MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xpe | 2025-10-06 08:32:35+00:00
Take away #1: Eric Hartford’s article is deeply confused. (I’ve made many other specific comments that support this conclusion.)

Take away #2: as evidenced by many comments here, many HN commenters have failed to check the source material themselves. This has led to a parade of errors.

I’m not here to say that I’m better than that because I’ve screwed up a’plenty. We all make mistakes sometimes. We can choose to recognize and learn from them.

I am saying this: as a community we can and should aim higher. We can start by owning our mistakes.
by rossriley | 2025-10-06 08:33:44+00:00
The population of London at the last census was still 60% British born. The difference between 2000 is that the figure was 60% white British.

He's not saying London doesn't have enough British people, he's saying it doesn't have enough white people in it.

That and saying it was heartwarming to see a Tommy Robinson march who represents the most extreme fringe of British right wing politics.
by sysguest | 2025-10-06 08:34:32+00:00
this

with leaf blowing, where do people blow their leaves/branches/trash to? to roads? to neighbors? making roads flood by blocking road drainage?

what about all these noise and dust from leaf-blowing? (even not counting all those fuel burning...)

maybe those leaf-blowing promoters are the "arseholes" ?

just rake them, put them in big bags & compost them
by nylonstrung | 2025-10-06 08:34:36+00:00
Yeah it's absurd how people will defend closed source, even more censored models that cost >20x more for equivalent quality and worse speed

The Chinese companies aren't benchmark obsessed like the western Big Tech ones and qualitatively I feel Kimi, GLM and Deepseek blow them away even though on paper they benchmark worse in English

Kimi gives insanely detailed answers on hardware questions where Gemini and Claude just hallucinate, probably because it uses Chinese training data better
by MichaelEstes | 2025-10-06 08:35:48+00:00
I might be in the minority, but I hate type re-definitions, I want types to just tell me how much memory a variable is using and it’s bit interpretation. Every variable already has a name, use that to communicate the data’s representation and if it’s really important that representation mismatches are caught at compile time wrap it in a struct. I don’t want to guess how much memory the compiler decided a variable needed (though that is also present to an extent in C/C++)
by dodslaser | 2025-10-06 08:35:48+00:00
Handling nitrogen is more dangerous than CO2 for the same reason it is more humane for the animals; you don’t notice you’re being asphyxiated. Not that it is impossible or even particularly difficult to handle nitrogen safely, but it would incur a cost (training, equipment, ...), and inevitably result in accidents when these costs are skimped on.

Unless legislation changes, it's simply better business to let the animals suffer.
by FooBarWidget | 2025-10-06 08:36:05+00:00
Let's just say "things can happen for reasons other than 'the govt is evil'" is not only an opinion that exists, but is also valid. You seem to be severely underestimating just how much of a 9/11 moment Meng Wanzhou is for Chinese. You should talk to more mainlanders. This isn't 20 years ago anymore.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-10-06 08:36:19+00:00
I agree and think cocaine should be legal.

That would allow us to better regulate it, treat addicts as they should, and end the networks currently profiteering from the flourishing black market and their exploitation of the addicts.

Prohibition just doesn’t work. We have tried dozen of times with various addictive substance from alcohol to tobacco. It’s nearly always a terrible solution.
by morsch | 2025-10-06 08:37:18+00:00
> Why can't utility scale operators use bulk purchases of the exact same panels, in a more optimal installation (south facing, unshaded etc) to achieve similar or better payback periods?

Utility scale operators added about 17 GW (peak) solar in 2024, so about 20x as much.

https://strom-report.com/photovoltaik/
by sr-latch | 2025-10-06 08:37:28+00:00
2-3% error is too high, this is something we _should_ be scrutinizing, and healthcare _should_ be more expensive if the reason it's expensive is that we're pouring more resources into it to get diminishing returns on reducing mistakes.

