as a reasonable default size if we stop calibrating to physical dimensions. If you choose to use your phone at a scaling where what is supposed to be 1" is 0.75" then that's on you, not on the website to up the font size for everyone.
by thayne | 2025-10-27 16:22:50+00:00
Does Amazon control the generation of this electricity? If so, then I definitely think it should be included, because it is something that Amazon has control over, and could possibly reduce water use.

If it is the power company, then the relevant metric is the amount of power consumed, as it would be up to the power company to find a more water-efficient way to produce power.
Show HN: JSON Query
by wofo | 2025-10-27 16:22:52+00:00
I'm working on a tool that will probably involve querying JSON documents and I'm asking myself how to expose that functionality to my users.

I like the power of `jq` and the fact that LLMs are proficient at it, but I find it right out impossible to come up with the right `jq` incantations myself. Has anyone here been in a similar situation? Which tool / language did you end up exposing to your users?
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-27 16:23:09+00:00
"Factory-farmed beef" doesn't even exist. All cows get raised in fields for their first 12-18 months. The ""factory-farming"" is just a feed lot they get taken to for 3-6 months to eat grain before slaughter.

If you want to talk about pigs or chickens, that's an entirely different story. Those do get raised full life cycle in factory-like industrial facilities. But those aren't cows.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-10-27 16:23:33+00:00
If you put a git repository in a shared drive via git clone --bare (makes it not checkout a branch, and doesn't setup any origin type stuff), you can use that as a remote, pushing/pulling etc. Setting up a network available shared drive on one of the two computers shouldn't be too difficult, and by git's distributed nature it's not exactly the end of the world if access temporary.

Another option would be to use the email-based workflow, but that's quite different from most people's expected git experience.
by Rochus | 2025-10-27 16:24:11+00:00
Respectfully disagree. This is a compiler engineering tool backed by peer-reviewed research (DLS'16, 112+ citations) and used in 30+ academic publications across PLDI, OOPSLA, and ECOOP. It requires understanding controlled experimental methodology and compiler optimization theory to interpret correctly. Perhaps that context clarifies its purpose. The goal is to assess compiler effectiveness for a common set of core language abstractions (objects, closures, arrays), not to represent application-level performance or claim that production C code would be written this way. Your "branch predictor" criticism actually validates the benchmark's design: if different language implementations handle the same branching patterns with dramatically different performance, that reveals genuine differences in compiler designs.
by Martin_Silenus | 2025-10-27 16:24:27+00:00
Did this on my Atari ST 68000 back in the 90s... I did not even heard about the word "preemptive" at the time (guys, I did not even know the Amiga OS did this natively), it was just an idea. Task switching every 10 or 20 HBL or so. I was so glad to have two routines running, each one changing color index 0 register to red and blue so I can see it realtime.
by tooltalk | 2025-10-27 16:24:52+00:00
Sure, that's not what a normal value is.

As explained, the price level or the cost of manufacture in China, the exporting country, is completely irrelevant as their local price/cost of manufacturer is artificially propped up by illegal state subsidies or other anti-market tactics to cripple foreign competition past 15 years. Again, China is a non-market-economy.

In those cases, trade regulators can use "undistorted" prices without gov't interference or use a market price in a similarly situated 3rd country as benchmark.
by pizlonator | 2025-10-27 16:25:12+00:00
> we could genuinely lose general purpose computing.

> At the moment, anyone can use Linux; it's better and easier than ever.

Maybe Linux will save us.

This was a fascinating thing to watch for me (pewdiepie telling people to install Linux): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0

My bet is that the momentum is strong enough that:

- A critical mass of PC makers will continue to offer a Linux preinstalled option, or at least some path to installing Linux.

- If Windows and macOS take more rights away, it'll just help Linux's market share.

So Linux's share will probably grow not only because Linux is getting better but because the corpo OSes trying to take away general purpose computing
by rramadass | 2025-10-27 16:25:16+00:00
Logic should be taught from the intuitive aspects first before turning it formal; With lots of domain examples to show how sentences often have a common Form (i.e. structure) which can then be generalized as Symbolic Logic ranging over a Domain of Discourse/Domain of Interpretation. Once this distinction between "Structure/Form"(i.e. Syntax) and "Meanings"(i.e. Semantics) is grasped then mechanical manipulation strictly following rules, starts to make sense.

Instead, what is taught is starting with truth tables for logical operators and thus students simply don't learn to think/understand. For example, almost everybody is thrown off by the "implication" logical operator (evaluates to True when the antecedent is False irrespective of the consequent). But if you use some actual domain examples then it becomes clear why it is so.

Alfred Tarski's classic book mentioned above does a good job of building up logic from the first principles and hence is a great companion to any standard textbook.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-27 16:25:16+00:00
They are targeting those locations... but they need credible reporting of wrongdoing in order to do so. Insider reporting, anonymous tips, etc. They generally don't just randomly show up at an employer without initial reporting of a crime.

