MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-14 20:33:38+00:00
The US desperately needs another version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Other_Half_Lives to become virally popular.

I went to school with kids who didn't have winter jackets. In Northern Maine. I studied with kids who didn't have any food to eat, almost ever. My mother taught kids that were kicked out and homeless at like 16. One child was named after a beer. Entire classrooms worth of kids being "raised" only by an impoverished grandparent who wasn't able to leave the house and couldn't really do anything and had only minimal social security checks for income.

There was a family that lived in a 10ft by 10ft shack and had 6 kids and basically nothing else to their name. One daughter was hit by a dump truck getting off the school bus and died.

My own family was impoverished for a long time. Sometimes the only food left in the house was old flour with bugs in it. The mental toll it took on my mother is still clear and evident, and I myself still have deep "scarcity mindset" behavior, and our situation wasn't even that bad. We technically were above the poverty line. We had a home that was clean and well built and very cheap ($400 a month mortgage). My mother had an education and a career, and my dad's employer was in control of making his child support payments, so they were always on time. My mom was really smart and extremely good at stretching money and playing the games required to cover your bills when you literally make less money than it takes every month to be legally alive, like making friends with the telecom neighbor who will set you up with free cable for a bit out of pity. Her job in government ensured we had good health insurance and visits to doctors. We had much wealthier family who kept us clothed with truckfulls of handmedown clothes from the previous decade. She had great credit and could manage credit cards very well.

It almost killed her a bunch of times though. Once when I was 12, she called my dad to come get me because she couldn't get herself out of bed and was bawling and openly talking about suicide. She couldn't really afford therapy and the local therapists in bumbfuck nowhere aren't good at their job anyway. Turns out there's a medically important distinction between "Therapist" and "Psychologist" and in the 90s neither was equipped to handle "Undiagnosed neurodivergent driven to the very end of their wits and surviving exclusively on adrenaline".

Yet there are people on this very board insistent that people do not starve in America (before Trump decided we didn't need to report on it and thus killed the program tracking it, it regularly reported millions and millions of American children literally go hungry. Free lunch and breakfast programs reliably improve grades and education outcomes still because children are hungry)

There are people who insist it is cultural or based on making bad choices.

These people are gross.
Show HN: SuperCurate – Fast note search and curation
by superdocs1 | 2025-11-14 20:33:51+00:00
I'm building SuperCurate, a tool focused on note retrieval and curation. Think filing cabinet for your notes, web clippings, images and PDFs.

Key features:

- Import from Evernote (ENEX), MD, PDF, images

- Fast search with filters to quickly find what you're looking for

- Organize notes into collections

- Search inside PDFs with direct page jumping and highlighting

- SuperCurate Web Clipper (similar to Evernote Web Clipper) extension for Chrome to save content directly to your library

Demos:

- Search and curation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4QSIoUL4Uk

- Web Clipper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F7QoC7X3fs

- Search inside PDFs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0X9sD-938Q

I'd love to hear your feedback and use cases!
by kgwgk | 2025-11-14 20:35:21+00:00
> Yeah let's not save ~$12,000 a year since it'll never help.

It's true that it may not help a lot if you're "missing $40,000 a year, every year, forever" which apparently is the article's definition of poor. Unfortunately we're not told what they would need such an amount of additional money for exactly.

On the other hand, maybe going from "missing $40,000 a year" to "missing $28,000 a year" is enough to not be poor anymore? It's difficult to understand the author's idea of the boundary between being poor and not being poor.
by sally_glance | 2025-11-14 20:35:40+00:00
Theoretically you're supposed to assign lower prio to issues with known workarounds but then there should also be reporting for product management (which assigns weight by age of first occurrence and total count of similar issues).

