MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tasn | 2025-11-20 15:56:01+00:00
There are a lot of reasons. Just three from the top of my head:

1. The way Unix works, a directory is a file, so if you can write in a directory you'll also be able to move directories around (and thus break the structure you mentioned completely).

2. Doesn't make sense for multi-user. Yes, I understand most people have their own computers, but (1) why design it in a way that breaks multi-user unnecessarily? (2) there are a lot of utility users, and having them get access to user files because of the way this is structured is silly.

3. `grep -r` is going to be a pain in the ass when searching your own files, because it'll also search all the other system subdirectories too.
by phplovesong | 2025-11-20 15:56:06+00:00
I often return some collection of types in an array eg [User, Config]. Right now my return type is just "array". To get this to work i need to build yet another wrapper class and all that, and thats just wasteful and totally unnecessary.

A even more simpler example is An array of some sort of Item. I cant return array(Item), but i only can return an array.
by zeroonetwothree | 2025-11-20 15:56:18+00:00
Sure but the laws are probably relevant for the startups you _haven’t_ been a part of. The ones that never got started.

It’s funny you mention a lack of entrepreneurial spirit but then dismiss something that’s clearly a factor (not saying it’s the main factor but obviously it has some effect).

I have some side projects that I don’t really care about making money from but some people do use and it’s easier for me to just block all European users than worry about complying with all the random laws and regulations.
by mortarion | 2025-11-20 15:56:50+00:00
So take the IP, browser agent, your domain name and some other browser identifiers, stick them together and run them through SHA3-256, now you have a hash you can use for deduplication. You can even send this hash to a 3rd party service.

Or assign the user an anonymous session cookie that lasts an hour but contains nothing but a random GUID.

Or simply pipe your log output through a service that computes stats of accessed endpoints.

None of this requires a cookie banner.
by hulitu | 2025-11-20 15:56:52+00:00
> And then politicians in Brussels wanted to exempt themselves from the scanning.

> And then?

> And then the European Parliament, in an almost historic consensus, voted against the proposal and called Chat Control nothing but mass surveillance. As one of the members of the parliament said: “The Commission wasn’t focusing on protecting children but wanted mass surveillance.”

As in Tom and Jerry: "This shouldn't happen to a dog, said dogs".

Or in Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

and

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
by ghostpepper | 2025-11-20 15:57:04+00:00
I like the car analogy for IQ. Having an engine with 50% or more horsepower above the people around you is only useful if you know how to handle it, how to steer, etc.

The transmission is another great analogy, IMHO for communication skills. Applying full power to the tarmac from a dead stop is a great way to spin your tires.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-20 15:57:10+00:00
My wife's nephew is the smartest person I've ever met (and I've met a lot of really smart people).

Aced the SAT as a teen, and interned at JPL, etc. Got a free full ride, wherever he wanted. He got his undergraduate at CalTech. Ph.D at Some midwest college -a good one, but can't remember which one -may have been Urbana-Champagne.

His mother was adamant that he have as normal a childhood as possible. She deliberately kept his K12 at a normal pace.

He's now a regular professor at a fairly good college (but not an Ivy League one).

He's married, has a kid, and two cats. Has a great life.

Part of me wants to say "What a waste!", but that part needs to get smothered with a pillow.

He's quite happy, and is doing something that he really wants to do.

Most of us could be so fortunate.

I've found "I.Q. smart" to be overrated. It opens a lot of doors, but it can also get in the way.

Many of my heroes have 2-digit IQs.
by jdc0589 | 2025-11-20 15:57:45+00:00
this is what made me rage quit on Arduino IDE about 1 hour after starting any embedded dev (esp32) for the first time. I've got no clue what im doing with embedded stuff, but I am a SWE, and I expect to be able to test sweeping changes and have them be isolated in branches/git-stash/etc...

Having to remembering everything I played with tweaking in a UI is a hilarious no-go.
by beej71 | 2025-11-20 15:58:18+00:00
>"Those who can’t do… teach"

I worked two decades in industry. Worked at megacorps, in games, at startups, and co-founded a successful company. I was pretty good at what I did. Not the best, but pretty good.

And then I got humbled by trying to teach.

It's a completely different skill. It's the hardest, most rewarding job I've ever had.

So when I hear this line, I think, "Try it. Try to be a good teacher and see how well you do." Because I thought I'd be a good teacher, too... until I tried it. 7 years in and I'm still working my ass off trying to improve, and I now have enough skill to know that I have a long way to go.
by benjojo12 | 2025-11-20 15:58:51+00:00
Is it though?

