MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DonHopkins | 2025-11-23 14:44:11+00:00
I grew up in the Washington DC area watching WDCA Channel 20, where the legendary and inimitable Dick Dyszel played the second and longest running "Bozo" (who ran live gerbil races), and the more "modern" Spock-eared "Captain 20" on the kid's shows (with the tag line "Live Long and Win Lots of Prizes", who ran live Atari tank battles), and the Dracuesque "Count Gore De Val" on the horror movie show "Creature Feature".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKC6JpqudME&list=PLaJhh0k4dk...

He shot a hilariously cheesy public service announcement that got locked into the scheduling computer and was shown so often, even after he was fired, that it is still burned into my brain: "Hi kids, I'm Captain 20, flying without an airplane, right?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Dyszel

http://www.captain20.com/screening.htm (with the original video)

Screening Room

On Sept 2, 1981, Peg Sullivan, who was one of the original liaison people from Taft Broadcasting when they purchased WDCA in 1980, came to me and said that as part of the license commitment, we were going to do a Public Service Announcement about the difference between fantasy and reality on television.

I liked the idea and asked her what she had in mind and when she wanted to shoot it. She said that there was an open spot in the production schedule that afternoon and as far as content went, "It's up to you!"

After thanking her for the advance notice, my mind went back to stories I had heard in my youth about kids being injured by trying to fly like TV's Superman. So, a few hours later, we went into the studio, I had the crew set and light a blue chromakey sweep and take a camera outside into the parking lot. There was no script, but I had in mind what I wanted to say. It took about 20 minutes to set, light and rehearse the spot. We did the first take and it was OK, except that some glare on my shoes "keyed" out and it looked bad. So, I took my shoes off and we did the second and last take. Peggy loved it. Management loved it and it was put into the scheduling computer to begin airing the following week.

The spot ran and ran and ran. The computer was instructed to run the spot on a regular schedule during kid's programming and then whenever there was an additional opening in the schedule. Because it was an important part of the license commitment, it was given a special priority code that could not be easily over-ridden.

The spot continued to run, even after I was fired Memorial Day weekend 1987, because no one knew how to override the code! Eventually they figured it out. But by then it was had run for five and a half years and was certainly the most viewed PSA in the history of the station.

To watch it with a broadband connection, click on the image below.
by Xss3 | 2025-11-23 14:44:40+00:00
A good dev isnt necessarily a good writer. Summarising complexity concisely is difficult.

Restrictions lead devs to write to useless messages like 'fixed a bug' rather than messages that are slightly verbose but actually useful.

Most messages wont be 200 chars. But id rather 200 chars of useful text than 72chars of useless text.

The real world is full of average devs that are average writers under time pressure to deliver code. Expecting them to deliver above average commit messages like googles examples is a pipe dream.
by baxuz | 2025-11-23 14:44:44+00:00
Number spoofing is trivial, and SIM cards can be bought retail for as little as 1€ in the EU and many countries around the world.

You can buy them in bulk on shady sites for as little as 5c per pop.

Most abuse happens on an industrial scale, and it's trivially easy and practically free to bypass this kind of "security" feature.
by Loughla | 2025-11-23 14:44:59+00:00
That's a very morality based argument. In general, those types of arguments aren't great and don't really serve a purpose outside of letting the individual take the moral high ground for whatever reason.

I had to rely on food banks when my parents kicked me out at 16. I had to again my second year of marriage while I was still in graduate school and our car got hit, forcing us to use our food budget (and we did have a budget that we followed) for the family.

For the second time, I had kids, I had a good job, so did my wife, I was seeking higher education to advance in my career. But times were tight due to factors out of our control, and we needed help.

What should we have done differently?
by UniverseHacker | 2025-11-23 14:45:37+00:00
Not at all- human connection and love are important and hard for most people to live without. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that. The problem with incels is they feel entitled to that, and use it as a basis to fuel hate towards others for denying them what they feel entitled to- and there is no sense of that sentiment in the comment you replied to.
by shswkna | 2025-11-23 14:46:02+00:00
There is another, third perspective one can have on this.

