MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by belorn | 2025-11-29 01:06:39+00:00
I wasn't sure if I should mention this, but there aren't much articles that talks about the negative consequences that metoo campaign had. It had some real consequences beyond just some dubious stuff.

Here in Sweden there is the "Adam case". A couple went through a bad divorce in the later part of MeToo, and the mother of two boys accused the father of sexual assaulting the older boy that was then 7 year old. The court found no evidence of the event, and because of some other aspects, gave full custody to the father. The mother then in the appeal changed the story and claimed that the boy and the father together sexual assaulted the other child, a 3 year old boy. Again the court found no evidence and marked in their decision that the new claim was not believable.

Then social service decided that in contrast to the court that the boy was a danger to other children and put the child in a treatment facility and denied any association with his father or any other member of the family. The boy was also denied access to school and for the most part any contact with other children. This went on for 5 years.

At that point a new social service worker got the case as the previous worker went on parental leave. The new worker found that neither the boy, father or the claimed victim statements had been referenced in the decision and it was exclusive based on the mothers claims. Just like the court findings, there was no evidence to collaborate any of the events. The new social worker decided thus to revert the decision and let the boy return to his father. However this was quickly reverted by his superiors, and the new social worker got removed and put on other cases. At this point investigating journalists got the wind of the case and made a fairly large documentary about it. The media publicity triggered an internal review at that social worker office.

A year later the internal review found, like the court and the new social worker, that there was zero evidence of any sexual assault and that serious mishandling had occurred in this case, especially by only considering the claims of the mother. The boy was finally reunited with his father, by now 6 years later at which point he was 13. No one has been charged with any crime, although the social service office has officially apologized to the family.
by abetusk | 2025-11-29 01:08:18+00:00
An entropy argument for optimal strategy when winning? Finite size/bounds arguments for losing?

If you have 100 options available to you, the maximum information gain is if you eliminate half. So, if you can, you always want to employ that strategy.

The problem comes with when you're losing, you might get maximum entropy gain by eliminating half but, because of finite effects of the game ending, that might not matter.

Take the example I gave: the next move you lose and you have 4 options to choose from. Eliminating half (2 in this case) will give you maximum entropy gain but guarantee a loss, since you're not whittling down the remaining list to 1 option. Better to take the hit on entropy in order to at least have a chance at winning.

I don't claim to have deep knowledge but this seems like finite size scaling effects. There's a kind of "continuum limit" of these processes but when you get to actual real-world/finite instances, there are issues "at the edges", where the continuum becomes finite. The finite size of the problems creates a kind of non-linear issue at the edges. All this is very hand-waivy, so don't take it too seriously but that's the intuition I have, at least.
by badsectoracula | 2025-11-29 01:08:45+00:00
I wonder if there is some sort of bias depending on the timezone people visit because i've been visiting HN for more than a decade and for me HN always had a lot of technical discussions and topics - in fact i see it as one of the most technically oriented forums i know. In fact if it was all (or mostly) business stuff i wouldn't stick around as long i have as i do not find those topics interesting.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-11-29 01:09:03+00:00
90% of the time I'm pro anything that causes a problem for the big corporations, but buggy code? C'mon.

It's a pile of numbers. People need to take some responsibility for the extent to which they act on its outputs. Suing OpenAI for bugs in the code is like suing a palm reader for a wrong prediction. You knew what you were getting into when you initiated the relationship.
by rglynn | 2025-11-29 01:09:37+00:00
I have little sympathy for the ad business failing to properly track ad fraud. I don't think the world is fundamentally better off for advertising.

On the bot traffic, do we not have better ways to do this that don't involve violating privacy of free human beings?

Proof-of-work captchas provide minor friction to an end-user but massively restrict the types of high-volume + low-compute attacks that would be doing this. That's just one example, I'm sure there are other ways too.
by Viper117 | 2025-11-29 01:09:57+00:00
Hello HN,

I built TimeProof, a native macOS app to solve a problem I faced as a freelancer: providing proof of work without using invasive "spyware" or expensive subscription services like Upwork/Hubstaff.