For the most part, they've been targeting visa overstays by those who have been charged with and/or convicted of other crimes in the US. Not significantly different than under Obama. It's only that the visibility has been turned up to 11 along with ramped up protests and state/city sanctioned resistance in some locations.

As to the ramp-up in scale.. that's what happens when you let 5x the amount of people legally allowed entry to come into a nation in a relatively short period of time illegally. over 90% of asylum claims are invalid and fraudulent... there is almost no legitimate reason for crossing into the country outside a recognized port of entry.

I say this as someone who feels that immigration should generally be tied to "do you have a source of income and a place to stay?" at its' core... combined with a multiple of minimum wage as an income baseline with hefty employer side taxes to go along with. Arguments against doing so are very similar in my mind to having slavery... it's not okay, not good for the nation. I have similar feelings that "free trade" should only occur when similar quality of life or safety measures are in place. I'm optimistically libertarian minded, but recognize reality.
by scellus | 2025-10-27 16:25:17+00:00
No. In general the statistics look a bit amateurish, which is normal for a scientific paper. I'd actually like reanalyze the data, just out of curiosity. (Those p-values and other things can still be on the right ballpark even if the models and analyses are not top notch. I'm not exactly doubting them, and the results are interesting even without any correlation to UAP sightings or nukes.)
Show HN: I built a free tool to generate vanilla CSS code easily
by mirodosta | 2025-10-27 16:25:40+00:00
Hi, I’ve been developing a set of free CSS tools for web designers. Goal is to make small and useful tools that don’t rely on CSS frameworks. I’d love your feedback on the design and any missing features.

You can try it here: https://cssify.co/ No login. Thanks for checking it out!
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-10-27 16:25:40+00:00
> but if I reset it on HN the text letters use about 2mm of width in my standard HD, 21" display.

1920x1080 24" screen here, .274mm pitch which is just about 100dpi. Standard text size in HN is also about 2mm across, measured by the simple method of holding a ruler up to the screen and guessing.

If you can't read this, you maybe need to get your eyes checked. It's likely you need reading glasses. The need for reading glasses kind of crept up on me because I either work on kind of Landrover-engine-scale components, or grain-of-sugar-scale components, the latter viewed down a binocular microscope on my SMD rework bench and the former big enough to see quite easily ;-)
by haskellshill | 2025-10-27 16:25:58+00:00
Are you misunderstanding on purpose? I am aware they are optional. I am arguing that there is no reason to omit them from your HTML. Whitespace is (mostly) optional in C, does that mean it's a good idea to omit it from your programs? Of course a br tag needs no closing tag because there is no content inside it. How exactly is that an argument for omitting the closing p tag? The XML standard has no relevance to the current discussion because I'm not arguing for "starting to treat it like XML".
by thinkcontext | 2025-10-27 16:26:21+00:00
“I’d just become leader and I’m excited and President Trump’s there. And I look over at the Democrats and they stand up. They look like America,” he told Sorkin. “We stand up. We look like the most restrictive country club in America.”

Kevin McCarthy, former GOP House leader and Speak of the House.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/30/mccarthy-...
by delusional | 2025-10-27 16:26:32+00:00
You're confusing logical/mathematic "truth" with philosophical/scientific "truth". While "politics should be based on scientific truth" is an opinion I have some sympathy for, even if it immediately falls apart under any scrutiny. "politics should be based on mathematical axiomatic truth" is a statement so laughable I can only imagine you forgot the context we were talking about.
by gbacon | 2025-10-27 16:26:56+00:00
The caption under the picture of ken and dmr both standing that attributes to the latter “their motivation was to build a system ‘around which a fellowship could form’” calls to mind quotes from The Lord of the Rings in comments at the top of perl’s source files. For example:

https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/perl.c#L15
by moebrowne | 2025-10-27 16:27:17+00:00
> So by blocking these IPs, you are blocking your users.

There were 122 million residential internet connections in the US in 2024 so for an app with 1 million users the chance of affecting a single user is <1%.

[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-411463A1.pdf
by amonroe805-2 | 2025-10-27 16:27:34+00:00
My heuristic is that quality is largely a function of human attention during creation. The transition to digital layouting etc meant less human attention could be spent on it while still achieving “acceptable” results, and so market dynamics ensured that less attention was spent on those tasks, lowering quality.

Whether or not you personally would make this cost/quality tradeoff comes down to the individual, but to me it is also quite clear that something was lost in the transition.
by rtkwe | 2025-10-27 16:27:49+00:00
As far as anyone can tell you can't use it transmit information. Their states are mirrored but you can't modify the state of on of the pairs to change the state of the other, that just breaks the entanglement. So all you really have are two particles that happen to be in the same random state at any given time.

I don't think you can even tell given only one of the particles in a pair if it is still entangled so you couldn't even destructively send small amounts of information either. It's a neat work around for semihard scifi but the universe is stubbornly resistant to any pathways for anything including information travelling faster than the speed of light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem