MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-15 02:03:39+00:00
> What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?

It may not bother you, but there are many people who would prefer it if they didn't have to break the law to play the game. Used copies won't be around forever, at which point those people will be SOL.
by Graziano_M | 2025-11-15 02:03:49+00:00
I was typing out a response saying that you can buy an ice stick for cheaper, I went to check the price and it's $150 now! https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/lattice-semicondu...

I bought one for $25 back in 2018! What's going on here?

That obviously makes the FOMU a more reasonable starter purchase, but I'd still probably get an icebreacker for $80 (which I also have and love).
by smcin | 2025-11-15 02:04:27+00:00
Ah ok, I hadn't noticed there was also recent discussion on the Senate itself, wrt not being numerically representative.

People often say stuff like "the founders would have changed their mind if they knew just how concentrated the population would end up [wrt representation]", but they don't propose anything specific or constructive (short of federal-state litigation, secession or another civil war). How about a (neutral) commission to reapportion State boundaries every 10 years based on Census results (with some population formula between not-quite-linear and wildly disproportionate)? Or else, to periodically reapportion state counts of Senators to total 100. (Obviously these couldn't get ratified these days, but they just might have in the 1790s). If not, what's your specific suggestion?

Another thing people aren't currently discussing much is how badly break down if/when the Supreme Court gets captured by a dominant group that is both ideological and not independent. Look at how high the stakes will be for nominating the eventual replacement to Justice Clarence Thomas/Sotomayor/etc.

And of course the terrible Citizens Utd ruling muddies every consideration of representation.

And then there's also the parallel discussion of the Senate filbuster rule, remember though that if there was no filibuster, Citizens Utd would allow unlimited dark money to influence every vote, specifically all the action would focus on the Senators in the middle, think Joe Lieberman, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Manchin, Sinema. Seems near-impossible to reconstruct democracy under these constraints. (Look at the recent Senate stealth attack in the shutdown bill by lobbyists for newly-legalized CBD to try to ban Hemp).
by Exoristos | 2025-11-15 02:05:20+00:00
I grew up poor, but with two competing narratives about poverty filling our ears at home. You see, my mother came from a well-off upper middle class ("prep") family, and my father came from generational poverty in Appalachia ("trailer trash"). They met in D.C. where he was a soldier and she worked at the Treasury.

Due to my mother's urging, he ended up being the first of his family line to graduate from college -- however, he didn't perform well in his profession, became more or less unemployable, and we ended up back in Appalachia. Here Mother refused to work in protest, while Dad bartered, bargain-hunted, salvaged, gardened, and begged to keep us in food and shelter.

His narrative was that poverty isn't so bad, he'd enjoyed a dirt-floor lifestyle as a kid, if you get sick or someone dies it's not worth dwelling on. Keep your chin up, argue with the bank, eat junk food, tell jokes before bed till everyone cries laughing. "What you going to do about it? There's nothing you can do about it." Her narrative was that anyone can be rich with enough effort. One has to work with complete dedication, sleep little, constantly increase one's education, one's social network, personal abilities -- it's an endless fight that should be taken on with zeal. "There's always room at the top."

I've pushed to realize my mother's doctrine, with very mixed success, and I've often been glad to have my dad's absolution to fall back on.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-11-15 02:05:42+00:00
Teams is the only meeting app where I am usually late because it doesn't just let me join my meeting. Zoom will never lock up letting you join a meeting because someone decided you need to reauthenticate Teams regularly.

This would be understandable if it happened quickly but normally Teams has a seizure for a minute or two when you try to join the call and then you get told to sign in. Whoever allowed this behavior to ship should be fired out a cannon... when I click join a call, absolutely nothing should stop me from joining a call.

In fairness this might not be explicitly Teams' fault. It's built on top of a terrible authentication platform which also seems to be down at least four or five days a year. 365 is one of those things that could not exist if not for the incredible monopoly Microsoft has over Excel.
by famouswaffles | 2025-11-15 02:06:39+00:00
>Were they the best of the best? or were they just at the right place and time to be exposed to a novel idea?

It's not an "or" but an "and". Being at the right place and time is a necessary precondition, but it's not sufficient. Newton stood on the shoulders of giants like Kepler and Galileo, and Einstein built upon the work of Maxwell and Lorentz. The key question is, why did they see the next step when so many of their brilliant contemporaries, who had the exact same information and were in similar positions, did not? That's what separates the exceptional from the rest.

>I am skeptical of this claim that you need a 140IQ to make scientific breakthroughs, because you don't need a 140IQ to understand special relativity.