One can both find good reasons and explanations for his behaviour, and at the same time his choices can be judged harshly.

I feel we have to heed the complexity of life and the situations people end in.

Each of us has different tendencies. Some are by nature straight shooters. Others again, overthink a situation and lack the cognitive or emotional intelligence to always arrive at the perfect answer for a situation we are in.

Both things can be true:

Him making a choice that seems inevitable for the situation he is in.

Also can be true, him wasting the life of another person (his wife) and him not seeing it this way. This is a bad deed from her perspective and can remain so.

But consider, for example, that he probably resented her and she was proxy for society’s pressure to confirm. Or, he thought that he gave her what she wanted (kids) and provided for them. In his eyes he paid his dues and got nothing out of it.

He might have realised that if he doesn’t get those small escapes (the affairs), he might not make it. You won’t know the make up of his reward system and his emotional make up.

When she wanted the divorce, his coping behaviours became habit. And he might not have been able to see a way out, or not have had the strength to change his reward seeking habits.

We also don’t exactly hear how he died in detail.

Im am not excusing him, but I am trying to be devil’s advocate to your absolutist stance, to provide a counterweight.
by Nursie | 2025-11-23 14:46:09+00:00
The problem with that view is that it’s not the children’s fault, and the cap punishes them and messes with their life chances because of decisions made by someone else. If there are kids going hungry, that’s somewhere you usually want the government to step in and take the strain.

It’s a very difficult area to navigate, politically. While it’s entirely understandable that there’s public discomfort with the idea that a family could bring in more in benefits than the average national wage (like, why the hell am I bothering with working in a system like that?! Am I the sucker here?), you also have to take into account that kids are going to need a certain amount of support, just to stand a chance in life.

So how do you ‘punish’ the parents, or even just balance the feeling of what’s ’right’, while not punishing innocent parties?

I agree though - the underlying cause is that the UK is stagnating, the average national wage is really not good anyway. And that’s the driver of a lot of the problems we see with anti-migrant sentiment, with benefits restrictions, with all sorts of stuff. If the country was thriving it wouldn’t be so much of an issue.
by Lord-Jobo | 2025-11-23 14:46:23+00:00
The slow consistent degeneration of file explorer, the primary core service for users in the entire OS, is truly a sign of the times at Msoft.

This shit crashes all the time in our office workflow, hard restarting explorer process. USB issues, soft freezing on certain types of file transfer.

Mapping drives and credentials integration have been bugged as fuck for at least 3 years. I shouldn’t have to edit every connection in our office in credential manager to fix this.

And anything happening with the explorer process is infuriating to try and diagnose. It almost never throws an error code or event code when it fucks up. So good luck trying to fix it yourself.
by mentalgear | 2025-11-23 14:46:57+00:00
Just like their predecessors: Big Tobacco, Big Fossil, Big Tech.

The Playbook is always the same: Run global Propaganda (ads/PR), while behind the public's back extract the capital from the general public into the private hands of a select few and "socialise" the costs (health, mental-health, polarisation, extremism, populism, ...) to the state (taxpayer).

Basically: screwing the public and letting them pay the bill, but hidden by X-layers of obfuscation.
by mentalgear | 2025-11-23 14:48:32+00:00
PS: Of course all the SV hipster boys and wanna-be billionaires (do you still believe you will make it?) downvote this. Well, let "that sink in" as your poster boy would say.