Amazon is mature enough for processes to reflect this, so my guess for why something like this could slip through is either too many new feature requests or many more critical issues to resolve.
by mouse_ | 2025-11-14 20:35:40+00:00
> We’d been building what we liked to call a “procrastination engine,” named Sloth Surf. The app worked like this: A user who had the urge to procrastinate on the internet could come to the site, input their procrastination preferences, and let an AI agent do it for them. Want to waste half an hour on social media? Read sports message boards for the afternoon? Let Sloth Surf take care of the scrolling for you, our pitch went, and then it can email you a summary—all while you get back to work (or don’t, we’re not your boss).

This guy's living a delusional, fantasy business boy lifestyle where he has hardworking fictional employees working tirelessly on his poop-on-a-stick idea, while literally calling him in his free time to tell him it's a great idea and a valid thing to put his time into. What are YOU doing?
by keeda | 2025-11-14 20:35:44+00:00
That's a fair point. For people already finding great utility in GenAI it seems like a foregone conclusion, but for others it can be understandably frustrating that people take it as an article of faith that "AI is worth it."

Disclosure, I'm very much in the former camp, but I try to ground myself with broader empirical evidence. I've found an increasing amount of empirical evidence that GenAI is providing value more than commensurate with its costs.

Largely the studies I've looked at focus on productivity boosts, I guess because that is very easy to tie to economic impact. This recent thread has some relevant sources and extremely rough numbers, but the outcome seems to be that for a 1% increase in datacenter usage we may have gotten a 1.2% boost in national productivity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794907

Now, this absolutely not a rigorous analysis, but could be a good starting point for how to think about these tradeoffs.
by noir_lord | 2025-11-14 20:37:01+00:00
That's an entertaining read.

I binned Windows 11 recently (only kept it around for gaming) because I didn't like the direction it was clearly going (and has been for a while - including their shoehorning of AI into everything when I don't want it or need it) and don't game enough that I care much any more.

For the first time since the 80's I'm not running a Windows OS on any of my machines.

I doubt they'll care, I'm one user of hundreds of millions but I don't have to consider whether every update is going to turn on something I don't want/hate so I care.

The linked video (via a linked post) from Dave Plummer does indeed sum up my feelings pretty well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpA5jt1g60
by make3 | 2025-11-14 20:37:37+00:00
Sidenote, it's interesting how the term "virtue signaling" is arguably objectively an individualistic right-wing dog whistle these days.

I would argue that it is being used all over the media to complain about anyone showing any signs of not being purely individualistic, as if individualism is the only true thing people actually honestly feel. This is obviously incorrect, empathy, professionalism, a desire for a sense of purpose, are all things that people objectively feel in the real world, everyday, everywhere.

I would argue that the expression "virtue signaling" is used systematically in individualistic right wing media by the right about anyone who say, for example, that they care about minorities or less fortunate people or to take action to support them, as if it was false. I would argue that this is harmful.

People do care a good fraction of the time, and they should be recognized for their positive actions, and encouraged. I would argue that we should definitely strive for a culture where individualism is not seen as the only true emotion that people can feel.

So, knowing the negative political and philosophical baggage, I would not use that expression, especially if you don't have actual proof that they don't care about security, professionalism, etc.
by anon_cow1111 | 2025-11-14 20:38:01+00:00
First year:

Very covid-like symptoms, to the point where I initially did a quick home covid test (or multiple tests if I remember) that was negative. Very distinct soreness around the crease of the hip/leg joint, probably a lymph gland.

Second year: exact same symptoms but less intense, still started antibiotics immediately

third: again same but less intense, I ignored it until general full-body joint pain occurred then immediately went on antibiotics, after a few months of that it started to clear up.
by simoncion | 2025-11-14 20:38:13+00:00
> The percentage of people so dumb that they can't hold a useful job is staggeringly low.

Sure. OP didn't say otherwise.

OP did say that some folks "will always be poor" because they are "under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society" and that "[t]hat doesn't mean that they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke" and that "Maybe eventually we will have enough mastery over genetics where we can make people truly equal in ability." but until then "The only thing we can do is be compassionate and help out.".