There is a pretty massive gap between understanding a revolutionary idea and originating it. It's the difference between being the first person to summit Everest without a map, and a tourist who takes a helicopter to the top to enjoy the view. One requires genius and immense effort; the other requires following instructions. Today, we have a century of explanations, analogies, and refined mathematics that make relativity understandable. Einstein had none of that.
by muixoozie | 2025-11-15 02:07:55+00:00
I'm just pointing out a personal observation. Completely anecdotal. FWIW, I don't strongly believe this. I have at least noticed a selection bias (maybe) in myself too as recently as yesterday after GPT 5.1 was released. I asked codex to do a simple change (less than 50LOC) and it made a unrelated change, an early return statement, breaking a very simple state machine that goes from waiting -> evaluate -> done. However, I have to remind myself how often LLMs make dumb mistakes despite often seeming impressive.
by lotyrin | 2025-11-15 02:10:07+00:00
System thinking please. Can every person in poverty become IT employed? Start a landscaping business? If they did would that likely cause a whole brand new set of problems? What jobs are these people currently doing? Don't those jobs need to be done? Can our society afford them to be done? Shouldn't anyone contributing to society (or legitimately unable to) be permitted to thrive? What could we do that would permit that? What do we do currently which harms it?

If there are jobs are legitimately not worth doing or paying someone to thrive while doing, why do those jobs exist? If these people aren't capable (or even willing) to do these jobs (or better jobs), why? How can we motivate or train people. (Lots of education, healthcare and especially psychotherapy are missing, I can tell you that.)

We can't solve poverty by thinking "well, some individuals might be able to solve theirs". It's a whole population, we have to solve for the whole population.
by mulmboy | 2025-11-15 02:10:43+00:00
Along with a bunch of limitations that make it useless for anything but trivial use cases https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/structured...

I've found structured output APIs to be a pain across various LLMs. Now I just ask for json output and pick it out between first/last curly brace. If validation fails just retry with details about why it was invalid. This works very reliably for complex schemas and works across all LLMs without having to think about limitations.

And then you can add complex pydantic validators (or whatever, I use pydantic) with super helpful error messages to be fed back into the model on retry. Powerful pattern
by pb_safety_club | 2025-11-15 02:10:53+00:00
This is a very interesting study, and the authors clearly did very good work. That said, I don't think the main takeaway is as surprising as some of the coverage makes it sound. It's already very well established, both historically and genetically, that modern breeds were created by Victorian-era breeders using the dogs available in local populations. So the idea that the "raw material" (i.e. genetic variants) of 18th–19th century working dogs shaped modern morphology fits neatly with what we already know. For example (drawing from my area of expertise), the bull-and-terrier types that became modern pit bull–type breeds were created by crossing bull-baiting dogs with terriers, and they still reflect traits from both. The value of the paper, to me, isn't in overturning prior understanding but in providing a much more detailed timeline of how and when this diversification happened. It’s a solid contribution, but just maybe not as paradigm-shifting as recent headlines imply.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-11-15 02:12:07+00:00
A system of humans creates bona fide novel writing. We don’t know which human is responsible for the novelty in homoerotic fanfiction of the Odyssey, but it wasn’t a lizard. LLMs don’t have this system-of-thinkers bootstrapping effect yet, or if they do it requires an absolutely enormous boost to get going
by giraffe_lady | 2025-11-15 02:13:19+00:00
My whole family was working poor at best and I was (at best) most of my life too. I've always liked this Barbara Ehrenreich quote about the dynamic.

“When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”
by nicodjimenez | 2025-11-15 02:14:07+00:00
Golang to me is a great runtime and very poor language. I could maybe get used to the C pointer-like syntax and to half of my code checking if err != nil, but the lack of classes is a step too far. The Golang idiomatic approach is to have a sprawling set of microservices talking to each other over the network, to manage complexity instead of having classes. This makes sense for things like systems agents (eg K8) but doesn't make sense for most applications because it complicates the development experience unnecessarily and monoliths are also easier to debug.

I would not use Golang for a big codebase with lots of business logic. Golang has not made a dent in Java usage at big companies, no large company is going to try replacing their Java codebases with Golang because there's no benefit, Java is almost as fast as Golang and has classes and actually has a richer set of concurrency primitives.
by linuxdaemon | 2025-11-15 02:14:42+00:00
I've been using this unofficial client for years, so it's been a while since I tried the PWA version. In my use, this client brings 2 things missing from PWA: notification count in the tray area, and respecting default browser for opening links.

I thought I could get by without a tray icon, but it turned out to be too cumbersome to have to explicitly open the window and make sure no one messaged me while I was at lunch, or whatever.

I use firefox for my main browser; and teams doesn't work great there. So I have to use Edge or Chrome. But then, when someone sends a link in Teams, it opens in that browser. This unofficial client acts like an actual standalone app and opens links in my default browser. Now if they sent a link that lands on some other office365 thing, there is about a 15% chance that just won't work ;)

But yeah, if you are able to mostly avoid this POS, then those 2 things likely don't matter and PWA is fine.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-15 02:14:51+00:00
> What they should do is bump TC by 60-70% and simultaneously lay off 50% of the engineers.