The Problem: Most time tracking tools require monthly fees, upload your data to their servers, and often capture more than you're comfortable with. Clients want verification (screenshots/timelogs), but I wanted privacy and ownership of my data.

The Solution: TimeProof is a standalone, local-first SwiftUI app that automates screenshot capture and time logging.

Local Data: All screenshots and logs (times.csv) are saved directly to a folder you choose on your machine. Nothing leaves your device.

Proof Generation: It automatically stitches your session screenshots into a timelapse video (using AVFoundation/VideoToolbox for hardware acceleration), creating a visual "proof of work" artifact you can send to clients alongside your invoice.

Privacy Controls: You control when it runs. It only captures the screens you select.

Native Performance: Written in Swift/SwiftUI. No Electron bloat.

Technical Details:

Uses CGWindowListCreateImage (and transitioning to ScreenCaptureKit) for efficient capture.

Custom AVAssetWriter implementation with a pixel buffer pool to handle 4K/Retina timelapse generation without memory spikes.

Sandboxed with security-scoped bookmarks to persist access to project folders across reboots securely.

I built this to scratch my own itch, but I realized other devs and freelancers might find it useful. It's completely free to use.

Link: [App Store Link] (or your website if you have one)

I'd love to hear your feedback on the workflow or any feature requests!
Show HN: Native macOS timeout (Rust) – handles system sleep, no coreutils
by denispol | 2025-11-29 01:11:17+00:00
I built a dependency-free replacement for GNU timeout on macOS.

The main differentiator is the clock source: GNU timeout relies on nanosleep, which pauses if the machine sleeps. This tool uses mach_continuous_time. If you set a 1-hour timeout and close your lid for 2 hours, this kills the process immediately upon wake. GNU would wait another hour.

Written in Rust, ~500KB static binary, and includes --json output for parsing in CI pipelines, as well as extra tiny features.
by sillygoose_189 | 2025-11-29 01:12:04+00:00
Hey HN, I’m a high school founder building something small but (hopefully) useful for solo technical builders.

It’s called Nexus (https://trynexus.vercel.app/). I basically kept getting stuck on growth + ops stuff while trying to ship products fast. So I made an AI tool that helps with that.

It’s super early. Some stuff works well, some stuff definitely doesn’t. I’m mostly trying to see if this direction even makes sense for other solo builders.

If you try it, I’d love honest feedback. What sucks, what’s confusing, and what’s actually helpful.

Thanks for reading.
by travisb | 2025-11-29 01:12:04+00:00
All the participants in those pilot programs *know* they are in a time-limited pilot programs and that in a handful of years the money will dry up. This is a major flaw in all UBI studies which make them all but useless.

It will take 15 or 20 years before any UBI could be considered permanent enough for a majority of people to change their work habits.
by belviewreview | 2025-11-29 01:12:47+00:00
The thing about focused work, at least a lot of it, is that before you start making any progress you first have to remember a whole lot of specifics, like facts, goals, constraints, and so on, and how they all fit together to form the situation you are dealing with and what you are trying to do. And that takes uninterrupted time. If you are interrupted, it all evaporates from your mind and you have to remember them all over again.

It also takes mental energy, which everyone has only so much of each day. If you are interrupted, then all the mental energy you had spent is wasted, and you have less left for the rest of the day.

One more thought. I think the people who don't understand why interrupting is bad are people who they themselves don't know how to think in a sustained, focused manner on a difficult problem. And as a consequence of smartphones, such people are considerably more common than they used to be.
by xpe | 2025-11-29 01:13:24+00:00
I don't know that it is necessarily sick ... I suppose it depends what you do, how the people respond, and if you are playing a useful role in the interview process for your organization.

Tell us more?