Perhaps you've been so lucky as to never encounter folks who hold the bone-deep belief that being unable to work [0] makes you worse than worthless. If so, celebrate your good fortune, I guess?

[0] Typically, these sorts of folks have carveouts for retirement, pregnancy, childbearing, and maybe a begrudging carveout for short-term injury. Anything else and you're a filthy drain on society.
by someone7x | 2025-11-14 20:38:21+00:00
> something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening

I always lived in fear of being pulled over and getting busted for not having the insurance I couldn’t afford.

Eventually get pulled over and ticketed, cough up $1000 for proof of insurance to bring to court then get a payment program to pay off $1000 fine.

Once the proof of insurance expired, begin the cycle again.

Until I finally got enough earnings to always pay my bills every month on time, my entire financial existence hinged on how often the police stopped me.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-14 20:39:47+00:00
> It's not like politics where you can link to a statement from <representative of political party> to prove a point.

Yes, a quote from a party representative is not the kind of evidence called for, but “women control the culture” is a fact claim which does call for some kind of evidence (either directly provided or as a citation to someone else who has provided it.)
by jquery | 2025-11-14 20:39:49+00:00
I agree that our system (America’s, specifically) is too slow, but it’s not inherent to democracy, it’s the fact we only have elections every few years, because these rules were written in the 1700s when holding an election / voting in an election was difficult. No snap elections when the government is about to shut down (would’ve prevented all the nonsense of the last month and a half).

This isn’t cope. China has virtually no cultural exports of note compared to its size, except some gacha games (that are still mainly voiced in Japanese, which does have cultural exports). Every time I visit, I have to accept that my internet is going to be ridiculously unreliable and throttled and flaky.

I’m not saying China is “wrong”, but it’s not the obvious winner to me. Nor is it to my Chinese-born spouse who moved here for the greater opportunities and freedom.
by tdfirth | 2025-11-14 20:40:19+00:00
In my experience (I've put hundreds of billions of tokens through structured outputs over the last 18 months), I think the answer is yes, but only in edge cases.

It generally happens when the grammar is highly constrained, for example if a boolean is expected next.

If the model assigns a low probability to both true and false coming next, then the sampling strategy will pick whichever one happens to score highest. Most tokens have very similar probabilities close to 0 most of the time, and if you're picking between two of these then the result will often feel random.

It's always the result of a bad prompt though, if you improve the prompt so that the model understands the task better, then there will then be a clear difference in the scores the tokens get, and so it seems less random.
by Terr_ | 2025-11-14 20:40:48+00:00
I really really want the US legal process to abandon a certain style of incredibly cryptic bill, which contains hundreds of "the word foo shall be inserted in between teh words"-style changes.

It often seems like a trick to make is so that nobody really knows what they're voting on, as opposed to a wholesale "replace that entire section with the readable information below". I suppose, to be charitable, it may have originated as a conflict-avoidance strategy.

Ideally, bills would be changesets that can easily be turned into before-vs-after comparisons for legislators to review and approve.
by kincl | 2025-11-14 20:40:59+00:00
Having done just a small to moderate amount of automation in CI/CD pipelines around GPG tools I know this pain. Back then I was waiting for https://sequoia-pgp.org/ which recently (Dec 2024) released its v1.0 of the sq CLI which seemed to have a lot of promise of fixing the strange and inconsistent ergonomics of using the gpg tools.
by kazinator | 2025-11-14 20:43:07+00:00
It is some kind of new Law (that ought to be named after someone) that people who write about AI are likely using it to do that writing.

(Even ironically sometimes observed in cases when the writing is disparaging of AI and the use of AI).