From the article:

> And I’m talking to you now, fellow workers of the Valley! If you really want to do no evil, to be good, disrupt the status quo and make the world a better place, then don’t create a capitalist firm: it’s a top-down dictatorship, where the dictators steal the money. There’s nothing progressive about this kind of social institution. Founding such a startup is deeply unethical, represents institutionalised theft, and is a prime cause of diverse social ills.
by quickthrowman | 2025-11-23 14:48:48+00:00
McDonalds is just a real estate investment trust that happens to sell hamburgers. The business model is ‘rent high value land for a profit while racking up unrealized gains on the land and ensure a steady stream of rents by selling franchisees supplies that they can sell to make sure they can pay their rent.’ Take a look at the sorts of parcels McDonalds acquires, usually multiple acres in busy commercial areas.

In an ideal world, they’d be a restaurant company, but it’s just a real estate company with extra steps.

I agree that minimum wage should be higher!
by JKCalhoun | 2025-11-23 14:49:39+00:00
Silicon Valley is different in my mind because, well, back in the 1970's, it was arguably not evil.

Woz and the nerds were making machines at home, later hooking them up to one another with the janky telephone service as the interconnect. And this kid, just getting a taste of BBSs in Kansas in the mid 1980's, was so envious of the outrageous number of BBSs in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino, San Jose…—all strange names to me. But I saw that they were all in California.

When a job offer got me to move out to the Bay Area in the early 90's there was still a kind of soft echo of those times. Plenty of electronics recycling warehouses you could wander through (and recognizing some of the same faces, often older men, as you moved through your morning circuit to the next warehouse). Disk Drive Depot, Computer Literacy Bookstore, etc.

I had a career there, raised a family there. I watched the dot-com boom/bust, the rise of the internet, Google, and the slow decline of the hardware focus of "The Valley".

When the last of my daughters left the nest, the wife and I sold the house and I retired back to the Midwaste where the two of us grew up. Weird Stuff Warehouse had recently closed up shop and that seems now as fitting a time as any to have said goodbye to The Valley.
by KronisLV | 2025-11-23 14:49:42+00:00
I read the linked post as well: https://jenn.site/my-dad-could-still-be-alive-but-hes-not/

> i learn the story afterwards. dad went upstairs for a lie-down after dinner, but was awoken by severe chest pain. he vomits, which is a thing he never does, and asks mom to call 911 immediately. she does and provides all the symptoms, the dispatcher tells her that they've sent for an ambulance, and they should get ready to go.

> so they get ready, and then they wait. they wait for 15 long minutes, my dad in an extreme amount of pain, and nothing happens.

> mom calls 911 again and asks if they have an ETA. the dispatcher responds that don't have visibility on that. she asks if she should just drive my dad to the hospital and is advised that the best thing to do is to keep waiting.

> so they wait another 15 long minutes, and still no one shows up. the house is in a car-oriented suburb, 5 minutes away from a major highway, a ten minute drive from the hospital.

> mom decides that they should not keep waiting. she and my brother help dad into the car, and they drive him to the hospital.

> they arrive at the emergency room entrance. dad gets out of the car, takes two steps, lurches forwards, and dies on the front steps of the hospital.

What the fuck, that's horrible.

My dad's house is in a rural area of the country. He sadly passed away a week ago, I found him in his bed while coming to visit, he didn't pick up the phone that day, despite us having talked just the day before. When I found him, I called the emergency number and they still sent an ambulance, it was at the house in like 15-20 minutes, they confirmed the situation and did some paperwork and helped me with the next steps.

I can't imagine how horrible the circumstances in the article must feel and I'm not even sure what "justice" would look in a case like that, how the fuck can an emergency line dispatcher not have "visibility" on an emergency call, that's their one fucking job!
by zelphirkalt | 2025-11-23 14:49:48+00:00
The problem with reStructuredText at least is, that there seems to be only one canonical parser, that defines the format. Markup formats in my opinion need to be defined in terms of a proper grammar, so that we can easily adapt that grammar in any programming language to build a parser and have support for that format in another language. The Org format in Emacs also suffered from this, but now there is an effort to make a grammar for it, I believe.