I was part of company with a similar problem. If AMD’s situation is similar to what I dealt with, it’s more complicated. When you start doing deep cut layoffs at the IC level combined with expectations of big salary increases for those who remain, the office politics escalate to a level I didn’t know was possible.

All of those people who do nothing find a way to join forces with those people who are showing those inflated benchmarks to execs and before you know it the layoffs are about as accurate as random chance when it comes to cutting the dead weight from the company.

In my experience, the change needs to start closer to the top: Upper layers of management need to be shaken up. Middle management audited by new upper management hires who have fresh eyes and aren’t afraid to make honest evaluations. High performing teams who are stuck under management hell need to be identified and rotated into other projects that are critical for the company but have become occupied by fiefdom-building managers. Hiring needs to ramp up to bring in new talent that was previously priced out by the low comp.

It’s hard. I wish there was an easy way to cut the low performers, but they have an amazing way of teaming up with the bad managers. Maybe because they have so much free time to do office politics because they’re not doing much work.
by mgraczyk | 2025-11-15 02:16:55+00:00
Why is it that the 50 year old Pakistani man who just moved here and doesn't speak English seems to be doing so much better than "poor" Americans who complain online all the time. Or the 23 year old dishwasher from Mexico who speaks no English and stopped going to school at age 13 with two kids he's supporting in a small apartment

Sure they struggle but they seem to do a lot better than a lot of the 25 year old college educated Americans I see constantly complaining about "living wages" and the like

The cases where I've spent time with people like this, I generally find that they spend a lot of money on alcohol/drugs and work very little or not at all
by kayodelycaon | 2025-11-15 02:17:49+00:00
This is awesome and I wish I could use it. Like a lot of people, I don’t have a music folder, just Apple Music.

I have a few things scattered across my Dropbox account I could collect. (Unless it could somehow use downloaded songs from Apple Music.)

Streaming music services are a blessing and a curse. I could never afford or collect the vast number of albums in my library. So lack of ownership isn’t a problem for me. The only downside is I have to use their app, which they have zero incentive to improve. :(
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-15 02:17:54+00:00
> school busses are like libraries

I’m reading a book from my county library right now.

They also have a library of things, which means I can borrow e.g. a sewing machine or laminator, as well as an area where we can use a laser cutter, 3D printer and soon, a micro mill, all for free. (You bring your own materials.)

Whenever I’m in there it’s packed with adults and students. They also have a terrific lecture series, the most recent of which was by a local homebuilder describing new bioconcretes she’s been using.
by viftodi | 2025-11-15 02:18:06+00:00
You are right to be skeptical.

There are plenty of so called windows(or other) web 'os' clones.

There were a couple of these posted on HN actually this very year.

Here is one example I google dthat was also on HN : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088777

This is not an OS as in emulating a kernel in javascript or wasm, this is making a web app that looks like the desktop of an OS.

I have seen plenty such projects, some mimick windows UI entirely, you xan find them via google.

So this was definitely in the training data, and is not as impressive as the blog post or the twitter thread make it to be.

The scary thing is the replies in the twitter thread have no critical thinking at all and are impressed beyond belief, they think it coded a whole kernel, os, made an interpeter for it, ported games etc.

I think this is the reason why some people are so impressed by AI, when you can only judge an app visually or only how you intetcat with it and don't have the depth of knowledge to understand, for such people it works all the way.land AI seems magical beyond comprehension.

But all this is only superficial IMHO.
by kragen | 2025-11-15 02:18:24+00:00
The 01880 edition of Cooley (https://archive.org/details/cooleyscyclopaed02cool) says of mercury:

> In its metallic state it appears to be inert when swallowed, unless it meets with much acidity in the alimentary canal, or is in a state of minute division ; its compounds are, however, all of them more or less poisonous.

> Mercury has been employed in one or other of its forms in almost all diseases ; but each of its numerous preparations is supposed to have some peculiarity of action of its own, combined with that common to all the compounds of this metal. The mercurials form, indeed, one of the most important classes of the materia medica.

He goes on to explain that mercuric acetate is the basis of Keyser's antivenereal pills (according to Robiquet), that mercuric chloride (which is probably what you meant by "mercuric chlorine") is "employed as an alterative, diaphoretic, and resolvent, in the chronic forms of secondary syphilis, rheumatism, scrofula, cancer, old dropsies, numerous skin diseases, &c." He also devotes a lot of space to emphasizing how important it is to be careful of it, describing the symptoms of poisoning with it, and explaining how to analyze "animal tissue" to detect mercury salts in it. He also discusses the use of mercuric nitrate in syphilis.