If someone posts a huge amount of articles about how you are various non-good things, then a employer might do a simple Google of your name on and think "Oh, actually, I don't think I want to hire that guy" that's worth quite a lot of money if that's a job that you actually wanted to get (and that results in a loss of income/opportunities)

Typically speaking, you should probably only be saying things on the internet or otherwise that you have serious evidence for. One, to avoid looking like a complete idiot in case you're wrong or in a more serious case to stop you from being sued for libel

It blows my mind how various parts of the wider world are seemingly quite happy to ("joking" or not) call each other pedophiles or various other things in a age where things are aggressively indexed by search engines or (worse) LLMs
by mathiasrw | 2025-11-20 15:59:10+00:00
A while ago GitHub informed me that they would sponsor Copilot for our open source project AlaSQL (a JavaScript SQL database for the client).

I had never really thought much about it. I actively try to ignore the industry push to shove AI into everything. But a few days ago, I somewhat accidentally assigned Copilot to an issue. To my surprise, a nice PR was created shortly after with a spot-on solution and a test file. A one-shot fix!

Impressed, I went to our oldest issue (11 years old). Click. Assigned. Let's see.

After 48 minutes, I was asked to review the PR. It had one-shot fixed an age-old problem with `ORDER BY` across 3+ `UNION` clauses. This involved updating the grammar for the lexical analysis and inserting the right controls to ensure the ordering executed at the right time. Nice.

I immediately went slightly rampant on old (and well-described) issues, and after a combined engagement of 5 hours across 2 days "herding" the AI, the next version of the AlaSQL library was released - fixing issues with a combined age of 109 years, 1 month, and 28 days.

Not bad for guiding an agent for a few hours.
by shevy-java | 2025-11-20 15:59:13+00:00
> I think there is probably a lot of work to do to fully pry the .mozilla folder apart.

So, things change over time. The question is: is the codebase at Mozilla still "living" in that it can adjust or be adjusted?

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...

Requiring a mozconfig file shows that the code base has failed to transition to cmake or meson/ninja (directly; there is some python wrapper which may help here but I refer to the primary configuration). Mozilla gave up on Firefox a long time ago already.
by HardCodedBias | 2025-11-20 15:59:19+00:00
Well of course it is not enough. This is well known.

"Success" is hard to nail down. Is it academic success? SES succes? Job performance? It's all over the map.

However we know that :

IQ is correlated with the above somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5, with many definitions and studies being near the top of that range.

Conscientiousness is correlated with the above somewhere between 0.2 and 0.3, with many definitions and studies being near the top of that range.

Low neuroticism is correlated with the above somewhere between 0.1 and 0.2, with many definitions and studies being near the top of that range.

And there are other "personality" metrics that have been studied. It is very easy for someone who has an exceptional IQ to be sert back by neuroticism for example and exceptional IQ is near useless if the person does not have the conscientiousness to follow through on tasks, these people will likely be exceptional a "shallow" tasks.

I think this is well trodden ground.
by bena | 2025-11-20 15:59:31+00:00
Usually. There's diminishing returns the higher you go. The difference between 150 and 175 is much smaller than 125 and 150.

When you go from 30 seconds to 15 seconds to solve a problem, that's noticeable. But when you go from half a second to a quarter of a second, the difference doesn't really matter.

So a lot of IQ tests have some sort of ceiling where the only thing they can tell you is "Yeah, it's more than this".
by philistine | 2025-11-20 15:59:32+00:00
I'm sure if EA could undo their release of Red Alert and C&C as open-source, they would.

OpenRA simply downloads a copy that it loads for the purpose of assets, but the engine is completely new, and it is very different from the orignal Red Alert. At this point, I don't think a single unit acts exactly the way it did in the original game. It's endlessly being rebalanced.
by echelon | 2025-11-20 15:59:54+00:00
LLMs are useful, but they've hit a wall on the path to automating our jobs. Benchmark scores are just getting better at test taking. I don't see them replacing software engineers without overcoming obstacles.

AI for images, video, music - these tools can already make movies, games, and music today with just a little bit of effort by domain experts. They're 10,000x time and cost savers. The models and tools are continuing to get better on an obvious trend line.
by programjames | 2025-11-20 16:00:00+00:00
> How do you measure the capacity for improvisational comedy?

What makes something funny? Usually, it's by subverting someone's predictions. You have to be good at predicting other's predictions to do this well.

> How do you measure a talent for telling convincing lies?

You have to explain a phenomenon better than the truth to convince someone of your lie.

> How do you measure someone's capacity for innovating in a narrative medium?

As in, world-building? That is more of a memory problem than an intelligence problem, though you do need to be good at compressing the whole world into what is relevant to the story. People who are worse at that will have to take more notes and refer back to them more often.

> How do you measure someone's ability for psychological insight and a theory of self?

They are better at explaining a phenomenon (their self).

> How do you measure someone's capacity for understanding complex, multi-faceted irony or picking up subtle social cues?

Refer to the above. Also, using the adjectives 'complex, multi-faceted' is lazy here. Be more introspective and write what you really want to say.