On the positive side... Seeing how people respond to pressure (done within some bounds) might be useful information. Watching people dig deeper into their problem-solving toolkit (and even their determination and resolve) might be informative. But I have not recently reviewed interviewing research, so I don't know how strong the causal connections are between observing these things in an interview and on-the-job performance.

On the negative side: If one is primarily interested in finding flaws as some sort of intrinsically valuable thing or to boost one's own ego, these are probably hints to look closely at oneself and reflect and make sense of what is going on inside.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-11-29 01:13:51+00:00
Exactly. The properties rarely matter outside the item. The column is of such-and-such a strength, that's it. But when things get strange we see failures. Perfect example: Challenger. Was the motor safe sitting on the pad? Yes. Was the motor safe in flight? Yes. Was the motor safe at ignition? On the test stand, yes. Stacked for launch, ignition caused the whole stack to twang--and maybe the seals failed....
by makeitdouble | 2025-11-29 01:15:38+00:00
IMHO most companies encourage public-first conversation, but still end up with DM-first as their employees don't have enough trust in how their messages will be received.

It requires to be comfortable exposing lack of knowledge or saying weird things to peers, and be confident it will be taken in good faith. As you point out, that requires a whole level of culture building.
by Telaneo | 2025-11-29 01:15:39+00:00
Europe can do without Microsoft, however it will require a kick in the rear to get there.

I was kind of hoping that the GDPR would be that kick, as it's clear to anyone that Microsoft, or really any other major US corporation, can't actually satisfy that completely as long as they have their tendrils in its European subsidiaries and that the US can compel them give up the information they care about. But this is a rather large elephant the EU has elected to ignore since that's the path of least resistance.

The EU actually realising the using Microsoft as your foundation does break the GDPR and fining the relevant institutions (and fixing itself on that same front!), or relevant institutions being embargoed to the point of not being able to use Microsoft products, as is apparently now the case with the ICC, will probably kick Europe into gear, but it needs to be a solid kick, and not just an institution here and there.
by dboreham | 2025-11-29 01:16:20+00:00
LLMs are wonderful for this. I can't write hardly a line of shell script without looking something up. And then there are three different ways to do <thing> so I spend time beard-tugging as to which way to do it. Now I just tell the LLM what I want changed about this shell script and look at what it comes up with. 100% of the time it's fine.
by ianbutler | 2025-11-29 01:17:17+00:00
I don't think there's an objective assessment of good code. I've been writing code for over 20 years at this point and most times I've seen what people describe as their own good code I disagree with various decisions.

Experience CAN remove pitfalls, though developers even disagree about those sometimes.

Organization, chosen abstractions, naming etc are basically personal thinking and have differed on every team I've ever been on.

When it's been good is when it's been consistent and that's taken a strong personality the team trusted to have authority.
by austin-cheney | 2025-11-29 01:17:33+00:00
> I'm also dubious of your claim that compensation doesn't attract better talent.

Maybe higher compensation does work out for FAANG, but it does not at other larger employers, at least not for software developers. I am highly dubious about this at FAANG too though. My perspective is as a former 15 year JavaScript developer and a lot of what I saw coming out of FAANG in JavaScript land just wasn’t impressive.

I do see a lot of impressive things in the world of JavaScript but it’s almost always open source from small teams or single developers.
by levodelellis | 2025-11-29 01:21:06+00:00
Every time I read his article I regret it. I literally mean every time, 100% of it. Judging by the title of the article, I didn't expect his reason to be "engineers working outside their area of expertise". I've seen good engineers figure out problems outside of their expertise plenty of times, so that's not a good reason either.

I feel like this article is the equivalent 16 paragraph stating you're likely to be correct only 10% of the time when you guess a random number from 1 to 10
by mrandish | 2025-11-29 01:21:08+00:00
> I was sure you were exaggerating. But no!