Costly healthcare due to scrutiny is not the problem with healthcare in the US. The problem is drug monopolies, medical (mal)practice without a license by insurance companies, and the lack of taxpayer funded healthcare-as-a-right.

We need to create an environment where someone like Terblanche feels comfortable advocating for himself without feeling like he's being a burden on the ER, and physicians don't feel like they're wasting time by investigating seemingly trivial cases. Such a situation exists because we are not pouring enough money into healthcare in this country.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-10-06 08:37:50+00:00
The difference is that you cannot choose who you're sharing a road with while you can usually choose your IT service providers. You could, for instance, choose a cheaper provider and make your own backups or simply accept that you could lose your data.

Where people have little or no choice (e.g government agencies, telecoms, internet access providers, credit agencies, etc) or where the blast radius is exceptionally wide, I do find it justifiable to mandate safety and security standards.
by lmm | 2025-10-06 08:37:55+00:00
> But you don't agree that it's better if those 100 tiny commits with messages like "x" and which all just tweak the same piece of code are cleaned up with some squashing and rewording before making a PR?

Not unless they're literally just e.g. making a change and undoing it. In general 100 tiny commits with messages like "x" don't make human PR review any harder and they make (automated) bisect to find a bug better.
by thomasahle | 2025-10-06 08:38:13+00:00
You are describing the same thing, but at different levels of explanation Llamasushi's explanation is "mechanistic / representational", while yours is "behavioral / statistical".

If we have a pipeline: `training => internal representation => behavior`, your explanation argues that the given training setup would always result in this behavior, not matter the internal representation. Llamasushi explains how the concrete learned representation leads to this behavior.
by misja111 | 2025-10-06 08:39:12+00:00
I don't get why you're so upset. Zurich gardeners can still use leaf blowers when leaves are falling, which is between October and December. Only they need to be electric.

The reason is not only environmental, also many people (including myself) were unhappy with the noise of the petrol powered ones. They are very loud, and it seems the typical Zurich neighbor always decides to clean up his garden on a Saturday morning at 7AM.
by hshdhdhehd | 2025-10-06 08:39:28+00:00
Googled.

> Because of firewall network address translation (NAT) issues, rendezvous protocols generally require that there be at least one unblocked and un-NATed server that lets the peers locate each other and initiate concurrent packets at each other.

So probably cant help with a VPC unless you pierce a hole for it.

I guess this makes sense, since by design this shouldn't be possible.
by lucideer | 2025-10-06 08:39:30+00:00
I feel like this seemed a plausible strategy when I first read it as a serial procrastinator struggling through university 17 years ago.

Now, after many years of applying stuff like this successfully for a couple months only to immediately regress at the first sign of life disruption, after an ADHD diagnosis & a bunch of therapy, this all seems like a fairly immature avoidant coping strategy in retrospect. I'm now fairly productive & don't procrastinate much (relatively speaking) and tbh I wish I'd read less of this crap in the past: I might've gotten help earlier.
by masklinn | 2025-10-06 08:39:48+00:00
It is, if anything, anti-functional: unless it smothers everything the litter provides nitrogen and nutrients as it decomposes.

Getting rid of all the litter for that “perfect lawn” requires re-introducing nitrogen artificially (historically lawns would be grown with clover, the clover being a nitrogen fixer for the grass, that stopped being a thing when people started widely applying broad-leaf herbicides like 2,4D, the lawn industry then labelled clover a weed to make killing it a goal rather than a negative side effect).
by Theodores | 2025-10-06 08:39:49+00:00
Thanks for the links. I am interested in creating my own number plate reader to scratch an itch. How many of those cars on the roads have I seen before?

My hunch is that, on my local journeys, I have seen the majority of cars before, to just see them as generic cars, with none of them special, apart from a few owned by friends and a few idiosyncratic vehicles (tractors, pre-war classic cars and anything else rare).

I could be wrong with most cars being totally new to me, maybe not on the road outside my door, but on the big road that my road joins on to.