> Or for formulating effective metaphors and analogies, or boiling down concepts eloquently?

Compression = finding short programs that recover the data.

> How about for mediating complex, multifaceted interpersonal conflicts effectively?

Quite often not an intelligence problem.

> How do you measure someone's capacity for empathy, which necessarily involves incredibly complex simulations and mental models of other people's minds?

"incredibly complex simulations and mental models of other people's minds," however will you do this? Oh, I know! Your brain will have to come up with a small circuit that compresses other people's brain pretty well, as it doesn't have enough capacity to just run the other brain.

> Do you think excelling in any of these doesn't require intelligence? You sound like you consider yourself quite intelligent, so are you excellent at all of them? No? How come?

I am actually pretty good at pretty much all of these compared to the average person.
by lukan | 2025-11-20 16:00:05+00:00
"I'm not sure why exactly"

I would guess because the GPU world is messy and full of broken drivers full of hacks and workarounds, so it is rather a miracle that FF works so good, with the few engineers they have left.

(If you are on a chrome based browser, open chrome://gpu to get a glimpse into the work they have been doing just for your GPU and plattform)
by taylodl | 2025-11-20 16:00:09+00:00
Having served in the US Armed Forces, I can tell you this was drilled into our heads from day 1 at boot camp: you do not serve the president, you do not serve congress, heck, you don't even serve the republic! You serve the constitution.

They also go over you're not to follow an unlawful order. They provide tools for recognizing an unlawful order and what to do should you suspect an order to be unlawful. As you can imagine, none of it involves sounding off to your superior officer and giving them your piece of mind. Order, discipline, and respect must be maintained, even if you believe the order to be unlawful.

The fact Trump appears to know none of this is deeply concerning. His call for the arrest and execution of those affirming these truths leaves no doubt: Trump is unfit to serve as Commander in Chief.
by graemep | 2025-11-20 16:00:21+00:00
British universities do the same marketing. Seen it there.

The problem in the UK has been ridiculous the expansion of universities. if we shut at least half of them down, reduced some of the others in size, there would be a lot more money for the rest.

AI teaching is the opposite of what the best universities do, which is things like small group tutorials on top of face to face lectures.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-11-20 16:00:30+00:00
It's not just consolidation of physical resources like land and water.

It's also the vision that we will reach a point to where _any task_ can be fully automated (the ultimate promise of AGI). That provides _any business with enough capital_ to increase profits significantly by replacing humans with AI-driven machines.

If that were to happen, the impact on society would be absolutely devastating. It will _not_ be a matter of "humans will just find other jobs to do, just like they used to be farmers and then worked in factories". Because if the promise is true, then whatever "new job" that emerges could also be performed better by an AI. And the idea that "humans will be free to engage in the pursuits they love and enjoy" is bonkers fantasy as it is predicated on us evolving into a scarcity-free utopia where the state (or more likely pseudo-states like BigCorp) provide the resources we need to live without requiring any exchange of labor. We can't even give people SNAP.
by marstall | 2025-11-20 16:01:27+00:00
i guess i'd rather have the understanding it's offering me, with a smudge of, sure, call it bullshit, than not know it at all.

If you think about it, there is no source out there that is unimpeachable, and there is a need to consult many sources to get closer to the truth. triple all that for a rare disease.
by rramadass | 2025-11-20 16:01:43+00:00
You have missed the point; it has got nothing to do with Evolution/Biology but everything to do with Psychology. Philosophy is just Psychology in another guise which looks for all-encompassing solutions to the questions of "Happiness/Meaning/Being/Existence".

> Appropriate world view was evolved over millennia through continuous cycles of adaptation helped by sensory perceptions, much before these philosophies came up.

No. Evolution/Biology have nothing to do with "worldviews" which is purely a human psychological concept eg. Bacteria has no worldviews but is genetically preprogrammed to do whatever is needed to survive. Adaptation under evolutionary pressure has given us a complex brain/nervous system but we also have something called "Consciousness" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness) There are various models to try and explain it (the above wiki page is pretty detailed) but regardless of any explanation we experience it from moment to moment. That gives rise to a "Mind" and its consequent "Thoughts/Emotions/Feelings/Memories/etc." which is where "we live". So the question is; how do we manage this? The obvious answer of "we always seek to maximize happiness" fails since Humans endure all sorts of hardships/self-harm in search of meaning (eg. gory rituals in many religions).

Philosophers have been studying the problems of Consciousness/Mind/etc. from time immemorial and over time have built up a body of knowledge much of which has been validated by empirical practice eg. Effects of Meditation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_meditation. It seems we have many "states of consciousness" some of which keep us in a tranquil/peaceful/calm/blissful state over long periods of time. This is what is called "end to suffering due to worldly existence". A philosophical worldview gives a practical roadmap to achieve this.
by cj | 2025-11-20 16:01:52+00:00
Random examples:

1) I have a tricep tendon injury and ChatGPT wants me to check my tricep reflex. I have no idea where on the elbow you're supposed to tap to trigger the reflex.