What? Me exaggerate? Never! :-) I did actually spend a minute looking for the commercial on YouTube but YT search sucks, so thanks for finding it. Setting aside the fact it's crassly manipulative corporate propaganda, as someone with a lot of film and video production experience, the production team that made it did very nice work. That's the only reason I actually ever even saw it. I normally skip through all commercials on the DVR, but I happened land on a couple of really nicely shot frames as I was skipping and rewound to see the spot. I thought, "Wow, blatant bullshit but great work!" :-)
by jagged-chisel | 2025-11-29 01:22:10+00:00
> Why does bad code bother engineers so much?

I’ll take a stab.

Because I’m being held accountable for the bad results of the bad code. Because I’m being held to task to fix the problems caused by the bad code on a schedule that I didn’t agree with. Because management is using someone else’s bad code to deny me a positive annual review.

“You’re a senior engineer - why did fixing this take so long?” Because of the garbage I had to wade through to even find the problem. Because I wasn’t yet working here when this was written and I have to take time to get my head around the insanity.

Yes, these are management problems. I’ve spent years managing managers and attempting to educate them on how bad code causes errors and delays. But for many reasons, it’s a Sysiphean task.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-29 01:22:13+00:00
Rather than evidence of flip-flopping what I'm talking about there is that I consider this to be weird today in 2025. Things change, there's innovation in data structures and algorithms and the hardware we're likely targeting also changes to favour some structures and algorithms over others.

In 1975 this wouldn't be weird, but also C++ doesn't exist then.
by chrisweekly | 2025-11-29 01:23:24+00:00
That's one of the many many reasons I miss my dad so much. He went straight from MIT to GenRad circa 1970. I didn't start doing software till 1998, but we had some years of overlap -- and it was profoundly gratifying to connect w/ him on engineering topics. The learning was even bidirectional tho I'm sure I got more out of our pseudo-professional interactions than he did. Sigh. I really miss him.
by keeda | 2025-11-29 01:23:49+00:00
I think it would help if either side could be more quantitative about their claims, and the problem is both narratives are usually rather weaselly. Let's take this section:

>Deep learning thus far is shallow and has limited capacity for transfer - yes, Sutskeyer is saying that deep learning doesn't generalize as well as humans

But they do generalize to some extent, and my limited understanding is that they generalize way more than expected ("emergent abilities") from the pre-LLM era, when this prediction was made. Sutskever pretty much starts the podcast saying "Isn’t it straight out of science fiction?"

Now Gary Marcus says "limited capacity for transfer" so there is wiggle room there, but can this be quantified and compared to what is being seen today?

In the absence of concrete numbers, I would suspect he is wrong here. I mean, I still cannot mechanistically picture in my head how my intent, conveyed in high-level English, can get transformed into working code that fits just right into the rather bespoke surrounding code. Beyond coding, I've seen ChatGPT detect sarcasm in social media posts about truly absurd situations. In both cases, the test data is probably outside the distribution of the training data.

At some level, it is extracting abstract concepts from its training data, as well as my prompt and the unusual test data, even apply appropriate value judgements to those concepts where suitable, and combine everything properly to generate a correct response. These are much higher-level concepts than the ones Marcus says deep learning has no grasp of.

Absent quantifiable metrics, on a qualitative basis at least I would hold this point against him.

On a separate note:

> "AI will write all the code" will also come off poorly.

On the contrary, I think it is already true (cf agentic spec-driven development.) Sure, there are the hyper-boosters who were expecting software engineers to be replaced entirely, but looking back, claims from Dario, Satya, Pichai and their ilk were were all about "writing code" and not "creating software." They understand the difference and in retrospect were being deliberately careful in their wording while still aiming to create a splash.
by gruez | 2025-11-29 01:23:55+00:00
Go to a country that don't have UBI? This seems like something that would easily resolve itself. Some countries will have UBI and some won't. If the UBI proponents are right and UBI leads to more human flourishing and a more productive populace, the UBI countries will win out. If the UBI doomers are right that UBI would lead to people getting lazy, the UBI countries will get eclipsed by non-UBI countries.
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-29 01:24:49+00:00
I once spent two cold nights standing on my head putting an aftermarket remote start system into an old BMW.