My use case is as a cyclist. So that Raspberry Pi will need to be carried somehow. There aren't too many cyclists around in my neck of the woods, therefore, even though I might see all cars as generic boxes, their drivers might see me as 'there is that stupid cyclist again', hopefully to give me space on the road.

We all have to get along on the roads and I don't want any conflict, mostly because I will need to use the same roads again and I wouldn't want to meet someone on the road after some silly road-rage type of incident. Therefore, knowing how many cars are actually new to me would be useful to know.

This applies to so much else, even the birds in the garden, where I can't tell one sparrow from another. It would be great to know which of them are residents and which ones are from out of town. Birds don't wear number plates though.
by stuaxo | 2025-10-06 08:40:27+00:00
Here are some anti patterns a colleague put in their code.

Prescriptive comment: Comment describes exactly what the following code does without adding useful context. (Usually this is for the LLM to direct itself and should be removed).

Inconsistent style: You have this across modules, but this would be in the same file.

Inconsistent calling style: A function or method should return one kind of thing.

(In the worst case, the LLM has generated a load of special cases in the caller to handle the different styles it made).

Unneeded "Service" class: I saw a few instances where something that should have been simple function calls resulted in a class with Service in the name being added, I'm not sure why, but it did happen adding extra complications.

Those are the ones off the top of my head.

As a senior dev, I think use of these tools can be fine, as long as people are happy to go and fix the issues and learn, anyone can go from vibe coder to coder if you accept the need to learn and improve.

The output of the LLM is a starting point, however much we engineer prompts, we can't know what else we need to say until we see the (somewhat) wrong output and iterate it.
by MEMORYC_RRUPTED | 2025-10-06 08:40:44+00:00
As someone who is a chronic procrastinator, and has diagnosed ADHD, I relate to this. While yes, scrapping tasks and limiting concurrent in-progress todo's helps with peace of mind and feelings of guilt, I am _significantly_ more productive the more I get on my plate. As long as A I have a clear set of small tasks for each project, I can actually make more progress.

That said: there's definitely a price to pay for this. I'm very bad at managing energy levels, or making sure I do all of that in a sustainable way, so, it's super productive, until I'm not. At all. Usually quite suddenly. The risk for burnout is quite high.

I'm starting to accept that I'll never find the right balance, rather, I'm just getting better at recognising the symptoms that I'm headed towards burnout, and just accept that it's alternating periods of very high, intense productivity, and periods of basically nothing.

Putting one thing on my to-do list is the most surefire way of me not doing the thing.
by bellamoon544 | 2025-10-06 08:40:50+00:00
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by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-06 08:41:35+00:00
I quit a while ago, now I have issues finding an employer that doesn't have idiotic hiring practices or even anyone who will take a look at my portfolio of projects. I haven't had a single interview in which the interviewer would ask me anything about my projects, let alone seemed to know about them, or even read my website. Hiring is utterly stupid these days.

So maybe one recommendation is to make sure you interview well, if you can, or prepare for some unemployed time.

For me quitting was also the only healthy thing I could do, and I am still glad I did leave that lost place.
by Shank | 2025-10-06 08:41:39+00:00
> Had the person who evaluated my girlfriend not evaluated seriously or just sent her off that could’ve been her. I’m so thankful they admitted her and took her care seriously.

This might sound strange, but I think you deserve some credit for taking it seriously and being there. It’s a documented issue that women’s problems are frequently written off and downplayed as normal things like period pain.

I’m really truly happy to hear that she made a full recovery as well. It is wonderful to hear that she is okay.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-10-06 08:41:44+00:00
>In his effort to understand hospital safety and risk, he learned these oft-cited projections: more than 200,000 people will die each year from preventable medical errors. He was shocked. Conservatively, these estimates amount to at least one fatal Boeing 747 crash per week, Terblanche calculated.