That said, I have used reStructuredText for writing a technical master thesis, and for that it worked wonderfully. If you buy into the ecosystem or use Pandoc to convert to LaTeX/TeX, and build a PDF or whatever you need, it will work well. But if you want to use it as a basis for HTML pages from other languages, which don't have a parser for reStructuredText, then you are in for trouble.
by TheCraiggers | 2025-11-23 14:51:18+00:00
That's antithetical to capitalism and consumerism. Not to mention human nature. While I agree with you in principle, I don't know how one would even start to effect any change here at a societal level. Especially when it's impossible to not be bombarded with marketing from people who are extremely good at using your emotions against you here.

Well, I suppose I do know of one. Mindfulness training I think has been shown to help with this, but that's still at a very personal level.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-11-23 14:52:20+00:00
Step into a variant of a future, where claude is as important to the internet as aws, because constant interwebz rewrite happening in near real time had to be stopped for 4 hours causing incredible hacking spree as constant rewrites open/close/re-open various holes.

There is a part of me thinking that my initial thoughts on LLMs were not accurate ( like humanity's long term reaction to its impact ).
by op00to | 2025-11-23 14:52:46+00:00
Twitter support escalation worked in the mid 2010s, but basically now the only effective escalation is to send a letter via overnight mail to the CEO office. This has worked for me for major ISPs, cell phone companies, furniture retailers, hell - even the government after some vital records I asked to get duplicates of came unreadable 5 times in a row.
Show HN: FlowTask – AI to bootstrap project setups
by Bibhash199 | 2025-11-23 14:55:13+00:00
For years, I was stuck. Trapped in a loop. Every new project, every team initiative – it began with the same soul-crushing setup.

Hours. Gone. Not on the actual work, mind you. But on the meta-work. Defining tasks. Sketching forms. Mapping workflows. Hunting for that 'perfect' template that never quite fit. Just trying to get to zero. To a starting line where meaningful work could actually begin.

Most project management tools? They're brilliant once things are up and running. Tracking, collaborating, reporting – they nail it. But that initial blank canvas? That moment you’re staring at an empty page, forced into a rigid template that doesn't quite fit your brain? They leave you cold. You're still the architect of the initial system, not just the manager of the tasks within it.

That frustration? It boiled over. It forced us to ask: What if this initial setup wasn't a blank canvas? What if an AI didn't just suggest tasks, but built the entire damn structure for your workspace?

That's the core idea behind FlowTask. Imagine a comprehensive blueprint, generated for you. We’re talking about a full task hierarchy descriptions, assignees, due dates, dependencies, all logically organized. Forms, too. Generated with the right fields text, numbers, dates, dropdowns and smart validation rules, context-aware. And workflows? Defined states, transitions, ready for your no-code builder or internal system. All of it.

The 'how' is where it gets gnarly. And exciting. This isn't just tossing a prompt at an LLM and hoping for decent text. We're building a structured AI generation layer. Think of it less as a word spinner and more as a schema generator for project components. We're pushing fine-tuned models and sophisticated prompt engineering to ensure the output isn't just plausible, but structured. System-ready. It’s about killing the 'hallucination' problem by guiding the model towards concrete, defined outputs.

We're taking that initial project 'cold start' problem and crushing it. Hours of administrative grind, cut to minutes. This isn't about replacing human smarts. It's about automating the truly tedious, non-creative crap.

We've been grinding on this for a while. Now we need your unfiltered take. What are the landmines you see? How do you currently kick off a new project? What kind of structured output would actually save your ass?