If the subject matter is AI, you should instantly pay attention and look for the signs it was AI assisted or generated outright.
by Terr_ | 2025-11-14 20:43:24+00:00
Maybe, but Trump is already violating plenty of Constitutional and statutory "pursestrings", and so far Republicans have been quite complicit in the process. Even with a reduced presence, they are likely to keep ~34 senate seats [0][1] which is enough to continue protecting him from justice.

How would/should our system recover if a President commits all sorts of crimes with the support of 34 senators?

(Bonus fun fact: The theoretical minimum popular support needed for 34 senators would be 3.6% of the population.)
by btilly | 2025-11-14 20:43:34+00:00
I agree that we should not simply self-treat by supplements or starving ourselves.

But you are dead wrong that interventions would need to be directly targeted at B. burgdorferi.

The standard and effective treatment for TB back in the 1950s was a combination therapy with Streptomycin, Isoniazid (INH), and PAS. The purpose of PAS was to create a low manganese environment in the body, which put stress on Mycobacterium tuberculosis - the bacteria that causes TB. This stress did not kill the bacteria by itself, but it did make it more vulnerable to the rest of the treatment. Because of this treatment, we have a lot of data showing how well people do with low manganese for a period of 1-2 years. (That was the time that this treatment required.) It wasn't pleasant (in particular it came with nausea), but it was definitely survivable.

If low manganese really does stress B. burgdorferi, then a similar combination is worth trying today. Better yet, this combination would not require the development of a new drug that needs FDA approval. It can be tried using only drugs that have been long approved, and which are already part of standard medical practice. (Granted, PAS is no longer used for TB. But it is the standard treatment for an excess of manganese.)
by Brendinooo | 2025-11-14 20:43:37+00:00
There's a tension between descriptive and prescriptive claims here.

Descriptively, the author is (worthily!) conveying the real, lived experience of resource scarcity so complete that standard budgeting advice is useless, tone-deaf, etc.

But prescriptively, he goes much further than "useless": advice "doesn't work". The endless runner, The Pit, eternal poverty with "no relief in sight."

This language of inescapability creates a framework where "poor" is effectively defined as "people for whom interventions don't work." This is unfalsifiable! If someone escapes, they were never really "poor".

And if that's true, then what? We can't identify what interventions help, we can't learn from success stories, we can't reason about different causes needing different solutions. The framework meant to defend the poor actually makes it impossible to help them effectively.

The author almost certainly wants to avoid victim-blaming, which is respectable. But defining poverty as this inescapable, almost metaphysical state removes all agency from both people in poverty and those who'd want to help them.
by mmis1000 | 2025-11-14 20:43:58+00:00
I don't think ai (or whatever features) is a bad thing unless it's on your way or designed to do damage to you (hey, I am saying you, Microsoft, get off your onedrive and copilot bullshit. I really don't need it to eat my network and memory when I absolutely don't want it).

Features are supposed to be helpful when you need it. Instead of block your way and pretend it's the only way you can do it, or designed to annoying you to make you turn it on accidentally.
by dwedge | 2025-11-14 20:44:43+00:00
> its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.

As a teenager I worked at a bailiffs in the office typing up the paperwork. One case that stuck was me was where the debtor owed somewhere around £400. The bailiff took a motorbike (or scooter) that could easily have covered the debt. It was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt. It was so unfair it should have been criminal.
by rbonvall | 2025-11-14 20:44:51+00:00
Example of replacing grep+cut with a single awk invokation:

$ echo token:abc:def | grep -E ^token | cut -d: -f2 abc $ echo token:abc:def | awk -F: '/^token/ { print $2 }' abc

Conditions don't have to be regular expressions. For example:

$ echo $CSV foo:24 bar:15 baz:49 $ echo $CSV | awk -F: '$2 > 20 { print $1 }' foo baz
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-14 20:44:53+00:00
It is a maths problem, not one of economic theory, and a well-understood limitation of "social mobility" as a measure in this context. Social mobility between two countries is only meaningfully comparable if their income distributions also have a similar degree of compression since it is a rank statistic. The large differences in wage compression between e.g. Scandinavia and the US are well documented, such as this[0] recent NBER paper, and not controversial.