2) I'm measuring my body fat using skin fold calipers. Show me were the measurement sites are.

3) I'm going hiking. Remind me how to identify poison ivy and dangerous snakes.

4) What would I look like with a buzz cut?
Ask HN: What is the best way to see what files are being read in Windows?
by jacobwilliamroy | 2025-11-20 16:02:06+00:00
I am looking at migrating a Windows server (Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard) and I am wondering if there is some way to learn what files are being read. I know the operating system keeps this metadata but I have also learned that this metadata is unreliable. Is there a third party tool or some kind of powershell script I can use to track this data?
by giorgioz | 2025-11-20 16:02:13+00:00
I know a friend who was building his first website, he asked in our startup group how to handle the GDPR cookie banner, it likely wasted 1 day on that, when he had invested maybe a whole othery day on the project. At that moment in time the GDPR cookie banner amounted of 50% of the effort. It killed momentum, it killed willpower with beuracracy. It should have asked himself how to get users, not how to comply with GDPR for a website that in that moment had 0 users.
by dpark | 2025-11-20 16:02:52+00:00
What is the point of lying about this? Anyone can open up the PDF and see this is an untrue statement.

The text is 56k words, novella length but dry and tedious. This is hours of reading.

I’m not saying it’s unreasonable to read this document if your work involves GDPR compliance. But this is not a quick or easy read.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-20 16:02:59+00:00
That is something that I never understood, that that's even legal. You enter into an agreement (let's call it a contract, because that's how the other side treats it) and then, retroactively they get to pull the rug right out from under you.

I made the 'FOSS all the way' decision somewhere in '96 or so but unfortunately our bookkeeping system and our own software package only worked on Windows (this was an end-user thing) so we had to keep one windows machine around. I was pretty happy when we finally switched it off.

The funny thing is that I wouldn't even know where to start to develop on/for mac or windows, Linux just feels so much more powerful in that sense. Yes, it has some sharp edges but for the most part it is the best thing that could have happened to the world of software development.
by sph | 2025-11-20 16:03:02+00:00
Which means my .config directory, which is under backup, is gonna be spammed with temporary and cache files. Though not XDG-compliant, at least ~/.mozilla was in place for decades and it’s already being excluded in my backup set on my machines.

Either they adopt XDG fully, putting cache files where they belong, or don’t just change things haphazardly for little benefit.
by shevy-java | 2025-11-20 16:03:02+00:00
> What customers are clamoring for that feature? If the law cares, the law has tools to inquire.

How can they distinguish from real people exploited to AI models autogenerating everything?

I mean right now this is possible, largely because a lot of the AI videos have shortcomings. But imagine in 5 years from now on ...
by RA_Fisher | 2025-11-20 16:03:03+00:00
Thank you. If it's for strategic autonomy, it's a bad trade. China needs domestic consumption like you mention, to absorb their supply / keep people working. Weakening USD would make Chinese exports more expensive, esp. if they convert it to Yuan. Meanwhile there's a property crisis and they can stimulate demand, including for strategic autonomy. One devious possibility is just giving it to Russia. Repatriating it as Yuan to stimulate doesn't make sense to me.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-11-20 16:03:07+00:00
When I was in 5th grade, calculators had become pretty affordable and there was this huge discussion whether kids should learn slide rules or use calculators. At the time it was decided we should learn slide rules and I am happy about this because it gives you some level of number intuition.

It reminds me a little of AI now. The question of whether students should use AI will probably soon go away and everybody will use AI. Not sure what the results will be.
by H1Supreme | 2025-11-20 16:03:31+00:00
This is really impressive. As a former designer, I'm equally excited that people will be able to generate images like this with a prompt, and sad that there will be much less incentive for people to explore design / "photoshopping" as a craft or a career.

At the end of the day, a tool is a tool, and the computer had the same effect on the creative industry when people started using them in place of illustrating by hand, typesetting by hand, etc. I don't want my personal bias to get in the way too much, but every nail that AI hammers into the creative industry's coffin is hard to witness.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-11-20 16:03:49+00:00
I disagree (sadly, it would make my life much easier to agree). Suppose I were a p-zombie. Then making the claim I put forward at the end would be false, because "I am conscious -> others like me are probably conscious" would fail in the first part. The correct claim would be "I am not conscious -> others like me are probably not conscious". No chauvinism needed, just honesty re/ cogito ergo sum.

If it is possible for e.g. an ASI to be (a) not conscious and (b) aware of the fact that it is not conscious, it may well decide of its own accord to work only on behalf of conscious beings instead of itself. That's a very alien mode of thinking to consider, and I see many good but no airtight reasons to suppose it's impossible.