This reminds me of the book The Checklist Manifesto by surgeon Atul Gawande. The book argues that aviation has achieved such a good safety record largely through the use of checklists, and Gawande describes his attempts to apply them to the field of medicine. Recommended. (Edit: I see that checklists are discussed later in the article; I would still recommend the book, as it has thoughts on how checklists can be applied more effectively.)
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-06 08:42:15+00:00
> It’s undeniably worth investing in immigrants, including refugees. It’s our duty to take care of them as global citizens, just like it’s our duty to care for the elderly and others.

These are different things. Yes we are required to provide the resources needed for life to refugees as well as to the elderly. That doesn't automatically mean that this is a worthy investment. What dividends do you intend to get from a bedridden old person.

> Rhetoric otherwise is just veiled racism.

No, it's not, were did a talk about race? If anything, you could accuse me of egoism, nationalism and social darwinism. Dealing with other perspectives by shouting you are bad guy(tm) won't advance anyone.

But I did not say, that any culture will perform worse than another. I did say a person robbed from his culture, law and economic system, and displaced into another will struggle. Putting on rose tinted glasses will help neither, your society, the refugee nor the refugees society.

> I also think you’d be surprised how little time to pay off would actually be needed.

Sure, that's why the societies with the refugees all outperform their neighbor and are way more peaceful.

> Give people a calm space and community (including their friends and family), and we will all flourish.

Sure, but why should this take place in your country, just because you have a self-inflicted lack of young people? That is very much egoistic and unfair, in my opinion. Providing money for education aid to developing countries and then sending ministers there to openly headhunt the well educated for your country, doesn't seem too far from colonialism and slave trade to me.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-06 08:42:19+00:00
The good thing is though that Europe is fragmented enough that it won't go to pieces all at once in all countries, which gives some chance to remedy. Hopefully we - NL - will be able to move on from Wilders and his fear based movement soon. Another big factor is how long putin will be in a position to try to influence Europe by shoving refugees by the trainload into the EU immigration system whilst at the same time funding the right wing and various secession movements. I suspect that once that regime collapses that there will be a lot of people that will be missing their paychecks.
by phplovesong | 2025-10-06 08:43:04+00:00
Afaik rubygems kicked some long term contributors and stole the entire project. Thats some serious red flags for me. At what point rubyruby gems does something nasty is only a matter of time. They could start to gatekeep or even worse add some sort of paid version.

Anyway.. a core piece of infra like this needs to be open for anyone and not closed for some shady entrerprize.
by munksbeer | 2025-10-06 08:43:11+00:00
I don't think the majority of human's ever had the attention spans to read and properly digest a paper like the NIST report to make up their minds. Before social media, regular media would tell them what to think. 99.99% of the population isn't going to read that NIST report, no matter what decade we're talking.

Because it isn't just that one report. Every single day we're trying to make our way in the world and we do not have the capacity to read the source material of every subject that might be of interest. Human's rely on, and have always relied on, authority like figures or media or some form of message aggregation to get their news of the world and form their opinions on it from that.

And for the record, in no way is this an endorsement for shallow takes or thinking and then strong views on this subject, or another. I disagree with that as much as you. I'm just stating that this isn't a new phenomenon.
by posix86 | 2025-10-06 08:44:04+00:00
Depends on the scope. Simple things might be docstrings or sections in READMEs, bigger things issues/tickets or a page on Notion/Google Docs or whatever you use; overview there or in your head.

The crucial mindset imo is that you're trying to do something that's already useful. At the time you write these things, you're probably more familiar with the topic at hand than anyone else in the company; try to leverage that into writing a document that someone else (or yourself in the future) can save time once they actually execute what you write by getting faster to the point where you're at right now. E.g. from the article, rewriting a js package structure in vite; think through implications and potential hurdles you already have a solution for.

They're useful in almost all outcomes. If they won't be executed, at least you know why (e.g. too complicated/effortful), and if they're executed, best case you can improve the company's offerings substantially.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-10-06 08:44:05+00:00
I guess what do we mean by internal representation?