Increasing rank is much easier than increasing income on a compressed distribution. Being able to easily increase income is much more important than being able to easily increasing rank if you are optimizing for economic opportunity.

[0] https://www.nber.org/digest/202505/wage-compression-drives-n...
by gwbas1c | 2025-11-14 20:45:01+00:00
Makes me wonder if a good way to "reign in" on copyright abuse and abandonware is to require copyright holders to pay a tax based on some kind of formula.

More importantly: If no tax is paid, after a reasonable amount of time, (1-3 years,) the work is considered abandoned and automatically moved to the public domain.

Even more importantly, if the work isn't available for general consumption (rental and physical), at a reasonable cost, without a subscription / ads, no copyright claims can be perused for non-commercial piracy. (IE, it would become totally legal to torrent a TV show if it's stuck in a streaming service that requires ads / a subscription.)
by treetalker | 2025-11-14 20:45:17+00:00
- Obama phone -> Trump must have Trump Phone

- Obamacare -> Trump must have concepts of a plan for health care

- Reagan fires air traffic controllers -> Trump must pretend to order ATCs "back to work" after the longest government shutdown, during which they were working without pay anyway

- GOP forces alternate naming of DCA to Reagan National Airport-> Trump must have stadium named after him

- Putin has gaudy gold-trimmed rooms -> Trump must trim White House in (faux) gold

- Kim Jong Un has military parades with rockets and goose-stepping -> Trump must have military parade (but doesn't get rockets and goose-stepping because military courageously slow-walks the request)

- Obama gets Nobel Peace Prize -> Trump must have Nobel Peace Prize; doesn't get it; see next step

- George W. Bush has "War on Terror" -> Trump must bomb boats and talk about a ground invasion of Venezuela (now that the Nobel is no longer in play)

…
by fakedang | 2025-11-14 20:45:28+00:00
Teheran has all these problems all because of the clerics. The city is insanely polluted. The waters are polluted, the air polluted, the vehicles aged and polluting, the works. Guess that's what happens when you have a country run by uneducated mullahs who also have a hand in the extreme exploitation of the land. For those not in the know, the clerics personally control all businesses through trusts called bonyads, which overexploit water sources for agricultural use (saffron exports, horticulture, farming, etc.) and manufacturing and industry. Heck, Khamenei's bonyad is the largest and controls Coca Cola bottling in Iran.
by coldtea | 2025-11-14 20:45:42+00:00
>if communism is so wonderful then I'm sure most of the former ComBloc countries will go back to it any day now...

Because wonderful things win over non-wonderful things in history? Yeah, sounds like a perfect criterion...

Besides, it never had a chance on an equal playing ground and have several things holding it down (including being implemented in countries that were underdeveloped to begin with, and with the full Cold War power of the biggest countries on Earth breathing down their necks, plus schemes ranging from mild like that in TFA to way worse going on against it).

Even so, for many of those that did live through it, there was a considerable pining for that era (for exampes ostalgie in ex-Eastern Germany), and some quite favorable polls in the later 90s even. Now, over 35 years on, it's mostly people who were raised entirely or in the biggest part after it that have the strongest opinions against it.

>the equivocation and whataboutism here is mindboggling

Yeah, god forbid somebody answers back... Don't they know they're supposed to just hate one side and praise the other?
by nerdponx | 2025-11-14 20:46:18+00:00
> this means that if you write non-trivial Awk code, nobody on your team will be able to read it.

Sort of! A lot of AWK is easy to read even if you don't remember how to write it. There are a few quirks like how gsub modifies its target in-place (and how its default target is $0), and of course understanding the overall pattern-action layout. But I think most reasonable (not too clever, not too complicated) AWK scripts would also be readable to a typical programmer even if they don't know AWK specifically.