Let's talk. Happy to dig into the tech or specific use cases.
by UniverseHacker | 2025-11-23 14:55:30+00:00
You have a right to have firm boundaries and communicate them clearly to your partner. Doing so will usually make a relationship and life together better, not worse because your partner will respect your honesty and strength. If her doing that will hurt you, I strongly recommend you communicate clearly and up front that you know she has those interests, but following up on them is a deal breaker for you, and you need her to be honest about that. You’re not even married yet, have the conversation now! It won’t be good for you or for her to be an angry shell of yourself like the dad in the article, making a sacrifice you never wanted to make.
by com | 2025-11-23 14:55:42+00:00
I opened this, only to be confronted by an article about the investigation into the downing of Air India flight 182, a terrorist attack that killed hundreds of people, including my childhood neighbour friends Brinda and Arti and their dad, Vishnu.

Forty years. What lives they could have led, people they would have loved and been loved by. For their family, so many years of grief.

Thank you for this project.
by broken-kebab | 2025-11-23 14:56:34+00:00
"Custom program" is a bit too serious sounding wording for a 5 lines shell script.

>in Windows you can use [...] In X, you cannot.

Well, I can. What you probably mean is that in X you don't have a GUI for this. But X is text configurable/scriptable by design. GUI is a concern of an upper level software.
by biglyburrito | 2025-11-23 14:56:34+00:00
What a stupid article. To save you the click, here are the "subtle signs":

1. Arrive at work feeling numb 2. Shrink from learning new tech tools 3. Avoid promotions 4. Catch ‘the Sunday scaries’ 5. Constantly check your 401(k) 6. Wish you could volunteer more 7. Notice your peers are gone 8. Feel left out of retirement 9. Hate your boss 10. Get achy knees

Most of these are signs that your current job sucks & should probably try to look around for a new one. The rest are signs that you're yearning for things outside of work, which is completely normal.
by Arnt | 2025-11-23 14:57:03+00:00
I'm curious. What happens if you do that and immediately send messages to lots of people?

Will all if the messages be delivered promptly, or will most be delayed until the first few recipients have either replied or have reported your new account as spam? I don't know, I'm curious.

Signal appears to have the necessary information to compute spam prevalence per virtual number provider.
by nvarsj | 2025-11-23 14:57:06+00:00
I know it may seem like the hardest thing ever - but you are doing the right thing. Come out, end the sham, start to heal. Otherwise you are in for a life of pain. I'm not gay but I'm divorced and whatever the reason for the divorce, it is always hard. But it's so much better afterwards, rather than living in a lie of a relationship.
by swatcoder | 2025-11-23 14:57:08+00:00
That's great. Indeed, many of us don't see ourselves existing for that reason, especially among people who read and post on this site.

But many many many in the world do see it that way, and more even in the past -- when the "dad" would have been making life their life choices -- than do right now. Either partially, but significantly, or wholly.

My comment was helping its parent recognize the influence of that way of seeing the world, as it seemed to have escaped them.
Ask HN: Advice for feeling like a failure in PhD?
by phdthrowaway1 | 2025-11-23 14:57:40+00:00
I am doing a PhD in R1 public uni on Computer Engineering in the USA. PhD is something I really wanted to do because it allows me to dive deep into stuff. Turns out what I thought initially was not the whole story.

I am nearing the end of second year of my PhD. My advisor is in HPC but doesn't do hot research and I want to do efficient hardware AI research (faster kernels, ML systems etc). But whenever I read papers and see the authors and what they have accomplished and the team behind them and the prestigious schools/labs doing them while I am deep in some cuBLAS function hoping to optimize register tiling to be a nanosecond faster, I feel like a failure. I don't know what problems to work on. I wonder if what I want to do even requires a PhD.

I question if I will ever be able to do anything publishable as the labs in MIT/Stanford, their cohort of brilliant minds basically alone? There's so much out there that I don't know. The more I think I know the more stuffs keep popping up. I thought I had finally understood LLMs to their nitty gritty details but then there's even more new variants of attentions popping up. I am not sure if I will be able to read everything needed to be able to research. I want to be able to get a job in the US after my PhD(home is terrifying) and I am an international so quiting is not an option.

I am looking for any advice or if you were in a similar boat anything would be helpful. Thank you.