And sometimes I did use it to keep the car running while doing other stuff. This function was a design intent of the device.

It would work like this: Drive to a destination not so far away on a cold wintry day and put transmission in park like usual. Then, push the start button on the remote and turn the ignition switch off.

After that: Remove key, get out, lock doors, go do whatever quick errand it was that had us out to begin with, and return to a car that was finally actually warm inside. The engine and accessories would continue running uninterrupted, like nothing ever happened.

After returning: Put key in, turn it to "on", select a gear, on to the next destination. Engine stays running the whole time.

When I read about this function, I figured I'd never use it. But it did work very well and my then-wife liked it quite a lot. Also if short, cold runs are bad for things like bearing wear and oil contamination, then keeping it running and letting it get up to operating temperature was perhaps a nicer way to treat that old engine than the alternative of never letting it really get warm might have been.

(It would time out and turn off after about 10 or 15 minutes. Otherwise, the engine would cease immediately upon touching the brake pedal if the ignition switch wasn't on.)
by packetlost | 2025-11-29 01:25:35+00:00
There's a laundry list of benefits that all add up, not like one specific killer feature. Some applications really do have very complex configuration needs, but it's sorta situation dependent on whether embedding a scripting language or a database is the right solution (for really simple cases I'm more likely to reach for TOML).

An incomplete list of benefits of using SQLite:

- Runtime config changes for free

- type safety

- strong migration support

- incorrect configurations can be unrepresentable (or at least enforced with check constraints)

- interactable from text-based interfaces and strong off-the-shelf GUI support
by dylan604 | 2025-11-29 01:26:25+00:00
They would obviously say we don't have the data. And to keep that person from "lying", the people that have the role to be able to make this request would have their software obey the soft delete flag and show them "no data available" or something like "on request of user, data deleted on YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS" type of message. who would know any different?
by aduwah | 2025-11-29 01:26:45+00:00
This is a bit misguided. If you lose weight too fast, you will have tons of side effects no matter how safe the medication is. Your heart, kidney, pancreas can be stressed with too fast weight loss even without meds. Also you might end up with a lot of loose skin...

Also a new medication will have unknown long term side effects for sure that will surface over time, similar to the current ones.

In my case mounjaro was life changing (for the better). I would say 42kg over 15 months was fast enough already.
by Kerrick | 2025-11-29 01:26:58+00:00
> giving them justification to deny other people the same opportunity you have

I don't fear they'll deny others the opportunity for remote work. The company is "headquartered" in California, but I don't know if they even lease an office anymore. The CTO lives in the upper midwest, the architect lives on the east coast, my manager lives along the Mississippi River, and I live in the Ozarks.

> enjoy the benefits more than you suffer the drawbacks

Yes. I'm sorry, I thought I made that clear in the post. The benefits of remote work include, but are not limited to: no stress or time from commuting, an opportunity for geographic arbitrage, and the ability to build a better lifestyle around the lack of a commute. Beyond just the remote worker themself, a society that transitioned all office work to remote would also gain more benefits: more efficient use of real estate with entire office buildings rendered unnecessary, less chance of land value distortion due to centralization of workers, and less pollution due to fewer commutes.

I'm glad to also criticize in-office work for having other drawbacks. For example, I was rear-ended commuting to work more than once, the family needed the expense of two cars, we spent more on clothing, and the ambient level of noise being above 35 dBA was annoying.
by MattRix | 2025-11-29 01:27:02+00:00
People’s habits are not usually driven by such long term thinking, but I think there’s a more fundamental thing you’re missing: People will continue to work as long as there is an advantage to working. In any well designed UBI system, those who are on UBI and continue to work will make more money than those on UBI alone, so most people will continue to work.

Not to mention that most people enjoy working as it gives them a sense of purpose.