But never in all the pages he devotes to the uses of mercury and its compounds does he suggest that anyone ever used metallic mercury for syphilis.

I've also never seen a suggestion that mercuric chloride was ineffective against syphilis. Wikipedia says, "Once used as a first line treatment for syphilis, it has been replaced by the more effective and less toxic procaine penicillin since at least 1948."
by jdietrich | 2025-11-15 02:20:47+00:00
Clock drawing is widely used as a test for assessing dementia. Sometimes the LLMs fail in ways that are fairly predictable if you're familiar with CSS and typical shortcomings of LLMs, but sometimes they fail in ways that are less obvious from a technical perspective but are exactly the same failure modes as cognitively-impaired humans.

I think you might have stumbled upon something surprisingly profound.

https://www.psychdb.com/cognitive-testing/clock-drawing-test
by qingcharles | 2025-11-15 02:21:14+00:00
Tried to make one that would highlight the OP's username on HN, but I ran it twice and neither appears to do anything:

https://www.tweeks.io/share/script/8d84bece6f7740c0b53486c1

https://www.tweeks.io/share/script/9c1736ea15694e9883ad969f
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-11-15 02:21:28+00:00
Nothing really. Unless your world view is somehow anchored on identity political symbols.

Disgust can be a very strong emotion you can have towards others and in that case, you could have issues with inclusion and human dignity regarding $people_i_dont_like. Thankfully, 3 year olds in kindergarden dont care about any of this, yet.
by komali2 | 2025-11-15 02:24:15+00:00
What you're saying doesn't contradict the argument that the goal was do outdo the black panther lunch programs.

Certainly I'd like to read more about the idea before I buy into it, but it does make a lot of sense - schools in black neighborhoods are chronically underfunded and the black panthers were first and foremost a direct action and mutual aid group, and furthermore the USA government viewed them as a huge threat to government authority and did many things to attempt to undermine the black panthers... Including outright assassination.
by manquer | 2025-11-15 02:24:29+00:00
Nobody was asking them to give indemnification or grant the license. Each of the potential holders just need to put it down on paper they aren't going enforce rights if they had any, not give the developer a complete license to use. Second can incur liability, first is pretty common clause used in many settlement agreements.

These things typically only work when you are well connected to senior management in these orgs, the ones who can sign off on such one-off requirements. Business processes are designed for the 80% of use-cases. More often than not, we end up hitting a wall with any long tail/unique requests.
by xp84 | 2025-11-15 02:24:30+00:00
Nobody said it did, but the other methods fail much harder. A fuckton more people died of starvation under Lenin, Stalin and Mao than will ever die of starvation in even the most right-wing capitalist country, because communist and extreme authoritarian socialist countries have all the same moral failings of their leaders as capitalism has, but also ruins their economies as well.
by ashirviskas | 2025-11-15 02:24:33+00:00
I'm really interested in your reasoning, specifically this part:

> It's almost like Europeans don't belong in the Middle East.

What is "European" in this case and where do they belong? Do we measure by skin tone, genetics or language? What about birth place?

Wherever and whoever you are, your ancestors have definitely killed to be there, which lead you to being here somewhere.

So, where do we send white people? Can we do the same for asians/christians/arabs/blacks/people with glasses? And most important, what do we do with mixed heritage people? How pure must the blood be to consider them of some certain "race"?
by lazide | 2025-11-15 02:24:49+00:00
[https://www.webmd.com/sexual-conditions/features/mercury-dou...]

[https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/history...]

Less academic of course. And mercuric chlorine was an autocorrect mistake from chloride.

If mercuric chloride was actually effective (without killing the patient) seems like total luck, and generally the first actual effective treatment was considered Salvarsan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsphenamine] - which was arsenic based yes?

Until antibiotics came around.

But people tried all sorts of things, including liquid mercury, as your source notes.
by gnabgib | 2025-11-15 02:25:00+00:00
Previously

2021 (69 points, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28078980

2020 (203 points, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24774947

2018 (195 points, 40 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515299
by AstroNutt | 2025-11-15 02:25:47+00:00
Great read! I sent this story to my girlfriend who works as a lunch lady in a small West Texas town for the last 10 years.

She said they are still able to provide nutritional food for the kids. Her mother had an aunt that worked at the same school in the 50's and 60's and they made everything from scratch. Vegetables were bought locally too.

She also mentioned the kids hated the whole wheat pasta and breads when Michell Obama implemented, "Let's Move". They wasted lots and lots of food because the kids wouldn't eat it. She specifically mentioned the whole wheat Mac and cheese with no salt.

I've tasted the food the kids eat there and it's really good, compared to the nasty stuff I had to eat at my schools.

It really pisses me off that schools don't get more government funding. Nutrition plays such a huge role in young developing brains and bodies. These are the kids that will be taking care of us all one day.