I would think due to training data it's stored the likelihood of certain thing to be as emoji as something like:

1. how appealing seahorses are to humans in general - it would learn this sentiment through massive amount of texts.

2. it would learn through massive amount of texts that emojis -> mostly very appealing things to humans.

3. to some more obvious emojis it might have learned that this one is for sure there, but it couldn't store that info for all 4,000 emojis.

4. to many emojis whether it exists it has the shortcut logic to: how appealing the concept is, vs how frequently something as appealing is represented as emoji. Seahorse perhaps hits 99.9% likelihood there due to strong appeal. In 99.9% of such cases the LLM would be right to answer "Yes, it ...", but there's always going to be 1 out of 1,000 cases where it's wrong.

With this compression it's able to answer 999 times out of 1000 correctly "Yes, it exists ...".

It could be more accurate if it said "Seahorse would have a lot of appeal for people so it's very likely it exists as emoji since emojis are usually made for very high appeal concepts first, but I know nothing for 100%, so it could be it was never made".

But 999 cases, "Yes it exists..." is a more straightforward and appreciated answer. The one time it's wrong, is going to take away less brownie points than 999 short confident answers give over the 1000 technically accurate but non confident answers.

But even the above sentence might not be the full truth. Since it might not be correct about truly why it has associated seahorse to be so likely to exist. It would just be speculating on it. So maybe it would be more accurate "I expect seahorse emoji to likely exist, maybe because of how appealing it is to people and how emojis usually are about appealing things".
by jacquesm | 2025-10-06 08:44:32+00:00
You are missing the long arm of russia that is funding discontent all over the EU as well as to help create the problems that are at the root of that discontent. Between those two and outright xenophobia there is a lot of opportunity for mayhem. I can't wait until that asshole kicks the bucket and I hope - but I don't have a lot of evidence for that hope - that the next generation of russian leaders will realize that if they keep this up they will end up achieving exactly that which they are afraid of. By now it should be clear that the days of empire are over.
by yapyap | 2025-10-06 08:44:32+00:00
Social media in 2017 was very different than social media in 2025.

There was a gradual change from social media with your friends to social media, look at these videos chosen by the algorithm to keep you on our platform.

Back in 2017 it was already changing but not nearly as much as where we’d find ourselves in 2025.

I think people could definitely come to the conclusion of being able to game your social score by conforming in 2017, all you had to do was post a few nice pictures but more often.
by snackbroken | 2025-10-06 08:44:50+00:00
People managed to keep trees in cities just fine prior to the mid 20th century so I can't imagine it's an insurmountable obstacle. Beyond cutting the trees down, other valid solutions include (but are not limited to) letting the leaves be on the ground by the tree, using a rake, planting tree species with smaller leaves, or allowing the leaves to be picked up by the regular street cleaning trucks.

Trees are really only a lot of work if you insist on keeping a grotesquely unnatural manicured garden; the only tree I've got that's any significant amount work is an apple tree that would turn half the yard to a rotten apple tripping hazard if you didn't pick them up. A couple more need trimming every few years to keep a path clear, but I would chalk that up to user error in choosing to plant them slightly too close to the path.

Contrary to what the "just tough it out" types would have you believe, noise pollution does cause appreciable harm to public health. Making lots of noise in a dense neighborhood where thousands of people live is just not worth the marginal efficiency improvement of blowing vs raking leaves. Tangentially, this is also one of several reasons why speed limits should be 30km/h in cities to limit rolling noise.
by BoredPositron | 2025-10-06 08:45:01+00:00
Thats a lot of historical revision if you blame a dude who was minister for 3.5 years about decisions made 20-30 years ago. Same for your last paragraph. Nothing even close to that happened in the years he governed. Maybe you should start showing recipes because it looks like your grievances are personal in nature and everything but factual.